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Habzial
QUOTE (hyzmarca)
Wasn't one of the main premises of Dune that computers were outlawed so that people had to use Spice to enhance their mental abilities to the point where they could do the calculations that would otherwise require a supercomputer?
I don't recall ever reading that, but admittedly I only read the first book. Of course, this plays into your declaration later in the post that cyberpunk "explores the psychosocial consequences of technology," supporting my statement that Dune is cyberpunk as you've defined it. Furthermore, even without computers out in the open, there is still a great deal of future technology around in Dune. In fact, I recall several instances of the psychological impact of assassination technology being illustrated early in the book.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
Star Trek does not fit into cyberpunk because it rarely explores the psychosocial consequences of technology, preferring instead to hammer in the moral lessons
Actually there are a number of episodes which do go into the psychological consequences of technology. An episode with android copies of people comes to mind. Several episodes from TNG also come to mind, one where a dying man puts his mind into an android, and another where an engineer hooks his brain directly into the ship's computer.

The problem with your definition (which comes up later in your post) is you've made it much too loose in order to incorporate things you consider cyberpunk. As a result, when I point out things which clearly are not viewed as cyberpunk by anyone, you're forced to backpedal and add conditions to your definition. I am well aware that Star Trek is not cyberpunk. Ditto for Dune and pretty much every other example I've listed. I'm not making these ridiculous suggestions to be smug, but to try and illustrate that by watering down "cyberpunk" you're swallowing up large parts of science fiction you probably never intended to.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
GitS, however, is most certainly cyberpunk.
...

Also, Kusanagi's nature as a human mind in the body of an overpriced killing machine working for a paramilitary government agency makes her enough of an outsider to satisfy the punk requirement. She isn't a part of mainstream society.
She works for the government. That isn't punk. It is quite possibly the furthest from punk you can get, particularly since government agents are technically wage-slaves. You can't spin it as punk by saying secret agents are outside of the mainstream.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
It is also necessary that a cyberpunk society be a distorted future reflection of our own, or else the work misses most of the genre's point, which is why corporate dystopias are so common but are by no means necessary. There are plenty of other dystopias that one could arise from the advancement of computer technology and there are plenty of not-quite-dystopias out there, as well.
If any computer distopia will do, then why isn't The Terminator cyberpunk? What about the current incarnation of Battlestar Galactica? What about Dark Knight Returns, a comic which follows Batman in the future? Series 7 is also dystopic and set in the near future, which heavily delves into the psychological impact of technology; would it be cyberpunk? It's rather unclear where one would draw the line with your opinion of cyberpunk.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
But one thing to remember is that the genre is very much an 80s genre and many of the conventions stem from the real future fears of people in the 80s. Most Cyberpunk tropes, deeply rooted in the 80s , appear either outdated or just plain absurd.
Which goes back to my quip about computers and technicolor mohawks.
Again, what are you basing this belief on? I'm going by what I've seen in cyberpunk books and short stories. You appear to be retroactively redefining cyberpunk so anime fits into it. Cyberpunk hasn't changed simply because things have been mislabeled as it.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
Among the tropes that were rendered absurd is the corporate dystopia which was originally fueled by by the rise of unabashed corporate consumerism and the yuppie culture while being succinctly defined by Gordon Gekko's words, "greed is good", and reinforced by Reagan's trickle-down economics. There were several years in the 90s when the good old fear of corporate greed was dead amongst the general populace, with only a few extremist anti-globalitarians and anarchists continuing to hold the torch.  It was only brought back to life, just barely, by the Enron and given a much-needed kidney-transplant by Halliburton.
You're contradicting yourself here. You've just stated that because corporate greed has been accepted as part of life and anti-globalization measures have fallen off, as were predicted by cyberpunk, the idea of corporate dystopia is absurd. I would say you've proved the idea was prophetic.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
However, it is possible to strip away these tropes and still have the core elements, the impact for technology on an imperfect society very much like our own told from the point of view of an disenfranchised outsider.
Yes. That's called science-fiction. It's been around for a very long time. There are countless stories in science fiction about someone who becomes the victim of technology, becomes a disenfrancized outsider, and the story revolves around the impact of that technology.


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
The dystopian elements stem from the fact that the protagonist is invariably a disenfranchised outsider.  Any society will seem dystopian from the point of view of the disenfranchised outsider.
Now you're rationalizing. Going by your loose definition of dystopia, mixed with your already loose definition of cyberpunk, almost every movie set in the present or near future is cyberpunk.

I have to beat a dead horse here: is The Net cyberpunk? It was set in the near-future (when it was made, at least), I'm sure the government seemed "dystopic" to Sandra Bullock's character, she was disenfranchized by technology, and she had to fight the system as an outsider. The movie most certainly delved into the psychological impact of technology... so it must be cyberpunk, right?


QUOTE (hyzmarca)
While all cyberpunk stories contain some dystopian elements, very few depict true 1984-style dystopias.
Considering cyberpunk stories are set in capitalist dystopias and 1984 was a socialist dystopia, I'm more than willing to agree with you here.


The overall point here (for anyone still reading) is you don't have to call something "cyberpunk" for it to be good. When you call just about anything that involves action and an interface between humanity and machines "cyberpunk" you're watering down the term. The more the term is deluded, the harder it becomes to find actual cyberpunk. What justification can you have for pretending cyberpunk means something else solely because you don't have a better label to categorize what you're watching? It's no different than if all movies were lumped into "action" and "drama."

Most anime isn't cyberpunk. That doesn't make it bad. You don't have to defend it solely because it's categorized as something else.
hyzmarca
Actually, we are really only touching on one aspect of the genre and cyberpunk, like every good well-defined genre is three-dimensional.
While we've been quibbling about themes and tropes, we have been ignoring style.

I am going to stand by what I said about the central theme of cyberpunk. I'm also going to stand by the assertion that corporate sovereignty and pseudo-sovereignty is a common trope but by no means a necessary one. To declare it necessary reject many popular and important cyberpunk works, including Islands in the Net.

The defining stylistic elements of the genre were borrowed from film noir and hardboiled detective fiction. including the gritty, violent, morally ambiguous world and imperfect protagonists.
Kagetenshi
I haven't read it and thus can't personally comment, but none of the literary criticism of Islands in the Net I've read calls it cyberpunk—it's usually explicitly not cyberpunk, in that it's called "post-cyberpunk".

Edit: I also withdraw Buster Friendly and the Rosen Corporation from the "sticking to" category, as they act within their organization. Deckard is a member of an organization, but acts independently. While Friendly may be seen as attempting to topple social order, the Rosen Corporation is merely seeking to topple a competing social order.

So we have:

Punks: seek to overthrow social order while not being a part of an established replacement

The Man: seeks to protect or strengthen social order

~J
Habzial
QUOTE (hyzmarca)
Actually, we are really only touching on one aspect of the genre and cyberpunk, like every good well-defined genre is three-dimensional.
While we've been quibbling about themes and tropes, we have been ignoring style.
That's because prose doesn't define a genre. You presented an ever-shifting definition of cyberpunk, and now that you've inadvertantly included a lot of science-fiction you never intended, you've switched to pretending something can be cyberpunk if it "looks" cyberpunk.

QUOTE (hyzmarca)
I am going to stand by what I said about the central theme of cyberpunk.
Which you based on nothing beyond your desire to lump anime into cyberpunk, and which you changed several times.



To Kagetenshi: The problems I have with categorizing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as cyberpunk are two-fold: 1) the setting and 2) the protagonists/antagonists.

The setting: It's post-apocalyptic rather than dystopic, for one. The world has been utterly destroyed by nuclear weapons used by warring governments. The war was one of political ideologies, not than the rampant consumerism and ever-increasing corporate power that inspipred cyberpunk. In cyberpunk, we see Western Civilization in a death spiral, where the problems associated with city life are exaggerated to extremes. In DADoES, the system already was annihilated, and everyone still on Earth lives with the reality they will one day be rendered mentally retarded. To put it another way, in post-apocalyptic works the world is destroyed, while in cyberpunk humanity is utterly debased.

Furthermore, what followed the apocalypse in DADoES was a moral revival in the form of the empathic religion. We're not presented the bleak future of cyberpunk, where everyone looks out for themselves, money defines your value, and human life has little meaning. Yeah, the future was bleak, but the reaction people had to it was to become closer to each other and all the life left on Earth.



The protagonists/antagonists: In cyberpunk, we see the dystopia and the corrupt system spawned from it. The protagonists are people who go against the system, either by fighting its very existence or making a living from it without adhering to it. In other words, sometimes they're rebels, sometimes they're mercenaries, but they're always criminals. The antagonists are those who live within the system, either leaders among it or the agents of those who run things.

In DADoES we don't have that. We don't have anything like that. What we have are two distinct sides: humans (the empathy of humanity) versus replicants (the sociopathic cruelty of technology). The protagonist is on the side of humanity, which is the side supporting what little system of government there is. The antagonists are replicants, driven solely by their personal desires and interests. What we witness is not a fight between punks and the system, but humanity versus technology. The best of what we are is pitted against the worst that we can become.

I would go so far as to say the replicants represent the humans of the future. All the themes are there: pleasure-driven, self-absorbed, cruel, and delighting in the decay of humanity while helping to spread it. They do seem like character's you'd meet in cyberpunk, I'll readily admit that. The problem is they also fit in well with other branches of science fiction, and are overwhelmingly common in post-apocalyptic settings that would never be considered cyberpunk (Madmax, for example). The replicants the story follows weren't on Earth to oppose anything; they were murderers on the lamb.

[ Spoiler ]




EDIT: Thanks for the spoiler tag info!
Herald of Verjigorm
QUOTE (Habzial)
SPOILER WARNING:

This form has a spoiler tag, and that isn't it.
[ Spoiler ]
Kagetenshi
Free from the creator, I present to you: Duds Hunt part 1.

The whole thing is available from here. specifically the WEB COMIC section.

Warning: may not be so useful to those who don't read Japanese. There's a scanlated copy floating around somewhere, and there's an official French translation that got published at some point.

~J
Sahandrian
Got one for the original topic, now long forgotten. Spriggan. While not much about the plot or setting is Shadowrun, the characters fit in well. Yu Ominae and Jean Jacquemonde are adepts, and Fatman and Little Boy are cyber monsters.

And I'm going by the anime movie, since I've never read the manga.
Kagetenshi
The manga is great, and in some ways more SRish (magic exists), but it's harder to build Jean Jacquemonde when he's a werewolf instead of just really skilled.

~J
thorr
can cyberpunk include space travel? near earth travel? be on another planet or in another galaxy? must there be humans?
Kagetenshi
Yes, yes, yes but difficult, most likely.

Adding too many elements like the last two changes the social commentary of the work.

~J
kigmatzomat
QUOTE (Habzial @ Apr 5 2007, 06:35 AM)

QUOTE (hyzmarca)
GitS, however, is most certainly cyberpunk.
...

Also, Kusanagi's nature as a human mind in the body of an overpriced killing machine working for a paramilitary government agency makes her enough of an outsider to satisfy the punk requirement. She isn't a part of mainstream society.
She works for the government. That isn't punk. It is quite possibly the furthest from punk you can get, particularly since government agents are technically wage-slaves. You can't spin it as punk by saying secret agents are outside of the mainstream.

Kind of irrelevant. The setting is 'punk. Look at GitS:SAC. The Laughing Man is classic punk: A hacker outsider trying to evoke change, out people who wronged the world, and try to make things better. Oh, and he failed the first time despite causing a massive uproar. His attempt at bettering the world was used as a boogeyman to blackmail companies and fill the coffers of those who exploited his appearance on T-shirts, lunchboxes, and backpacks. The world's most notorious hacker became Mork from Ork.

Look, he's faceless, using an icon, and The Man manages to steal that. H If that's not punk I don't know what is.

In truth, the GitS:SAC storyline is entirely about the Laughing Man. He's another archetype uber-hacker like Rache Bartmoss or even Captain Chaos. He did things that no one else knew could be done at the time.

Sure, the story is told from Section 9's point of view, particularly the Major's, but so what? Would Johnny Nemonic be less punk if the main character was one of the corp agents hunting the guy with a headful of data? For GitS that made it more evocative, imo. Seeing Kusangi have to wrestle with the fact that the Laughing Man was so impossibly beyond the normal rules but working to do something that should be done helped make it less of an idealized rant. It took someone who was proven to work in the general interest of the public good and was sympathetic to average people, even if they didn't follow the letter or intention of the law.
kigmatzomat
Guess I should look at the time/datestamps more often before replying.
Tommy Gunner
QUOTE (Snow_Fox)
"...Read or Die, the original series or the later one have good interaction though the paper masters is a little hard to get in..."

You know, It might be entirely possible to see Sorcerors who have spells that are capable of simulating Papermastery.

Isn't the magic of the Sixth World wonderful, particularly when you have a Gaesa that requires you to read every day for a certain legnth of time. And I'm not talking some literary data feed either. I'm talking old, dusty, wonderful books.

http://readordie.wikia.com - A wiki for the series, if you're curious.
Snow_Fox
a good example would be on CN now- Blood+
The concept without spoilers for those who don't know is that an evil organization has created a syrum bacteria that when humans are exp0osed to, they turn into monsters. These are let loose in war zones to create chaos behind the lines. Think formorians meet manbat

the lead character is genetically alter phys-ad who's blood is leathal to these monster. One group is trying to keep control of the monsters, one group is trying to destroy them and the origial 'mother' base from which the bacteria is grown. The question in the air is who are the good guys?
Critias
I need to second whoever it was (in the depths of the thread, months ago) that suggested Gunslinger Girl. It's good stuff, in a subtley icky kind of way.
Kagetenshi
If it wasn't me, I'll second it as well.

~J
Critias
Then you're thirding it, stupid head!

I knew I'd like the series when my wife was too creeped out by it to watch more than the first disc. It's not that there's ridiculous gore or nudity or anything like that -- it's just that's a very intense, dark, story by nature. It's all mental, all in your head how uncomfortable or sad it makes you. Even she wouldn't say it was bad, simply that no matter how well done it was she didn't like watching it. *grins* The only thing I genuinely disliked about it was that it felt like it ended very abruptly. I could have lived with a few more episodes, gladly.
Kagetenshi
As it turns out, there's a good deal more to the original manga (it's actually still ongoing). The first volume not covered by the anime comes out in English later this Summer.

Edit: even better, MediaWorks has confirmed there's a second season of the anime in the works.

~J
Critias
Swanky!
Jame J
An anime/manga that I would recommend Battle Angel Alita, but not so much B-A-A Last Order (too much space focus). The original has a lot of cyberpunk elements that would work well in SR.
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