
Is Cyberpunk Dead? A Conversation with Bruce Bethke - keiferski
https://www.markeverglade.com/iscyberpunkdead
======
currymj
The book "Void Star" is an interesting one. It has a William Gibson style plot
very similar to Neuromancer but instead of 1980s aesthetic choices, it has
2017 aesthetic choices.

So instead of ninjas you get MMA jiu jitsu guys, US tech mega corporations are
dominant rather than Japan, aftereffects of climate change rather than nuclear
disasters, cartels rather than Yakuza, and so on. It's like 2017 future is
extrapolated out instead of 1984 future.

But the plot is extremely Gibson-esque: a woman hired as a consultant on a
strange project for a mysterious ultra-wealthy client, rogue AIs, interactions
between mega corporations and the criminal underworld.

So if you take cyberpunk to mean just the synthesizers and neon and chrome
aesthetic, then it is getting sort of tiresome. But you can update all that
stuff to something slightly fresher and still tell the same kind of stories
and it works.

~~~
WorldMaker
> US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan

At the risk of going way out into tangents: Gibson's books had a fascinating
mix of tech mega corporations, not just Japanese, but some of the big players
were European in origin, and a share of US tech mega corporations.

Gibson absolutely has a kawaii bug about Japanese culture, though that's not
his only over-fascination (arguably _more_ of the Neuromancer trilogy is bound
to voodoun fascination than Japanese culture fascination), but the important
point at the time, and still a useful timeless quality to Gibson's books was
how much Gibson got right about the increased _weird_ of a global mega-
culture. Much more so than most of his contemporaries, Gibson's cyberpunk much
more accurately captured the feeling of the internet before the internet: one
minute you might be watching K-Pop on TikTok and then some dude with a Voodoo-
based handle sends you some weird files on Discord, before you hop over to
Facebook for the latest Eurovision memes.

Gibson used the prominence of Japanese mega corporations not just because a
lot 80s tech stock pundits (possibly wrongly; though Sony et al still have a
large market presence) thought the Japanese would dominate the future, but as
a part of a larger cross-cultural package that the future of "punk" wasn't
just white-bread American but a stew waiting to be stirred of global culture.
In that Gibson is an interesting comparison to pick when comparing timeless
versus time-bound components of cyberpunk, as Gibson's Japanese focus I think
was by far one of his most timeless additions to the genre.

~~~
currymj
sure, that's a fair point. Neuromancer trilogy has European family offices, it
has an American media/tech company Sense/Net, Zeiss and Braun are mentioned.

but the books really do feel like Japan is the dominant economic power, in a
way that seems very stuck in the 1980s (the Nikkei still has never recovered
to its peak in 1991). the way this gets translated is always rainy city
streets with neon signs in kanji, and synthesizers. a lot of work that is
heavily derivative of Neuromancer just copies these choices blindly rather
than trying to convey the same spirit as it tells the story. i liked Void Star
because it did the opposite.

another thing underappreciated about Gibson is that much of his world is not
particularly futuristic. there's implied to be plenty of buildings left around
from the 21st century. the bars, hotels, motels, and restaurants are mostly
described as being like normal restaurants today. stuff like Cyberpunk 2077
seems to miss this.

~~~
WorldMaker
Cyberpunk 2077 has a very interesting position, there's a lot of interesting
architecture detail and layers in what little I've seen of Night City so far
(we'll see when the game comes out), including some parts of the city that
look usefully old. It just has its own layers of the fact that Night City is
an American city, here being designed by mostly Polish artists giving it a
strange (accidental?) European sensibility, combined with the idea that in the
source fiction (the RPG), Night City was a planned city that didn't ever exist
before (the future year) 1994 (Cyberpunk itself was written in the 80s). So
there are at least 70-ish years of layers and tarnish to put on the thing, but
the fact that it is entirely distinct from a real place was a fictional
conceit from the 80s fiction it inherits.

Which is to say, that I think Gibson is absolutely correct that most "future
places" are and will always be built on the tops of the bones of the old
places. No one is going to demolish _all_ of San Francisco or DC's haunts and
landmarks. But also that's not a criticism that I think directly applies to
Cyberpunk 2077 as a specific example because the fiction intentionally wanted
and built a young city, with some of the EPCOT feels of the setting an
intentional planned commentary of a different sort than most of the space
Gibson enjoyed inhabiting in his books. Gibson did his own bits of entirely
new construction such as space stations, too, to make various
points/contrasts. Corporations building modern "cyber" company cities is a
rich tradition of its own in cyberpunk fiction, evoking and reminding
readers/players of the past dystopian company towns that did exist in a
previous American century and could easily exist again.

[https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City)

~~~
AkelaA
The original Blade Runner is a great example of a film that depicts the
changing architecture of a city - while we see sweeping shots of mile high sky
scrapers throughout the film, on the ground we still see the remains of
historic architecture, repurposed and built over - the police station was
built within Los Angeles's 1939 Union Station, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis
House makes an appearance as Deckard's apartment, and of course the famous
Bradbury Building was used as the set for the film's finale. The end result is
a city that still feels like it has a history not too dissimilar then the Los
Angeles of the real world, extrapolated out to 2019 based on 1980's fears of
overpopulation and such.

Something it's sequel wasn't really successful with, where instead the city
looks unrecognisable, with architecture that looks alien rather then anything
actually realistically plausible. If it wasn't for the frequent Coca Cola and
Sony product placement you could be convinced the city was Coruscant from Star
Wars or something.

------
Grimm1
I mean maybe in books, but Deus Ex and the remakes are as fresh as a few years
ago now we have Cyberpunk 2077 coming out and Detroit Become Human is
fantastic from a story setting. Not to forget The early 2000s telling of Ghost
in the Shell and the the most recent ones from 2016ish to now.

Less story inclined but just as cyber punk being the Watchdog games.

Cyber Punk and it's ideals are very much alive, however the medium of
expression has changed to ones more fitting of Cyber Punk IMO.

~~~
ordinaryradical
His point is that, with some exceptions (Ghost in the Shell), much of the
modern work you cite is a regurgitation of the earliest ideas of the genre
which have themselves hardened into tropes.

Gibson found the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer exceedingly retro and 80s because its
imagined future repeats anxieties and themes which were most relevant in the
1980s, when the genre first appeared.

The return to these “ancient futures” isn’t really punk, it’s kitsch. But to
do the thing those early authors did would be to continually approach the
present with the same mindset for interrogating it and see what appears.

~~~
jjoonathan
> regurgitation

Somebody's an essayist.

In any case, I'll grant you that the 80s cars and CRT theming are retro-
futuristic, but those are all surface-level, as Gibson himself points out.
However, I think the criticism loses steam if you try to apply it below the
surface, even just a little.

Social media, political troll gangs, cheap drones, and military + police
robotics played a big part in Watchdogs, and those are all modern or forward-
looking. Deus Ex's human augmentation is still forward-looking. AI integration
in Detroit Become Human is still forward-looking, even if it isn't terribly
imaginative. The interactions of technology, poverty, and crime common to all
of these are still forward looking, even if in hindsight they failed to
predict some big trends (e.g. social media boosting conspiracy groups and the
"traditional hustles" of self-help and alternative medicine).

Regardless, the artists are still using their imaginations. It's the critics
who see an 80s car, call it kitsch to get engagement, and miss everything of
substance.

~~~
drhayes9
But the concerns expressed in those works were the same as the ones expressed
forty years ago; that's the point the original article is making. Bethke
himself used the phrase “self-referential metafiction” in describing sci-fi
authors in the late 70s. I think a lot of the current cyberpunk work is the
same, commoditizing an art movement into a fashion dressing to tell the same
kind of stories we always get.

Vast corporations doing what they want to the helpless working class started
as an 80s fear in opposition to a largely hopeful view of companies from the
50s and 60s. Just because it's come true, or is still a fear, doesn't mean
that it's still exciting or exploring a new frontier.

Bruce Sterling was writing eco-fiction thirty years ago, about humans
struggling to survive post-climate-change... except that wasn't a phrase that
meant what it means to people today. The edge he was riding on in his work has
now headed towards the middle.

Vernor Vinge writing about true names in the early 80s was predictive; Become
Human commenting about it now isn't.

It doesn't make it bad or not worthy or anything, but it definitely is a move
away from the bleeding edge of a predictive SF movement.

"Snow Crash" and "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson are interesting books in
this sense. "Snow Crash" works best if you're a cyberpunk fan already, if it
can relax into the tropes you already know and make an action movie out of it.
"Diamond Age" moves away from that towards a definitely post-cyberpunk place
with people who aren't criminals trying to make a buck but maybe good people
trying to change the world with the power of technology. It's already shedding
the trappings and trying to get somewhere else.

It's gotta be a little weird for these authors to see their "movement" co-
opted into big media properties that make millions of dollars for big
companies. Somebody else said it in these comments; that's not very punk.

~~~
Apocryphon
Don't blame authors, blame society for failing to break out of the neoliberal
(or other epithet) trap started in the '80s. If we had fundamentally different
struggles and anxieties now, and perhaps a different, more idealistic outlook,
then different genres would emerge.

 _It 's gotta be a little weird for these authors to see their "movement" co-
opted into big media properties that make millions of dollars for big
companies. Somebody else said it in these comments; that's not very punk._

It's not weird at all. Consumerism has co-opted and commodified every single
ideology; there's nothing wiser or more edgy or purer about cyberpunk that
would have prevented this from happening to it. If anything, it's very
apropos.

~~~
ethbro
> _there 's nothing wiser or more edgy or purer about cyberpunk that would
> have prevented this from happening to it. If anything, it's very apropos._

But that never happened to punk musi... oh, I see your point.

------
parsoj
I'm confused - is this complaining about the genre as a whole being less
popular? Or just books? I think with one of the most hyped and games of the
year being a cyberpunk game (with "Cyberpunk" literally in the name) - its
definitely premature to call the genre as a whole "dead" If this article is
just lamenting the absence of Cyberpunk books - well surges in popularity in
one media can always carry over to others...

~~~
keiferski
The article isn't about either of those things. It's about the original ideas
of cyberpunk (which were rooted in the 80s) being turned into cliches and
repeated ad infinitum since and whether a new 2020-era genre is needed.

~~~
whatshisface
> _whether a new 2020-era genre is needed._

The idea that a new genre could be created because critics concluded that one
was "needed" is the daftest and most out-of-touch thing I've ever heard...

~~~
_jal
The idea that a random person on a message board could inspire someone to
write software because someone said they needed a tool is the daftest, most
out-of-touch thing I've ever read.

Oh wait, that has happened multiple times.

Granted, a genre is bigger than a tool. But this free-floating hatred for
commentators of all stripes literally blinds people to reality.

And it isn't some Critic-On-High making pronouncements and waiting for
followers to act. It is observational.

~~~
slothtrop
> The idea that a random person on a message board could inspire someone to
> write software because someone said they needed a tool is the daftest, most
> out-of-touch thing I've ever read.

A tool already describes a solution to a problem in mind, it's clear cut. If
the analogous problem here is "I want new genre fiction", then a) that doesn't
describe what's desired, and b) that already exists (qua all the "punk"
suffixed derivatives among other things), it's just not as popular, and
therefore we can surmise the wrong question is being asked.

Stephenson once had a talk where he suggested that sci-fi writers should
effectively return to optimistic stories, but he hasn't done that himself. He
could literally solve the problem he described. We want what we want, and
write what we want to write.

~~~
dgritsko
I've been re-reading "The Hobbit" recently, and this passage struck me as
relevant to your comment. From Chapter 3, "A Short Rest":

"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are
good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things
that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale,
and take a deal of telling anyway."

During the stay in Rivendell, nothing much interesting happens - so Tolkien
doesn't bother with telling us about it. The exciting, interesting stuff is
when our heroes are in peril or experiencing great trials and tribulations.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
It is an interesting take, but once you look beyond the obvious, the critique
is reminiscent of "Nothing new under the sun" trope ( they phrase it as a
minor insult -- Akira fan fic ). Not exactly compelling argument in my mind.

Personally, I think interest in Cyberpunk may have declined ( and oddly
increased in mainstream DND ), because, frankly, we seem to be living in early
Cyberpunk universe ( powerful corporations, nascent augment technology.. ).

edit: Then again, Cyber 2077 may re-ignite mainstream interest in the genre.

~~~
toyg
I think we've been in "early cyberpunk" for about 15 years already (if not
20). The renewed interest, imho, is due to a combination of factors, but
mostly two: the generation that grew up reading it as kids is now old enough
to be in positions of power over artistic output, so they will use those
influences in their own work; and some of the societal shifts cyberpunk
speculated about, are now recognizable by pretty much everyone.

------
CapricornNoble
Wasn't William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) roughly quoted saying: "I don't
write 'cyberpunk' dystopias anymore...because we are living them. They are our
reality today. So I just write contemporary fiction." ....somebody help me out
on this...I might be off the mark.

~~~
anotherman554
I suspect you are thinking of a different writer. I've never read a Gibson
interview where he said anything like that, though I have not read every
Gibson interview.

~~~
akeck
This article has similar quotes from Gibson:
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-
gibson...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-
losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was)

~~~
anotherman554
Not really. He doesn't describe our world as a cyberpunk dystopia in that
interview. Whatever world we have today I don't believe he has ever referred
to as cyberpunk-esque.

------
cletus
A couple of things:

1\. I wouldn't call The Matrix cyberpunk. That's the first time I heard that;
and

2\. I don't see cyberpunk as having died in the 1980s, so much as it was
simply the zeitgeist of that era and there have been lots of those in sci-fi
(and more generally).

For example, if you look at sci-fi from the 1960s you have lots of material
about mental powers (eg telepathy in Stranger and a Strange Land). Star Trek
was a utopia that mirrored a rosy view of America. All of this in an era of
personal freedom and society wrestling with the lingering injustices of
slavery a century earlier I think is no accident.

What happened in the 1980s was the rise of Japan and the loss of manufacturing
jobs in America. This stoked fears that corporations would replace governments
and we'd face a dystopian but technological future. I still see cyberpunk as
interlinked with anti-Japanese xenophobia.

So the issue with cyberpunk is that this xenophobia faded, the genre didn't
really evolve (and probably peaked with Blade Runner) and apart from the
Internet virtually nothing predicted in cyberpunk came to pass. We still have
governments. We don't live in a dystopian future (mostly). There are enhanced
humans with implants.

But I wouldn't describe it as dying. We simply moved on.

~~~
coolgeek
> I wouldn't call The Matrix cyberpunk

Why do you say that?

Also, cyberpunk broke into the mainstream (Blade Runner, Neuromancer) at a
time of fascination with Japan. I say fascination because there was a spectrum
- from philic to phobic.

That attention was, of course, a result of their (at the time) massively
increased economic strength, relative to that of the USA.

That same spectrum of attention exists in the body of cyberpunk, in toto.
There is not an anti-Japanese xenophobia that exists in the corpus either
pervasively, or inherently.

------
at_a_remove
"Everything about UNIX sounds silly. We're talking about an OS with commands
like chown, awk, and grep here and where 'zombie children floating in the
pipe' is a legitimate description of an error state."

— Bruce Bethke — _Headcrash_

------
canistr
It's been replaced by whatever genre you would describe Black Mirror as. A
reflection of the modern dystopia we live in within the context of the current
year.

~~~
toyg
I agree that Black Mirror is one of the few original attempts at doing proper
scifi about the near future, that we’ve had in quite some time. I wish it were
not so utterly depressing, my mental health can barely stomach a single
episode every month or so. If that were a genre, I would call it
“cybercynical”.

------
cyberpunk
No need to panic guys, I'm still alive. And this Bruce guy hasn't even spoken
to me -- so take his opinion with the appropriate amount of sodium chloride.

------
jackcosgrove
Considering a teenager recently commandeered the Twitter accounts of a number
of world leaders, and then used this awesome power to run a two-bit scam with
electronic money, makes me think cyberpunk is indeed dead because it is now
reality.

------
arthurjj
"A…depressingly mountainous amount of the self-identified cyberpunk fiction I
see now is stuck firmly in the 1980s. It's not new, fresh, or original. It's
paint-by-numbers Imitation Gibson. It's Blade Runner fan fic, or Akira fan
fic, or worse, wannabe Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077 media tie-in fic" I read a
large amount of new cyberpunk and this is depressingly accurate

------
082349872349872
What are, in the 20's, the big concepts that "cyber"[1] was to the 80's?

Ecopunk has apparently been done, in 風の谷のナウシカ:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24298259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24298259)

[1] we started with Tron and wound up with "I put on my robe and wizard hat."

~~~
dleslie
BioPunk?

Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" is an interesting take on this.

The most concise take I've seen for the core defining aesthetic of cyberpunk
is: "high tech, low life."

With that in mind, I don't think it _really_ matters what the tech is, so long
as the story is about those on the fringes of society and their interactions
with it; how _alien_ the world is to them, and how alien they are to the
world.

~~~
nrp
I would add “Blindsight” by Peter Watts to the list of great biopunk novels.

~~~
Apocryphon
Watts's work is great also as an existentialist hard sci-fi cosmic horror.
It's got all of the Plutonian depths, malevolent antediluvian creatures,
unfathomable aliens, degenerated humanity, and posthuman body horror of
Lovecraft, just not the omnipotent space gods. Plus, he even continues
cyberpunk tropes to their natural dystopian conclusions- in Rifters, "N'Am" is
a continent governed by the power company that sends PTSD-afflicted veterans
and abuse survivors to maintain deep sea geothermal generators, gigacorp execs
are literally called "corpses", and the internet is completely swallowed up by
A.I. spam bots.

~~~
dymax78
How would you rate the Rifters trilogy vs the Firefall trilogy? (I thoroughly
enjoyed _Blindsight_ , hobbled my way through _Echopraxia_ , and it's unlikely
I'll read _Firefall_ )

~~~
watt
_Firefall_ is just an omnibus edition of the two. Great hardcover though :)

~~~
dymax78
Thank you for the clarification. In the context of our discussion, your nick
begs the question.... Peter?!

------
nine_k
Cyberpunk is sort of what we're living through now. It's like being the
proverbial fish who does not notice the water around.

------
diegoperini
Mr Robot is the best cyberpunk story of the current generation.

------
dougmwne
At it's best, sci-fi is a great canvas for social commentary. You can use
present day concerns and take them out to their ultimate conclusions to
highlight the risks and rewards of taking our society down a certain path.
That also means sci-fi is very much a product of the time it was created. If
cyberpunk is getting less relevant, it's only because our society's concerns
have moved on from corporate skepticism to corporate embrace and from techno-
fear to techno-love. The cyber tech itself has gone from new to mundane. The
next anxieties will produce the next sci-fi.

------
Animats
The seminal "cyberpunk" novel is The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, from
1975. He didn't use the term, but all the key themes are there.

------
knolax
I'm gonna be honest, I only like cyberpunk for the aesthetics, not any of the
themes. In 2020 most of the messaging behind the cyberpunk genre seems trite
and obvious in hindsight (probably because of how accurate a lot of their
social predictions were). I think most people agree that are into cyberpunk
today are into it more for the neon signs than the social commentary.

------
mancerayder
A friend said a line that I have been stealing:

"The way things are going in the world, by the time Cyberpunk 2077 comes out
it'll be redundant."

------
karpodiem
Cyberpunk isn't dead - we're living it.

------
justinclift
With all the discussion so far, it's kind of strange no-one has pointed out
modern "CyberPunk" bands like GUNSHIP.

eg:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU)
\- Tech Noir

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ruvzfXQoE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ruvzfXQoE)
\- Dark All Day

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQaH3lh-
CA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQaH3lh-CA4) \- Art3mis & Parzival.
Pretty much a music clip for Ready Player One.

They have tonnes more:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/GUNSHIPMUSIC/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/GUNSHIPMUSIC/videos)

Yeah, I'm a massive fan. :)

If there's no GUNSHIP music in Cyberpunk 2077, something's definitely gone
wrong. ;)

------
keiferski
Bethke coined the word _cyberpunk_ and here's a little essay about it:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130716211015/http://www.bruceb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130716211015/http://www.brucebethke.com/articles/re_cp.html)

~~~
teilo
Thank you. The word Cyberpunk may have come first, but there is no question
that Gibson defined what it means.

------
shmerl
_> I would dearly love to see a new form of SF emerge that reflects the
baseline of now, and begins a whole new series of extrapolations that creates
a new consensual vision of a different future._

I think VirtuaVerse does it pretty well. It has that classic cyberpunk style,
but it explores very contemporary ideas. I.e. it's not stuck in the '80s.

See:

* [https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse](https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse)

* [https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/virtuaverse-ost](https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/virtuaverse-ost)

------
overcast
Cyberpunk 2077 should change this.

------
PedroBatista
Part of it became the news, other part became so overplayed it became cheesy
and the rest was always cheese to begin with.

This happens all the time, Cyberpunk is not above the "laws" of time.

------
spiritplumber
Polite reminder that the original Cyberpunk RPG took place in 2013.

------
LoSboccacc
from page 2:

> Bruce: wannabe Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077 media tie-in fic.

so yeah, basically an elitist point of view filled with "no true scotsman"
kind of platitudes.

that'd be like saying every fantasy sucks because it's just a lord of the ring
tie in.

> Bruce: I would dearly love to see a new form of SF emerge that reflects the
> baseline of now

if only he was a writer. oh wait.

------
627467
This comment section is as rich as the article. Thank you hn'ers.

~~~
toyg
Cyberpunk is to the early internet generations what beat literature was to
boomers.

------
bitwize
I've lost track of how many times cyberpunk has died and been resurrected with
new cybernetic parts grafted onto its corpse.

------
donkey-hotei
Kill Cyberpunk. Long Live Solarpunk

------
bytematic
The single most awaited game in history is about to release, titled "Cyberpunk
2077".

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
After the (disappointing) release of Duke Nukem Forever, the title of the
single most awaited game in history was overtaken by Half-Life 3 (or, maybe,
Half-Life 2: Episode Three).

~~~
hobofan
most != longest

I don't think a lot of people are still holding their breath for HL3,
especially without any official acknowledgment of its development and the
release of Half-Life:Alyx. HL2 was also so long ago (16 years) that most young
adults don't even have a connection to it, as they didn't grow up with it.

------
spiritplumber
It happened.

------
sarreph
No, as per Betteridge's Law of Headlines[0].

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
tus88
No it is not.

------
m3kw9
Cyberpunk 2077

