Whipstitch wrote:This is moronic. Cyberpunk has never, ever, ever been about stasis or even futility.
Quick literature lesson for the illiterari among us who probably think that adding cogs to something automatically makes it "steampunk" or that Star Wars is science fiction:
Cyberpunk is the offspring of science fiction and noir. See, there was this guy called William Gibson who wanted to write a book about future dystopias and computers. As with any book, it took him a while, and halfway through he went to the movies and them came out crying because Ridley Scott already said in that movie nearly everything he wanted to say...but in the end the movie enriched him and made his book even better, and today we still acknowledge Neuromancer as the first cyberpunk.
Spoilers: The name of that movie was Bladerunner. When the press asked Scott to define his movie genre-wise, he called it "future noir."Again, for the illiterati among us: Noir is a genre starred by helpless chumps trapped in worlds they didn't make and constant victims of circumstances. Noir worlds are dog-eat-dog worlds where no one is innocent, everything has a price, and everyone has a price (do not, and I repeat, DO NOT mistake with Hardboiled, which comprises similar settings, but is starred by badasses like Humprey Bogart with considerably more agency).
Transhumanism and fixation with IT apart, every genre that ends in -punk is features the same basic themes:
Societal transformation by means of introduced disruptive agent
This is the basic building block of science fiction. Hugo Gernsback stated that, for a work to be considered science fiction, the author must know science, and they must be able to extrapolate as to how a specific breakthrough would change society.
Needless to say, in -punk works, society always changes for the worst.
Social inequality
There are two types of people in this setting: The haves and the have nots. Those who have it (call it bionics, call it steam robots, call it gene mods, etc) have it all, those who don't, have nothing, they live as destitutes and social detritus, and usually eke out a living working for the haves and making them even richer. In -punk works, megacorps tend to have a stranglehold of the IT in question, if not the monopoly (not always, though).
Nihilism
Life if meaningless and dirt cheap, everyone will sell you out for peanuts, and nice guys don't finish last because they don't finish at all, period, they get betrayed then killed. Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody knows the race is rigged, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, that's how it goes. Also, in addition to the inherent nihilism, Cyberpunk also features generous amounts of cold-blooded brutality.
And of course, after cyberpunk became a thing, eventually other authors started writing works in similar settings, but instead made their stories about badasses in black trench coats that stuck it to The Man whenever possible, and these works were called "post-cyberpunk." And after that other authors started re-creating the premise in the victorian period (steampunk), the renaissance (clockworkpunk), fantasy worlds (dungeonpunk), etc etc etc.
You're welcome.
