William Gibson, Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, Discussion Thread... Options

[mfb]

at least SR4's rules for handling multiple hackers make some kind of reasonable sense.

i like SR3's hacking rules because they make hacking challenging. i like SR4's hacking rules because they make hacking much more integral to a successful runner team.

[Butterblume]

I bought a William Gibson anthology for a very good price.
I could barely stand reading Neuromancer. The second one, I think it was Mona Lisa Overdrive, I abandoned after the first 50 pages or so.

I cannot believe that Gibson is that bad a writer, so I blame the translators. I probably should get an english Version of Neuromancer and try again...

(That reminds me, I still need to get hold of 'Das Boot: The Original Uncut Version', just to see what it sounds like in english)

[Protagonist]

Well, from those two quotes, maybe Gibson just really, really, really despises elves? :wobble:

[Tanka]

[Dog]

[Dog]

Looking back over Glyph's quote from the interview, I'd just like to point out how that question seems intended to provoke.

[De Badd Ass]

[mfb]

[Kagetenshi]

He wasn't that close. What he got was popularity and critical acclaim. Cyberpunk had been around for some time previously, and it's arguable (and has, if I read what he's saying properly, been argued to some degree by Swanwick) that Neuromancer marked the beginning of the end of Cyberpunk, that the movement was essentially killed off by the overwhelming success of the novel denying the movement the ability to be, as it were, "fighting the man". Nevertheless, even if we accept that he did kill Cyberpunk, he did it by writing something amazing, and that is credit-worthy.

His pre-Neuromancer works were closer, but I don't think they were all that influential until at least '81.

~J

[mfb]

eh. it's kinda self-fulfilling, i guess--Gibson is the first cyberpunk most people read, so they compare everything else to it. if you go back and read, say, The Shockwave Rider, it just doesn't feel like cyberpunk--because it's not Gibson-y.

[NightmareX]

IMO cyberpunk is only dead if we want it to be.

[Kagetenshi]

[mfb]

i think our culture has moved past the classic cyberpunk future. cyberpunk no longer matches our fears about what the future could bring. so while there's still good, interesting cyberpunk material coming out, it doesn't have the social impact or relevance it once had.

[MYST1C]

[BlueRondo]

[Kagetenshi]

Terr'rists, China, government for the corporations, by the corporations (as opposed to corporate independence from the government), and children being taught to hate God and love Darwin.

No, seriously, there's probably a decent amount of the above elements in there, but I can't claim to be nearly in tune enough with the zeitgeist to be able to say.

~J

[BlueRondo]

[NightmareX]

[Kagetenshi]

[nezumi]

While the cyberpunk movement is over, the cyberpunk mindset and style both still exist. A movement is a social change based on many people, however a mindset and style can be embraced by any person in any time. We still have people who embrace and life the free love lifestyle, who embrace Victorian style (although few wear it in public). The term "a renaissance man" still applies.

[Kagetenshi]

[nezumi]

"A renaissance man" refers to someone who studies an assortment of different subjects and is an expert in several. Of course, you could argue that that person isn't part of the Renaissance style, but I'd argue that many aspects of style have nothing to do with the environment at the time and everything to do with applying the mindset to the current style. A man who is barely literate, scratches himself in public and is regularly caught in the nude can still be called a caveman even though he can operate a computer. A person who embraces classical learning and knowledge across a wide variety of subjects may be considered, literally, a renaissance man, even though he is chronologically displaced. This is also why there are multiple renaissances in history, because it refers to a movement, mindset and style, independent of an artistic method and set of available knowledge.

Similarly, I'd argue that any person who is anti-authoritarian and who is oriented heavily on the rapid pace of technology and especially its negative effects on society, even if that person is under twenty and isn't worried about the Red Threat, as showing cyberpunk style.

To strictly define a style as something that exists within set chronological boundaries is to deny the definition of what makes that style special. Of course, if the style isn't special, that's acceptable. However a classical painting done in 2006 is still classical art (in style), and a cave painting showing broken up, multiple viewpoints of an object and stressing abstract geometric forms is still cubist.

[Kagetenshi]

I'm not arguing that a Renaissance man needs to come from the Renaissance or from a new Renaissance, I'm arguing that it's no longer possible for a human to be accomplished to expert in enough fields to qualify as a Renaissance Man. I'd also say that the term doesn't actually carry the cultural implications of the other terms under discussion.

~J

[nezumi]

Who defines "enough"? The definition doesn't say all fields of knowledge, just wide field of knowledge (and an expert in several). If you can do four or five widely different jobs professionally, and are well studied in several fields beyond that, I would call that "wide".

And regardless, we may be getting caught up on a single example. You can still embrace that style and life that mindset, which was my original point, regardless of your time frame (granted, it's a lot more unlikely in some time frames than others).

[Herald of Verjig...]