...are those media now sort of goofy and unwatchable/playable/etc.?

I can handle the "alternate future" of Twilight:2000 a hell of a lot more than I can dig on the utter silliness of Cyberpunk 2020's post-industrial mess.  It's kind of like listening to KMFDM - "I can't believe I ever thought this was all that great."

Quote from: thedungeondelver;416014...are those media now sort of goofy and unwatchable/playable/etc.?

I thought about this recently, and my personal answer was an unequivocal "Hell no!"

Now Cyberpunk 2020 feels like steampunk, or Barsoom or War of Worlds already did to me. The feel certainly shifted from anticipation to alternate timeline fantasy, but it's still just as exciting to the imagination as it was before. To me at least.

Part of the problem, too, is that cyberpunk as a pure literary genre is now dead.  Like all sci-fi subgenres before it, it has fragmented and scattered and flowed back into the mainstream of sci-fi, so you'll get cyberpunk touches in military SciFi or what-have-you.

Postcyberpunk (to a lesser degree Gibson's "Bridge Trilogy" is an exemplar of this) has a somewhat less gloomy outlook to it - Bonn didn't get nuked, the US is not a collection of warring city states, and I don't plug a fiber optic cable into a hole in my corpus callosum and download a program-as-drug.

It was a bit easier to blow up a few cities with nukes, predict continued Soviet aggression, throw the words "Sony", "Zeiss Optik" and "megabyte" into an otherwise unremarkable Dashell Hammett type story with some vague pseudo-spiritual mumblings, wrap the whole thing in an entirely stolen from Blade Runner narrative and be feted across multiple literary genres in 1985 when it looked like, yes, we were fucked in 30 years.

On the contrary, I think the current world is very cyberpunk, minus the common cybernetics. If you're outside in a city or many large towns, you're on camera. When Hurricane Katrina hit, it was Blackwater doing the street corner guards stuff. Big banks and big corporations tell politicians what to do. The internet is pervasive. iPhones and other wireless devices are better than the cyperpunk stuff in the Gibson books.

Quote from: danbuter;416019On the contrary, I think the current world is very cyberpunk, minus the common cybernetics. If you're outside in a city or many large towns, you're on camera. When Hurricane Katrina hit, it was Blackwater doing the street corner guards stuff. Big banks and big corporations tell politicians what to do. The internet is pervasive. iPhones and other wireless devices are better than the cyperpunk stuff in the Gibson books.

I agree with danbuter here, what's replaced cyberpunk for me is just modern techno spy shit like Burn Notice. Also, like Benny, the 80's cyberpunk just feels like modern fantasy to me now.

Given that there really has been a great surge in development of prosthetic limbs to re-limb wounded veterans of resource wars in backwater hellholes, I think CP is doing just fine.

No just consider many of those stories as "Alternate Histories" or timelines now.

 Perfect case of this: the TV series "Max Headroom:20 Minutes Into The Future".

The show was made in late 1986 to late 1987 and aired on ABC television from March 1987 to May 1988. The last episode made ("Baby Grobags") never aired until a cable showing in September of 1995.

Now, based on a detail in one of the episodes about Bryce Lynch the stories supposedly takes place sometime between the years 2002 and 2005.

The trivia detail: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092402/trivia
In the British pilot movie Lynch was 18, in the American version he was 15 or 16.

The DVDS set just became available this past August.
Whats funny is what once seemed 'futuristic' now seems contemporary or almost-contemporary. Several of the stories just seem like CSI or NCIS-equivalent type action adventure. The surreal part is how different all the computers and monitors used in the show look.


- Ed C.

Wonder what would be today's version of the Tyrell Corporation.

Quote from: ggroy;416038Wonder what would be today's version of the Tyrell Corporation.

I just watched Blade Runner the other day. I was wondering where all of the flying cars are at.

Quote from: PaladinCA;416040I just watched Blade Runner the other day. I was wondering where all of the flying cars are at.

Parked out at Avery Brooks' house, that fucker.

Not really. I think because what cyberpunk was, has evolved a bit. It always had a theme of technological change and rebellion--but humanity and its nature
are now a them of similar media.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, for example is what cyberpunk evolves into, among other similar media.

What is humanity, where is it going, and can it survive in its new state?

Well quite reputable scientists are predicting the technology to download a human brain onto a computer is about 20 years away.

Then again reputable scientists predicted we would all be driving Sinclair C5s.

Quote from: PaladinCA;416040I just watched Blade Runner the other day. I was wondering where all of the flying cars are at.

http://www.moller.com/

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/09/flying-car-production-could-start-within-three-months/1

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/flight-international/2010/06/flying-car-a-reality.html

http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/28/flying-car-transition-technology-terrafugia.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/30/terrafugia-transition-fly_n_630578.html#s108243

Quote from: thedungeondelver;416018It was a bit easier to blow up a few cities with nukes, predict continued Soviet aggression, throw the words "Sony", "Zeiss Optik" and "megabyte" into an otherwise unremarkable Dashell Hammett type story with some vague pseudo-spiritual mumblings, wrap the whole thing in an entirely stolen from Blade Runner narrative and be feted across multiple literary genres in 1985 when it looked like, yes, we were fucked in 30 years.

Much the way eco-disaster porn is doing now. All futurism quickly becomes retro, because predicting the future, especially through fictional media, is a sucker's game. The fiction changes to reflect the values and fears of the time. Gibson's work is still full of branding and corporate culture and cutting-edge technology, but it's totally different now. Punk went mainstream and sold out. Even the dark future has its Green Day.

I don't find it goofy or unwatchable or unreadable, necessarily, any more than I find old sci-fi classics from the Fifties to be goofy or unwatchable. The good stuff always has themes that endure. The material that just fetishizes fictional, dated technology as our savior or destroyer was probably shit to begin with.

No problem with it at all.  For the same reason I have no problems with Dragons, Goblins and all manner of fantasy creaturers roaming a near European fantasy world.    Cyberpunk is a setting for fiction what's the problem?