So much of this space has been collapsed into homogenized entertainment. Nowadays, by the time a child is ten years old they have seen every form of the hero’s journey in the cartoons they watch, to the degree where there are tropes and nods to source material or even sometimes derivatives of source. Sci fi, fantasy and other genres are blended in as hooks because cartoons have to keep viewership and eye balls, so they throw everything they can find at it.
As a result, unfortunately, there is very little “new” material. The old material that took centuries to develop and longer has been flattened and duplicated, over and over again. I sound like a curmudgeon (I probably am), but I stopped watching movies entirely not too long ago because it became a farce of seeing cliche writing. Shows are even worse so as to not even warrant discussing.
Cyberpunk specifically has also been outdated fast by real world developments, and other genres emerging with similar topics, but different design(?)-language. The whole cyberspace-element for example kinda died (or evolved) with the rise of the real internet, the Matrix-Movies and recently with stuff like VRMMO-stories from asia.
The overall concepts and elements are still around in some way, but the specific combination and language that makes cyberpunk are gone. At the end I would say they were a result of their time, and time has changed, so not it's just nostalgia and retro.
I always find it kind of funny that after Cyberpunk was coined "X-punk" (steam-punk, diseal-punk, etc) became a construction to denote a particular type of "retro-future", sci-fi as imagined from a past time period.
This wasn't initially true of the word cyberpunk, but over the intervening years its become true, as cyberpunk has more and more denoted the future specifically as seen from the perspective of the 1980s and early 90's. Its become "retro-actively retro".
I'd go the other way and say Cyberpunk was meant to be capitalism taken to its logical extreme (unregulated industries rife with corruption, with markets/regimes perturbed only through acts of violence and espionage).
As life begins to imitate art, we're met with a The Thick Of It type situation where the satire of reality is no longer applicable and would be further diminished by continuing it
> "Time and again, The Thick of It led and reality fell in behind."
Yeah, the issues of political critique that were key to early cyberpunk have largely been lost. It's partially the fault of the first Blade Runner movie, which exploded the genre while also sanitizing it of the harshest elements.
It's not really any more cyberpunk than, say, a crow collecting expended ammo casings because they're shiny. Just involving electronics technology doesn't make something cyberpunk.
Disagree, corvids collecting bullet casings because they are shiny is heavily Shadowrun/WoD/Hellboy coded aesthetically. Regular birds gathering fiber optic cables for nests is EXTREMELY CYBERPUNK are you kidding? The image evokes so much: capitalist excess, tech waste involving computers/internet/cybernetics, war bad, environmental degredation etc... the only part about this concept that isnt heavily cyberpunk is that the bird isn't sick, dying, or dead and is somehow happy to find such a workable and durable nest building material.
the bird's children may be crippled if it gets tangled in their feet while they're still developing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringfoot (which is in general a common sight wherever pigeons can be found); when my flat's fibreoptic was being installed, the cable-layers made a big deal of collecting the cuttings where they spliced the cable and ensuring nothing would be in reach of any animals.
...What? It's waste from expended munitions. The Ukranian war isn't a corporate war, it's a war between sovereign nations. The drones were produced by and bought from corporations (I assume) but the result of the arms race for better measures and countermeasures would have been the same if each country had produced its own gear.
Again, something doesn't become cyberpunk just because it involves computers or electronics.
>war bad
I don't think cyberpunk is anti-war as a central feature. It's certainly compatible with that message, but you could write a cyberpunk story that is pro-war, as long that war is to counter the power of corporations.
>environmental degredation etc.
All in all, discarded fibers are more of a nuisance to people than to the environment, I think.
First, the bulk of the Russian forces are still armed forces personnel. Second, even if most of the Russian forces consisted of mercenaries, their pay and their tactical objectives would come from the Russian government, which also directs the strategic objectives. A cyberpunk corporate war is fought entirely between corporations, for corporate reasons.
What even is this argument? Why are you people wasting my and your time on this?
Considering how the former leader of Wagner countermanded orders from above and was recalled, as well as Wagner’s usage of press-ganged convicts straight out of gulags, the unit was fairly irregular compared to the Russian military proper. Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.
Cyberpunk as a concept is fairly subjective and subject to interpretation. Perhaps your conception of cyberpunk is more exclusive and prescriptive than others’? I wouldn’t interpret a difference of opinion about the tropes or ethos of cyberpunk in a normative way.
Just because folks see cyberpunk aspects in society or literature that you do not is not a contradiction of your own perceptions. It might be a case of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.
Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art, or both (or neither)? You seem to be saying that cyberpunk is only a literary genre, which is somewhat limiting the discussion when so many cyberpunk works have been adapted to other media, which then inspires other works which were never in written form to begin with. To limit your own discussion to written works is your prerogative, but it seems a needlessly narrow scope for the discussion of others who don’t share your view.
To say that we’re wasting our own time is to discount the fact that others are participating in the discussion in good faith for their own reasons. HN writ large isn’t a means to an end, HN and the individuals of HN are ends unto themselves.
>Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.
What I said was that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate war. The composition or actions of the Wagner group are completely irrelevant. WG could be composed of anarchist hacker cyborgs who participate in armed conflicts to fund their struggle against what they perceive as a corporatocracy, and the Ukranian war would still not be a corporate war.
The points system whereby Ukrainian soldiers’ units earn credits for confirmed kills (with a bonus for live capture) of Russian and other nations’ hostile forces, which can be redeemed for drones and other materiel from plethora of international and domestic startups competing with established arms megacorps, as opposed to top-down procurement diktats reads to me as cyberpunk. The growing usage of (semi)autonomous ground drones on both sides also seems fairly cyberpunk in a Terminator sense. The participation of forces from other rogue states like North Korea in exchange for food and arms is cyberpunk.
Reasonable people can disagree, as I alluded to above, but I wouldn’t say that disagreement on the points or in itself is pointless or wrong, which seems to be where we differ. Whether something is cyberpunk is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective experience in the reader of art and of literature and of history. I don’t see how you can say what something seems like to others, as that is to second guess their own experience of reality (or as mediated by fiction, in the the case of artistic works).
To me, the cyberpunk ethos can be summarized as high tech, low life. Utilizing literal convicts as frontline soldiers by Wagner in Ukraine seems to fit that description to a tee.
In light of the above combined with the routine usage of AI on all sides, the conflict in Ukraine as a whole seems to be a literal expression of “sustainable war” as depicted in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which is widely regarded as a cyberpunk work.
> In effect, the G4 nations went to war with each other in a "sustainable" manner managed by AIs: fighting deliberately avoided damaging major cities and essential infrastructure, mercenaries, and autonomous war machines were heavily used, and the goal of most battles was to destroy enemy structures, vehicles, and equipment while taking reasonable measures to capture rather than fatally harm human combatants when possible. In other words, the conflict would be sustainable as almost all losses could, in theory, be perpetually replaced by the military-industrial complex.
It’s more corporate than any past war, and for the reasons stated, it is hard to imagine how it could be more corporate if the belligerents tried. The direct involvement of startups in weapons dev combined with the points system creating a market for material driven by individuals and small groups rather than a traditional procurement process is hyper capitalist. The absence of direct conflict between corporations à la Shadowrun doesn’t meaningfully change the calculus for my determination that the Ukraine was is a corporate war.
Regarding your edit:
> I won't let you move the goalposts.
I don’t know what this statement is referring to, but I haven’t changed any of my positions regarding what I perceive as cyberpunk or whether or not I view the Ukraine war as corporate (and cyberpunk).
Perhaps you view the discussion as one where points are scored, but I don’t. I view the discussion as a collaborative enterprise where we both express ourselves and develop our own ideas in the context of a wider discussion.
If there’s something specific I said you would like me to address, please let me know, as I don’t know what you mean.
Okay, fine. Then you're using the term in a different sense than I did. What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing with the Ukrainian war not being a corporate one by my definition?
> What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate one by my definition?
It’s a discussion board. I’m discussing the topic and trying to get to know what you think and believe, and thanks to your prompting, I got to know what I think and believe a little better myself. I don’t have any desire to disagree with you, as I don’t think that either one of us are making statements that have an objective quality to them, as the context is too subjective and subject to interpretation.
I don’t know enough about your definition of “corporate war” in the context of this thread, since you said we’re using different definitions, so maybe you could share a little bit about what that term means to you? What would it take to make the Ukrainian war a corporate war, to you? What are qualities of corporate war, and how would you or I know it when we see it? Can you think of some examples that meet your definition of corporate war, either in fiction or in real life?
We do have some degree of it, but it's more on the realistic side of performance. The remaining body has to handle them after all, so it's hard to enhance performance beyond human limits for real. Maybe with some more decades of development.
But we've also learned that we don't need to change the body itself, when we can just enhance the tools we use. Smartphones are already seen as some sort of half-step towards humans becoming cyborgs. Similar have we now Exoskeletons, which are probably more practical than replacing a full limb.
When society is affluent enough, people say it will become corrupt and fall apart. But when society has truly deteriorated, stories of heroes come to mind. If you look back at the era when cyberpunk social critiques emerged, the world that led that movement was wealthy, with a thick middle class. But when society starts to become poorer, those kinds of stories become stressful for the public. When you have room to breathe, such macro-level critiques serve as a 'healthy amount of stress' for survival. But when survival itself is at stake, it becomes much harder to be tolerant of criticism.
That's why the countries where cyberpunk flourished were wealthy ones
I’ve toyed around with this hypothesis about dark music and edgy culture.
The roaring 90s were full of this: dark music exploring critical themes or things like depression and addiction, lots of social criticism, and edgy offensive humor. The mid to late 90s were an economic boom time for a broader segment of people and were optimistic in a way that’s hard to explain today.
I like to put it this way: it’s not that things were all better in the 90s. They weren’t. But people thought they were getting better.
Now people don’t want those things. They want light entertainment, either no criticism (the right) or only approved types via approved critical theories (the left), and offensive edgy stuff is out and may get you cancelled (which side cancels you depends on the content).
It seems like we think alike. I feel like the dark and critical themes of the 90s were ahead of their time back then. A lot of what they predicted actually turned out to be accurate. The cultural media of the 90s said things like 'this is what will happen if wealth becomes concentrated or corporations take over'—and it's actually playing out in a similar way.
But as our society has become more stratified by wealth and the vast majority have become poorer, people no longer have the mental space to think deeply. They've come to love clear, simple answers.
I interpret this as the world becoming too excessive. Because there's so much information that it's hard to even find meaningful content. Critical interpretation has also become difficult. Just look at AI. It's different today and different tomorrow, and for freelancers like me, it's like we have to deliver immediately.
There's material poverty, but I think mental poverty is more due to the pervasive FOMO, the fear of falling behind in the flood of information
As you said, it's 'only approved types via approved critical theories.' As people lose their margin for error, they also lose the capacity to consider others' perspectives.
I meant to write quite a long response to your comment, but let me just bring it down to a single question: How is your feeling different from melancholia?
There is and always will be mainstream, niche, the unknown and everything in between. There was always very little new material and a lot of works just gained recognition when their zeitgeist was long overdue, too. I think experimentation is hard, and it's even harder to justify experimentation in the evolving economic climate.
Genres are meant to be collapsed, or rather they should blend and dissolve into each other. The earlier (and good) seasons of The Simpsons are a poster child when it comes to "flattening and duplicating old material". Almost every episode cites a movie or work of literature, and there was nothing wrong with it! It's part of why I understand the 90s as a cultural era of citations, and I had to grow up with that sentiment. It took me quite some time to understand that we moved past it.
Nowadays, we are fortunate enough that a lot of things from the past 10 decades have been digitized and are readily available on demand. That's amazing! Nothing is stopping me from asking myself some naive questions, like "What makes a good drama?" or "If Die Hard is considered to be a Christmas movie, why isn't Falling Down considered to be a summer movie?". I think there is still stuff to explore.
I'll just leave this unfinished thought with a recommendation to a niche movie I discovered recently: Sleep Has Her House (2017)[0]
I don’t watch many movies due to time but those I do watch tend to be odd, unusual, experimental, and sometimes polarizing.
A recent one I enjoyed was Rabbit Trap, a modern take on faerie lore. It was polarizing and got poor reviews.
Years ago I adored a two season series called Hellier. I have a hard time describing this. Ghost hunting show for thinking people? You have to suspend disbelief but it reminded me of Primer in terms of a lot achieved on little budget. If you want to see some hipsters try to use transcranial magnetic stimulation to talk to aliens this is for you.
I’ve enjoyed some horror for its tendency to subvert tropes: hero to villain, villain is really hero, everybody dies, etc.
But yeah. I can only watch blockbusters if I’m in a certain kind of mood where I want light entertainment with no thought.
I've noticed this as well and I'm rather concerned about it. Those cheap rip offs will ruin countless classics for her and it's really sad. I'm looking for the most boring stuff for her to watch just so she doesn't become fully jaded by age 18.
Side note: if you need new stories, I've found a lot of weird and fun stuff to read on Royal Road.
I abandoned movies too, 5 years ago or so. There's little space for "art" (whatever that might be) when you need to invest giant sums and expect a return. There's still some good movies coming out, I'm sure. But I don't have the time or energy anymore to dig for it like I did in the past.
I think you are right for movies and TV shows, but not for "comics, manga and graphic novels" and I'll add books as well. Since those are much cheaper and easier to produce than TV shows and movies, they can be created independently, without the need to optimize for earning tons of money. Indie literature and comics are very diverse in the storytelling.
But I acknowledged (and dread a bit) that the audiovisual storytelling is such a strong force that any discussion about storytelling, even when specifically talking about literature/comics storytelling, is dominated by audiovisual references. Any creative writing workshop/course that include sci fi and fantasy genres will inevitably mention Star Wars as example for whichever technique. The more literary ones will mention some Oscar winning movie, etc.
it’s been this way forever. the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00, etc… all had generic trash movies and music too.
stop getting recs from algorithms and the entire world will open back up to you. just like top40 music and generic movies from back in the day, you’re getting the lowest common denominator recs.
i read a book about the music industry in the 80s (it’s been a couple years and i can’t remember the name now) but people called the top40 music from back then formulaic. they were convinced record labels had formulas to make their pop music stars. what do you think algorithms are? they’re feeding you trash.
again, stop getting your recommendations from algorithms and the world will open back up. get your recs from actual film or music geeks. go to your local record store, look at their wall of employee recs, or *gasp* talk to them and ask them.
I understand your point, but it's slightly exaggerated. At least in Europe, any decently-sized city will have at least one of any of those. Not as many as there used to be, sure, but at least one.
I live in a big city. There are a few record stores, but if we're being honest, let's also not exaggerate by calling them mylocal store. And if I would opt for the journey, it's not like I would find this cool group of music nerds sharing secret gems. Vinyl is an expensive hobby and everything else is digital now. It's not like every niche artist got the means to press vinyl and the presumed cozy record store will hardly point you to bandcamp. Bit silly to pretend it's anything like it used to be in "your local record store".
At least in Germany, book shops and (small) cinemas are artificially kept alive through regulations (e.g. Buchpreisbindung) and public funding. Theaters got that too, techno clubs not so much. Lucky are the ones who still got a nice deal on rent, because without a solid revenue, your new whatever local scene experiment won't be in the city.
Then recently, conservative politicians also decided to attach ideological strings to the funding. What's a good book shop and what's a bad book shop gets intransparently decided by the domestic intelligence service now. The stories our times need will get you demonetized. As we speak, lobbyists are relentlessly trying to push the compliance machinery onto our devices, so we're not tempted by anything outside of commercial supervision either.
It's all converging towards the brave new mainstream. Pretending like all these trends are just fads is wilful ignorance. Media attention may come and go, but the insects remain dead, temperatures unprecedented and art compliant.
We are hardly in need of cyberpunk fiction anymore, tho.
I dunno, I've mostly lived in urban areas but I've always had record shops near to where I live. Sure, there are far less than there used to be, but the ones that made the cut appear to be on solid footing.
i think (safe guess) a plurality of hn users live in cities with most or all of these types of businesses. unless you're somewhere very rural, exurban or suburban, you owe it to yourself to at least try to find these places (and even if you are, you might be surprised at what's nearby).
While there’s a lot of slop out there that just exist to extract dollars, there are still some great movies being made every now and then. Don’t expect them to be the most popular high budget movies, you have to dig a little. The idea that there’s nothing new that’s worth watching though is clearly wrong and a typical bias that basically every person has to fight against as they age. You might even say it’s a cliche to think all new media is junk.
And yet. The other day I saw Dune described as this generation's LotR, which was that generation's Star Wars. Dune (and LotR, and SW) are all Hero's Journey stories (what isn't?), yet they're each pretty unique.
Granted, LotR and Dune were written in the 50's and 60's, respectively, with Star Wars following a decade later.
All I'm saying is that what is new depends on what generation you grow up in. And I suppose how much media you're exposed to. Speaking for myself, LotR was the second film I ever saw in the cinema so it was a whole new experience.
For the younger generations, these are old films, much like how idk, Spartacus and co was an old film for me.
tl;dr, the kids will be alright. Actually the kids also appreciate older media, there's a whole generation of late teenagers now rediscovering 2000's music / culture.
I'd also argue in LotR only Frodo has an archetypal Hero's Journey, but the novel itself is almost (but not quite) an ensemble piece with many other important characters that are not necessarily embarked on a steretypical Hero's Journey (Aragorn, Legolas & Gimli, Merry & Pippin, Gandalf).
Sidestepping the Hero's Journey for a second (which Dune actually subverts, one of its key points being that heroes are bad for mankind), Villeneuve's Dune is nowhere near a massive pop culture phenomenon of its time like Star Wars and LotR were of theirs, respectively.
Coincidentally, there is a new Ghost in the Shell anime that's premiering now on Amazon Prime Video. It's animation style and mood are closely aligned with the original 1989 manga, which is to say it's more cartoonish and light-hearted. I prefer the more adult oriented content the franchise was putting out up until about 2006, but the new anime series gives me hope that we might eventually see a follow-up animation of Shirow Masamune's Man/Machine Interface - what was once considered to be Ghost in the Shell 2 before Mamuro Oshii created Innocence.
Personally I think I'm done with GitS at this point. How many times has it been rebooted, like a dozen times?
The last one I enjoyed watching was Arise but I lost track after that. I think the series has been done to death and I would love to see some completely new IP from Masamune that is more reflective of the AI and economic upheavals we are experiencing in the 20s.
I see every version as a remix of the original material, each done with their own take and philosophy. They're not remakes or reboots.
The only version that didn't add anything new was the Hollywood movie, which was an entertaining but shallow derivative of Oshii's animes and not based on the manga at all.
I think the original material provides enough ideas to continue spinning off new remixes. It hasn't even been outdated by the recent advancements in AI. Quite the opposite.
I don't think it will be animated any time soon due to Major not having much screen time, but if you haven't seen it, I would definitely recommend Human Algorithm[1] manga. It's a bit different art style than the original, more gritty and sterile, in a good way. For me personally that makes it a bit more cyberpunk feel. The first arc is a bit drag at a time but when all plot lines converge, the payoff is awesome.
The article author sure likes Ghost in the Shell. Almost every variant is listed.
The article only covers comics, manga, and graphic novels, not anime. So Bubblegum Crisis, which is half cyberpunk and half music videos, isn't listed. Nor is Cowboy Bebop.
(The site is now intermittently down, with "429 Too many requests".)
You're probably not going to get it. And he has decent reasons for not wanting to bother.
The nature (infamy?) of his activities over the past few years should also be noted. (And maybe chuckled at if you have a bit of a dark sense of humor.)
It's not corruption. He has stated that there were projects going on behind the scenes, but most of them got scrapped before reaching production.
The most recent manga he involved with was Ghost Urn, which explores the world of GitS from a different protagonist. He did not do the drawing, but did most of the worldbuilding and mecha design.
He's always been a very horny creator and the original Ghost In the Shell movie (in fairness not directed by him) has the female main character need to get nude to use her stealth ability while the men can leave their clothes on.
Whatever narrative you've invented of Shirow changing over time is a stretch.
If you've seen the original movie, other than nudity there is very little horny in it. No sex, no banter about sex, no erotica. The female body, even if well endowed, is depicted clinically and emotionless. There are no lecherous characters, nobody chasing girls, etc. No romance even, though the relationship between Motoko and Batou is somewhat ambiguous.
Shirow's manga is horny though, partly why I dislike it.
Yes, I addressed this: Kusanagi appears naked often; the intro scene is definitely striking and somewhat of fan service. However, there's little sexy about this in the movie, the characters don't behave sexy, there are no lecherous moments, etc. In fact, sex is barely acknowledged at all. It's not a "horny" movie.
I think the sexuality of Kusanagi works on multiple levels. She is a full cyborg, and she could present however she wishes. She explicitly uses her appearance toward social engineering ends in the Stand Alone Complex series. I’m not very familiar with the manga, from what I do remember, Kusanagi is bisexual and is likely “fully functional” sexually, but her body as depicted isn’t really her own, as she relies upon regular maintenance provided Section 9.
I view the portrayal of Kusanagi as being steeped in aspects of the male gaze in a metatextual way. Japanese society has a high emphasis on traditional beauty standards, and the artists depicting her as a character use her beauty as a foil against the audience, by contrasting her beauty with her strength, and by subverting the desires of the audience by drawing our attention to her humanity by alienation through destroying her body at multiple points in the series. Her desire to protect her comrades at the cost of her body shows us how she is willing to sacrifice her femininity, being forced to regress to a childlike body.
The series have a lot of fan service, but I believe that it’s intentional so that the audience is forced to confront their own biases and stereotypes about women and about cyborgs/robots. The cyborg nature of her body as it is destroyed reads to me as a visual metaphor for the Madonna/whore double standard women are subject to society.
I guess I don’t disagree with your view, so much as I think that how she is depicted works on multiple levels in-universe and with respect to the viewer, and said depictions serve multiple functions in the text.
In the movie Kusanagi isn't bisexual. No reference is made to her sexuality at all. One could argue her demeanor is completely asexual. The only human side we see of her is her wondering whether she's human at all.
Movie Kusanagi is her own thing, mostly unrelated to the manga or other adaptations.
A lot of mangaka have done that sort of thing, calling something normal in the industry "infamous" and "corrupting" seems overblown when Tatsuya Matsuki and Nobuhiro Watsuki are grooming children and collecting CP and every other mangaka seems to be shitposting racism.
I called it infamous not because I have a particular problem with it, but because of the way it's characterized by (Western, at least) fans. They snicker at and make jokes about the scenarios he apparently employs. (Admittedly, it doesn't sound like my thing, and I haven't looked too deeply into the material. It could very well be that I'm getting trolled.)
I agree that you can find genuinely disturbing things in the manga world and that Masamune's work is relatively benign (though some of his depictions of less-developed adult women might upset some). In general, I find the idea of commercialized erotica amusing, especially when coming from sources with more mainstream claims-to-fame. In these cases, I don't attach a connotation of moral bankruptcy or anything like that to the idea of them being "infamous", though maybe that's just me using the word wrong. I intend it more in the sense of, "Hahah, oh wow, THAT guy did THAT? That's crazy." Kind of like when we found out about Tezuka's softcore furry/snakewomen doodles.
Fans of Shirow will probably lynch me, but I didn't like the manga all that much. Not even the art style, which the new animé seems to replicate.
To me, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 GitS is THE version, because I'm seldom in the mood for slapstick and I much prefer the introspective mood of the movie, and its cinematic visuals. And the music!
I haven't liked any other adaptations since. To me, the movie is almost perfect. I didn't like Innocence much though.
I liked Innocence for the overwhelm-of-ideas. I will say outright that 'i don't entirely get it' but I very much like that it exists and I rewatch it every couple of years to just sit under the waterfall of concepts, no matter how pretentious it all may be.
I just can't get over how pretentious it is, and also I miss Motoko in it. I mean, the first movie (1995) also toyed with pretentiousness, but this was miraculously curtailed before it had a chance to bog the whole movie down [1], and its awesome mood, soundtrack -- much like with Blade Runner, another favorite of mine, I find it hard to separate the movie from its awesome soundtrack -- and visuals overpowered everything else. Motoko questioning if she was human, and what it mean to be human, it all worked for me. Maybe if she had spent the whole movie doing this, without any payoff, I'd like it less.
Innocence has great visuals too, I'll grant you this!
I really like the art direction of the new GitS adaptation (I hope this retro style gets used more), but yeah it's completely different in tone from the '95 adaptation and most of what followed.
also go read my comic about a robot lady with reality issues, http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/, it's got cover quotes from three people with seven Hugos between them.
It might be skirting the edges of what is considered cyberpunk since it has Mecha elements but Patlabor is a fantastic manga/series that should have been included in this list [1]
It is especially strange not to see it in the list given GiTS is heavily featured (according to the comments, I can't access the page or web archive ATM).
Patlabor movie 2 was directed by the same director as the original 1995 GiTS animation movie. Both patlabor 1 / 2 have similar themes to GiTS, and are heavily cyber punk in themes and esthetics.
This is a bit of an idiosyncratic list. Two of my favorite additions from my own youth: Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow and Batman: Digital Justice. The latter now reads like a bit of a corny cash grab for the early '90s cyber fad, but I still love the time capsule of some if its art.
It took me twice as long to read Hard Boiled as it should since I spent so much time looking at Geof Darrow’s intricately detailed art. Great story, but the illustrations are on another level.
It's not that idiosyncratic a list, those were the first two graphic novels that came to my mind when opening up the website. Geoff Darrow's art Hardboiled is incredible. I was a huge batman fan as a young teen and digital justice came out at peak Batman hype, and it was much hyped itself, but it wasn't very good.
In Italy (and sometimes abroad, I recall dark horse translated it in English at some point) Nathan Never has been publishing as a monthly comic for a few decades.
A recent (2023) finding: from Guillaume Singelin, Frontier [0]. Fitting it into "cyberpunk" may need a bit of a push, but since the limits are kind of blurry I don't really care. The narrative is not perfect perhaps falling into wanting to say a lot more than the page limit allows, but all in all it's a good enough read.
I'm vouching for Frontier as well, as well as "Carbon & Silicon" [0] from Mathieu Bablet. All of his work is gorgeous, I love his art.
If you liked Frontier's theme and are into video games I recommend you check out "Citizen Sleeper" [1] illustrated by Guillaume Singelin as well.
It's a 7 hour narrative text-based adventure that really hooked me one week-end. Your choices depend on how you "spend" your dice, dice that are cast at the beginning of every single day on the station so you get to pre-plan your actions somewhat.
Gameplay wise it's mostly reading, but I liked exploring the station they created.
I did a pandemic project of reading Dredd from the start for as long as I could. I made it through about 25 case files volumes, which took me from 1977 to the late 90s (I think).
Is Judge Dredd cyberpunk? I don't care. It's an incredible run of comics, that touches on many of the same themes as cyberpunk.
There are many people involved in Dredd over the years, but I do think John Wagner has had the rare opportunity among work for hire creators to shepherd a fictional universe over decades of real and in universe time.
I am somewhat surprised not to find any Jodorowsky in there.
Maybe the incal world doesnt really qualify as punk and more like regular scifi or perhaps bordeline new-agey, but it doesn’t strike me as fundamentally different from Akira in story style.
The one I'd highlight from the list is Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World, it's my favorite manga. It's beautifully drawn and incredibly grounded in tone and oddly relevant.
The overarching story is about a pandemic that starts as a backdrop and becomes more important and metaphysical and religious as the story goes on but the core of it revolves around crime bosses in Latin America, the lives of prostitutes, a Uyghur rebellion in Xinjiang, political conflict and organized crime all done in a very real way. It's completely devoid of any (manga) tropes or genre aesthetics.
I've honestly not ever considered Ghost in the shell to be under the cyberpunk genre. It's too clean and the characters too ingrained in the working of the system. And the system "works", it's not a sanitised depiction, gits society feels much like our own with a detailed techno-realism it's a society still at the transitional point to something more radical; exemplified by humans still doing very manual things - take for example that classic scene from the 1995 film, where the man uses multiple fingers to extremely fast into a terminal, this would seem impressive but pales in comparison to a direct cyberbrain connection, they still have terminals because this is a world still in transition. Another of my favourite but less known scenes is this scene from gitsac: https://paul.kishimoto.name/2017/01/barcodes/
But the point about the multi-finger fingers -xD- was not about transitional technology, but about explicitly avoiding direct brain connection as an additional layer of security.
Funny for some reason the submission title summoned this manga in my mind even though I've never read it only a free chapter in a magazine I was obsessed with.
Rich Veitch, he and Alan Moore. As Moore would later write:
"The One ... is a kind of landmark; a pulling together of obsessions and ingenious storytelling ideas into a coherent whole ... Its revisionist superheroics, while conceived at roughly the same time, predate Watchmen and Dark Knight in terms of publication, as does its packaging. Its political and humanist preoccupations were voiced before such sentiments became chic. Its deranged, culture-conscious humor offers an alternative and an antidote to today's rather gloomy trend of pessimistic, post-modern ultra-humans... Whatever it is that the comic books of the 1980s turn out to be remembered for, The One was right there in the thick of it, carving out a niche in the mainstream for dangerous ideas long before dangerous ideas became box-office certainties."
as someone who loves Astro Boy (and everything else Tezuka made): Atom The Beginning was a disappointment. But I also believe that Pluto sucks too (some smaller stories, like the pianist, were great).
The Ghost In The Shell: Global Neural Network features one story by LRNZ. His work Geist Maschine (in italian only) is amazing.
Among the Cyberpunk 2077 comics, Big City Dreams is also very good.
It's interesting how genre coding have become much more enforced these years. Back in the early 2010s we would call most of these just "sci-fi", because the influence and aesthetics of cyberpunk has already bled into the wider genre that you'd be more hard pressed to find a story without some influence on it.
But despite the author's veneration of 90s and 2000s, I'd argue the works from the late 2000s and early 2010s are just as sophisticated and arguably more relevant to our modern world; Project Itoh (Genocidal Organ, Harmony), Gatchaman Crowds, Beatless, alot of their themes were prescient; Because the frontier isn't hardware, it's ontology and semantics.
So much of this space has been collapsed into homogenized entertainment. Nowadays, by the time a child is ten years old they have seen every form of the hero’s journey in the cartoons they watch, to the degree where there are tropes and nods to source material or even sometimes derivatives of source. Sci fi, fantasy and other genres are blended in as hooks because cartoons have to keep viewership and eye balls, so they throw everything they can find at it.
As a result, unfortunately, there is very little “new” material. The old material that took centuries to develop and longer has been flattened and duplicated, over and over again. I sound like a curmudgeon (I probably am), but I stopped watching movies entirely not too long ago because it became a farce of seeing cliche writing. Shows are even worse so as to not even warrant discussing.
Cyberpunk specifically has also been outdated fast by real world developments, and other genres emerging with similar topics, but different design(?)-language. The whole cyberspace-element for example kinda died (or evolved) with the rise of the real internet, the Matrix-Movies and recently with stuff like VRMMO-stories from asia.
The overall concepts and elements are still around in some way, but the specific combination and language that makes cyberpunk are gone. At the end I would say they were a result of their time, and time has changed, so not it's just nostalgia and retro.
I always find it kind of funny that after Cyberpunk was coined "X-punk" (steam-punk, diseal-punk, etc) became a construction to denote a particular type of "retro-future", sci-fi as imagined from a past time period.
This wasn't initially true of the word cyberpunk, but over the intervening years its become true, as cyberpunk has more and more denoted the future specifically as seen from the perspective of the 1980s and early 90's. Its become "retro-actively retro".
I'd go the other way and say Cyberpunk was meant to be capitalism taken to its logical extreme (unregulated industries rife with corruption, with markets/regimes perturbed only through acts of violence and espionage).
As life begins to imitate art, we're met with a The Thick Of It type situation where the satire of reality is no longer applicable and would be further diminished by continuing it
> "Time and again, The Thick of It led and reality fell in behind."
Yeah, the issues of political critique that were key to early cyberpunk have largely been lost. It's partially the fault of the first Blade Runner movie, which exploded the genre while also sanitizing it of the harshest elements.
I'm intrigued. What's some good unsanitary cyberpunk that predates Blade Runner? I'm new to the genre.
It feels like the last remaining promise of cyberpunk is widespread cybernetic augmentation. The rest of the genre is not really fiction anymore.
I got a flier in the mail last week, offering a subscription service for ambulance rides. It was the most cyberpunk thing I'd seen personally.
The most Cyberpunk thing imo is the bird's nests made using fibre optic cable from Ukraine. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/bird-nest...
It's not really any more cyberpunk than, say, a crow collecting expended ammo casings because they're shiny. Just involving electronics technology doesn't make something cyberpunk.
Disagree, corvids collecting bullet casings because they are shiny is heavily Shadowrun/WoD/Hellboy coded aesthetically. Regular birds gathering fiber optic cables for nests is EXTREMELY CYBERPUNK are you kidding? The image evokes so much: capitalist excess, tech waste involving computers/internet/cybernetics, war bad, environmental degredation etc... the only part about this concept that isnt heavily cyberpunk is that the bird isn't sick, dying, or dead and is somehow happy to find such a workable and durable nest building material.
the bird's children may be crippled if it gets tangled in their feet while they're still developing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringfoot (which is in general a common sight wherever pigeons can be found); when my flat's fibreoptic was being installed, the cable-layers made a big deal of collecting the cuttings where they spliced the cable and ensuring nothing would be in reach of any animals.
>capitalist excess
...What? It's waste from expended munitions. The Ukranian war isn't a corporate war, it's a war between sovereign nations. The drones were produced by and bought from corporations (I assume) but the result of the arms race for better measures and countermeasures would have been the same if each country had produced its own gear.
>tech waste involving computers/internet/cybernetics
Again, something doesn't become cyberpunk just because it involves computers or electronics.
>war bad
I don't think cyberpunk is anti-war as a central feature. It's certainly compatible with that message, but you could write a cyberpunk story that is pro-war, as long that war is to counter the power of corporations.
>environmental degredation etc.
All in all, discarded fibers are more of a nuisance to people than to the environment, I think.
It's aesthetically extremely cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction.
Gibson's fiction created an aesthetic and I am pretty sure more people are now aware of the aesthetic than the fiction with gave rise to it.
And an aesthetic. You can google it if you're unfamiliar!
I'm very much familiar. It's just incorrect.
So it is decreed! 'Cyberpunk aesthetic' is hereafter an incoherent concept! Well done, sir. Objective truth is defended.
I'm glad you've seen the error of your ways.
Why dig in so rigidly?
You're right, I should learn to be swayed by such compelling arguments as plain assertion and "just google it, bro".
> The Ukranian war isn't a corporate war
Citation needed.
Uh... The combatants are members of the armed forces of political entities, not of the private armies of corporations? Checkmate atheists?
Since the conflict began in 2014, Wagner Group PMC has been involved in many operations in Ukraine, which seems to contradict your line of reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Ukr...
First, the bulk of the Russian forces are still armed forces personnel. Second, even if most of the Russian forces consisted of mercenaries, their pay and their tactical objectives would come from the Russian government, which also directs the strategic objectives. A cyberpunk corporate war is fought entirely between corporations, for corporate reasons.
What even is this argument? Why are you people wasting my and your time on this?
Considering how the former leader of Wagner countermanded orders from above and was recalled, as well as Wagner’s usage of press-ganged convicts straight out of gulags, the unit was fairly irregular compared to the Russian military proper. Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.
Cyberpunk as a concept is fairly subjective and subject to interpretation. Perhaps your conception of cyberpunk is more exclusive and prescriptive than others’? I wouldn’t interpret a difference of opinion about the tropes or ethos of cyberpunk in a normative way.
Just because folks see cyberpunk aspects in society or literature that you do not is not a contradiction of your own perceptions. It might be a case of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.
Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art, or both (or neither)? You seem to be saying that cyberpunk is only a literary genre, which is somewhat limiting the discussion when so many cyberpunk works have been adapted to other media, which then inspires other works which were never in written form to begin with. To limit your own discussion to written works is your prerogative, but it seems a needlessly narrow scope for the discussion of others who don’t share your view.
To say that we’re wasting our own time is to discount the fact that others are participating in the discussion in good faith for their own reasons. HN writ large isn’t a means to an end, HN and the individuals of HN are ends unto themselves.
>Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.
What I said was that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate war. The composition or actions of the Wagner group are completely irrelevant. WG could be composed of anarchist hacker cyborgs who participate in armed conflicts to fund their struggle against what they perceive as a corporatocracy, and the Ukranian war would still not be a corporate war.
The points system whereby Ukrainian soldiers’ units earn credits for confirmed kills (with a bonus for live capture) of Russian and other nations’ hostile forces, which can be redeemed for drones and other materiel from plethora of international and domestic startups competing with established arms megacorps, as opposed to top-down procurement diktats reads to me as cyberpunk. The growing usage of (semi)autonomous ground drones on both sides also seems fairly cyberpunk in a Terminator sense. The participation of forces from other rogue states like North Korea in exchange for food and arms is cyberpunk.
Reasonable people can disagree, as I alluded to above, but I wouldn’t say that disagreement on the points or in itself is pointless or wrong, which seems to be where we differ. Whether something is cyberpunk is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective experience in the reader of art and of literature and of history. I don’t see how you can say what something seems like to others, as that is to second guess their own experience of reality (or as mediated by fiction, in the the case of artistic works).
To me, the cyberpunk ethos can be summarized as high tech, low life. Utilizing literal convicts as frontline soldiers by Wagner in Ukraine seems to fit that description to a tee.
In light of the above combined with the routine usage of AI on all sides, the conflict in Ukraine as a whole seems to be a literal expression of “sustainable war” as depicted in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which is widely regarded as a cyberpunk work.
https://breezewiki.com/Ghostintheshell/wiki/Sustainable_War
> In effect, the G4 nations went to war with each other in a "sustainable" manner managed by AIs: fighting deliberately avoided damaging major cities and essential infrastructure, mercenaries, and autonomous war machines were heavily used, and the goal of most battles was to destroy enemy structures, vehicles, and equipment while taking reasonable measures to capture rather than fatally harm human combatants when possible. In other words, the conflict would be sustainable as almost all losses could, in theory, be perpetually replaced by the military-industrial complex.
>What I said was that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate war.
I won't let you move the goalposts.
It’s more corporate than any past war, and for the reasons stated, it is hard to imagine how it could be more corporate if the belligerents tried. The direct involvement of startups in weapons dev combined with the points system creating a market for material driven by individuals and small groups rather than a traditional procurement process is hyper capitalist. The absence of direct conflict between corporations à la Shadowrun doesn’t meaningfully change the calculus for my determination that the Ukraine was is a corporate war.
Regarding your edit:
> I won't let you move the goalposts.
I don’t know what this statement is referring to, but I haven’t changed any of my positions regarding what I perceive as cyberpunk or whether or not I view the Ukraine war as corporate (and cyberpunk).
Perhaps you view the discussion as one where points are scored, but I don’t. I view the discussion as a collaborative enterprise where we both express ourselves and develop our own ideas in the context of a wider discussion.
If there’s something specific I said you would like me to address, please let me know, as I don’t know what you mean.
Okay, fine. Then you're using the term in a different sense than I did. What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing with the Ukrainian war not being a corporate one by my definition?
> What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate one by my definition?
It’s a discussion board. I’m discussing the topic and trying to get to know what you think and believe, and thanks to your prompting, I got to know what I think and believe a little better myself. I don’t have any desire to disagree with you, as I don’t think that either one of us are making statements that have an objective quality to them, as the context is too subjective and subject to interpretation.
I don’t know enough about your definition of “corporate war” in the context of this thread, since you said we’re using different definitions, so maybe you could share a little bit about what that term means to you? What would it take to make the Ukrainian war a corporate war, to you? What are qualities of corporate war, and how would you or I know it when we see it? Can you think of some examples that meet your definition of corporate war, either in fiction or in real life?
Incidentally, here's a recent article about how the economics of ambulances are broken in the US: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-american-ambulance-rides-are
If municipal emergency services in yout area don't cover ambulance rides, that subscription service might not be a bad idea.
We do have some degree of it, but it's more on the realistic side of performance. The remaining body has to handle them after all, so it's hard to enhance performance beyond human limits for real. Maybe with some more decades of development.
But we've also learned that we don't need to change the body itself, when we can just enhance the tools we use. Smartphones are already seen as some sort of half-step towards humans becoming cyborgs. Similar have we now Exoskeletons, which are probably more practical than replacing a full limb.
NIMBYs have managed to "safe" us from the architecture.
When society is affluent enough, people say it will become corrupt and fall apart. But when society has truly deteriorated, stories of heroes come to mind. If you look back at the era when cyberpunk social critiques emerged, the world that led that movement was wealthy, with a thick middle class. But when society starts to become poorer, those kinds of stories become stressful for the public. When you have room to breathe, such macro-level critiques serve as a 'healthy amount of stress' for survival. But when survival itself is at stake, it becomes much harder to be tolerant of criticism.
That's why the countries where cyberpunk flourished were wealthy ones
I’ve toyed around with this hypothesis about dark music and edgy culture.
The roaring 90s were full of this: dark music exploring critical themes or things like depression and addiction, lots of social criticism, and edgy offensive humor. The mid to late 90s were an economic boom time for a broader segment of people and were optimistic in a way that’s hard to explain today.
I like to put it this way: it’s not that things were all better in the 90s. They weren’t. But people thought they were getting better.
Now people don’t want those things. They want light entertainment, either no criticism (the right) or only approved types via approved critical theories (the left), and offensive edgy stuff is out and may get you cancelled (which side cancels you depends on the content).
It seems like we think alike. I feel like the dark and critical themes of the 90s were ahead of their time back then. A lot of what they predicted actually turned out to be accurate. The cultural media of the 90s said things like 'this is what will happen if wealth becomes concentrated or corporations take over'—and it's actually playing out in a similar way.
But as our society has become more stratified by wealth and the vast majority have become poorer, people no longer have the mental space to think deeply. They've come to love clear, simple answers. I interpret this as the world becoming too excessive. Because there's so much information that it's hard to even find meaningful content. Critical interpretation has also become difficult. Just look at AI. It's different today and different tomorrow, and for freelancers like me, it's like we have to deliver immediately.
There's material poverty, but I think mental poverty is more due to the pervasive FOMO, the fear of falling behind in the flood of information
As you said, it's 'only approved types via approved critical theories.' As people lose their margin for error, they also lose the capacity to consider others' perspectives.
I think you explained it better than I did.
You're right. I just got a 3 day ban on reddit for a dark (not explicitly dark) joke. People don't want to look at shadows nowadays.
I meant to write quite a long response to your comment, but let me just bring it down to a single question: How is your feeling different from melancholia?
There is and always will be mainstream, niche, the unknown and everything in between. There was always very little new material and a lot of works just gained recognition when their zeitgeist was long overdue, too. I think experimentation is hard, and it's even harder to justify experimentation in the evolving economic climate.
Genres are meant to be collapsed, or rather they should blend and dissolve into each other. The earlier (and good) seasons of The Simpsons are a poster child when it comes to "flattening and duplicating old material". Almost every episode cites a movie or work of literature, and there was nothing wrong with it! It's part of why I understand the 90s as a cultural era of citations, and I had to grow up with that sentiment. It took me quite some time to understand that we moved past it.
Nowadays, we are fortunate enough that a lot of things from the past 10 decades have been digitized and are readily available on demand. That's amazing! Nothing is stopping me from asking myself some naive questions, like "What makes a good drama?" or "If Die Hard is considered to be a Christmas movie, why isn't Falling Down considered to be a summer movie?". I think there is still stuff to explore.
I'll just leave this unfinished thought with a recommendation to a niche movie I discovered recently: Sleep Has Her House (2017)[0]
[0]: https://scottbarley.com/Sleep-Has-Her-House
Thanks for that recommendation. That looks just up my alley.
You may wish to give On the Silver Globe a watch.
imo a good contradiction makes for a good stroy if you know what i mean
I don’t watch many movies due to time but those I do watch tend to be odd, unusual, experimental, and sometimes polarizing.
A recent one I enjoyed was Rabbit Trap, a modern take on faerie lore. It was polarizing and got poor reviews.
Years ago I adored a two season series called Hellier. I have a hard time describing this. Ghost hunting show for thinking people? You have to suspend disbelief but it reminded me of Primer in terms of a lot achieved on little budget. If you want to see some hipsters try to use transcranial magnetic stimulation to talk to aliens this is for you.
I’ve enjoyed some horror for its tendency to subvert tropes: hero to villain, villain is really hero, everybody dies, etc.
But yeah. I can only watch blockbusters if I’m in a certain kind of mood where I want light entertainment with no thought.
I've noticed this as well and I'm rather concerned about it. Those cheap rip offs will ruin countless classics for her and it's really sad. I'm looking for the most boring stuff for her to watch just so she doesn't become fully jaded by age 18.
Side note: if you need new stories, I've found a lot of weird and fun stuff to read on Royal Road.
I abandoned movies too, 5 years ago or so. There's little space for "art" (whatever that might be) when you need to invest giant sums and expect a return. There's still some good movies coming out, I'm sure. But I don't have the time or energy anymore to dig for it like I did in the past.
I think you are right for movies and TV shows, but not for "comics, manga and graphic novels" and I'll add books as well. Since those are much cheaper and easier to produce than TV shows and movies, they can be created independently, without the need to optimize for earning tons of money. Indie literature and comics are very diverse in the storytelling.
But I acknowledged (and dread a bit) that the audiovisual storytelling is such a strong force that any discussion about storytelling, even when specifically talking about literature/comics storytelling, is dominated by audiovisual references. Any creative writing workshop/course that include sci fi and fantasy genres will inevitably mention Star Wars as example for whichever technique. The more literary ones will mention some Oscar winning movie, etc.
it’s been this way forever. the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00, etc… all had generic trash movies and music too.
stop getting recs from algorithms and the entire world will open back up to you. just like top40 music and generic movies from back in the day, you’re getting the lowest common denominator recs.
i read a book about the music industry in the 80s (it’s been a couple years and i can’t remember the name now) but people called the top40 music from back then formulaic. they were convinced record labels had formulas to make their pop music stars. what do you think algorithms are? they’re feeding you trash.
again, stop getting your recommendations from algorithms and the world will open back up. get your recs from actual film or music geeks. go to your local record store, look at their wall of employee recs, or *gasp* talk to them and ask them.
Yes, and it's always been hot in summer!
> go to your local record store, look at their wall of employee recs, or gasp talk to them and ask them.
What local record store?
What local cinema?
What local bookshop?
Congrats, if you're resistant to addictive algorithms and same-day delivery convenience, but it's ignorant to deny the new baseline.
I understand your point, but it's slightly exaggerated. At least in Europe, any decently-sized city will have at least one of any of those. Not as many as there used to be, sure, but at least one.
I live in a big city. There are a few record stores, but if we're being honest, let's also not exaggerate by calling them my local store. And if I would opt for the journey, it's not like I would find this cool group of music nerds sharing secret gems. Vinyl is an expensive hobby and everything else is digital now. It's not like every niche artist got the means to press vinyl and the presumed cozy record store will hardly point you to bandcamp. Bit silly to pretend it's anything like it used to be in "your local record store".
At least in Germany, book shops and (small) cinemas are artificially kept alive through regulations (e.g. Buchpreisbindung) and public funding. Theaters got that too, techno clubs not so much. Lucky are the ones who still got a nice deal on rent, because without a solid revenue, your new whatever local scene experiment won't be in the city. Then recently, conservative politicians also decided to attach ideological strings to the funding. What's a good book shop and what's a bad book shop gets intransparently decided by the domestic intelligence service now. The stories our times need will get you demonetized. As we speak, lobbyists are relentlessly trying to push the compliance machinery onto our devices, so we're not tempted by anything outside of commercial supervision either.
It's all converging towards the brave new mainstream. Pretending like all these trends are just fads is wilful ignorance. Media attention may come and go, but the insects remain dead, temperatures unprecedented and art compliant.
We are hardly in need of cyberpunk fiction anymore, tho.
I dunno, I've mostly lived in urban areas but I've always had record shops near to where I live. Sure, there are far less than there used to be, but the ones that made the cut appear to be on solid footing.
Indie bookshops have had a revival in the past decade, it's big box book retailers who are in trouble.
https://apnews.com/article/independent-bookstores-expanding-...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/19/independent...
Im in a US suburb and have a few places to buy records, books and to go to a movie. I don't think it's so unusual
i think (safe guess) a plurality of hn users live in cities with most or all of these types of businesses. unless you're somewhere very rural, exurban or suburban, you owe it to yourself to at least try to find these places (and even if you are, you might be surprised at what's nearby).
It's been never at this pace, nor in this quantity.
But it's always been at a faster pace and a higher quantity than whatever decade preceded it
Unfortunately that's how the system is. New material is risky and hollywood is not performing well financially
At least we have houses like A24 which brings interesting content
a24 was great, they’ve definitely slipped though. as soon as they won their first oscar they’ve been chasing money rather than quality.
their old catalog though, incredible. i’d say like 80+ percent of the movies they released were fucking amazing. but that has fallen dramatically.
neon is still going strong though!
a24 style really hits
Just don't get bored with life. If they live long enough, the wise man sees trends; the ebbs and flows of the zeitgeist.
Yeah, back in my day there were Elves, not Vulcans. There were Orcs , not Klingons.
While there’s a lot of slop out there that just exist to extract dollars, there are still some great movies being made every now and then. Don’t expect them to be the most popular high budget movies, you have to dig a little. The idea that there’s nothing new that’s worth watching though is clearly wrong and a typical bias that basically every person has to fight against as they age. You might even say it’s a cliche to think all new media is junk.
Might as well provide a method for good discoveries, as the current channels are extremely lifeless
The answer is high effort: find a group of people who share your taste.
[dead]
And yet. The other day I saw Dune described as this generation's LotR, which was that generation's Star Wars. Dune (and LotR, and SW) are all Hero's Journey stories (what isn't?), yet they're each pretty unique.
Granted, LotR and Dune were written in the 50's and 60's, respectively, with Star Wars following a decade later.
All I'm saying is that what is new depends on what generation you grow up in. And I suppose how much media you're exposed to. Speaking for myself, LotR was the second film I ever saw in the cinema so it was a whole new experience.
For the younger generations, these are old films, much like how idk, Spartacus and co was an old film for me.
tl;dr, the kids will be alright. Actually the kids also appreciate older media, there's a whole generation of late teenagers now rediscovering 2000's music / culture.
Dune isn’t a straight hero’s journey because Paul isn’t a hero, or at least is a tragic one. He’s not Luke Skywalker or Frodo.
I'd also argue in LotR only Frodo has an archetypal Hero's Journey, but the novel itself is almost (but not quite) an ensemble piece with many other important characters that are not necessarily embarked on a steretypical Hero's Journey (Aragorn, Legolas & Gimli, Merry & Pippin, Gandalf).
Sidestepping the Hero's Journey for a second (which Dune actually subverts, one of its key points being that heroes are bad for mankind), Villeneuve's Dune is nowhere near a massive pop culture phenomenon of its time like Star Wars and LotR were of theirs, respectively.
Coincidentally, there is a new Ghost in the Shell anime that's premiering now on Amazon Prime Video. It's animation style and mood are closely aligned with the original 1989 manga, which is to say it's more cartoonish and light-hearted. I prefer the more adult oriented content the franchise was putting out up until about 2006, but the new anime series gives me hope that we might eventually see a follow-up animation of Shirow Masamune's Man/Machine Interface - what was once considered to be Ghost in the Shell 2 before Mamuro Oshii created Innocence.
Personally I think I'm done with GitS at this point. How many times has it been rebooted, like a dozen times?
The last one I enjoyed watching was Arise but I lost track after that. I think the series has been done to death and I would love to see some completely new IP from Masamune that is more reflective of the AI and economic upheavals we are experiencing in the 20s.
I see every version as a remix of the original material, each done with their own take and philosophy. They're not remakes or reboots.
The only version that didn't add anything new was the Hollywood movie, which was an entertaining but shallow derivative of Oshii's animes and not based on the manga at all.
I think the original material provides enough ideas to continue spinning off new remixes. It hasn't even been outdated by the recent advancements in AI. Quite the opposite.
I don't think it will be animated any time soon due to Major not having much screen time, but if you haven't seen it, I would definitely recommend Human Algorithm[1] manga. It's a bit different art style than the original, more gritty and sterile, in a good way. For me personally that makes it a bit more cyberpunk feel. The first arc is a bit drag at a time but when all plot lines converge, the payoff is awesome.
[1]: https://kodansha.us/series/the-ghost-in-the-shell-the-human-...
The article author sure likes Ghost in the Shell. Almost every variant is listed. The article only covers comics, manga, and graphic novels, not anime. So Bubblegum Crisis, which is half cyberpunk and half music videos, isn't listed. Nor is Cowboy Bebop.
(The site is now intermittently down, with "429 Too many requests".)
You're probably not going to get it. And he has decent reasons for not wanting to bother.
The nature (infamy?) of his activities over the past few years should also be noted. (And maybe chuckled at if you have a bit of a dark sense of humor.)
For those who don't know, like me: he moved into adult manga, hentai-ish poster book work.
His popularity may have corrupted him...
https://appleseed.fandom.com/wiki/Shirow_Masamune
It's not corruption. He has stated that there were projects going on behind the scenes, but most of them got scrapped before reaching production.
The most recent manga he involved with was Ghost Urn, which explores the world of GitS from a different protagonist. He did not do the drawing, but did most of the worldbuilding and mecha design.
He's always been a very horny creator and the original Ghost In the Shell movie (in fairness not directed by him) has the female main character need to get nude to use her stealth ability while the men can leave their clothes on.
Whatever narrative you've invented of Shirow changing over time is a stretch.
If you've seen the original movie, other than nudity there is very little horny in it. No sex, no banter about sex, no erotica. The female body, even if well endowed, is depicted clinically and emotionless. There are no lecherous characters, nobody chasing girls, etc. No romance even, though the relationship between Motoko and Batou is somewhat ambiguous.
Shirow's manga is horny though, partly why I dislike it.
The movie starts with a bunch of female nudity during the credit sequence.
It's arty but there's no doubt it's done that way in part due to horniness.
Yes, I addressed this: Kusanagi appears naked often; the intro scene is definitely striking and somewhat of fan service. However, there's little sexy about this in the movie, the characters don't behave sexy, there are no lecherous moments, etc. In fact, sex is barely acknowledged at all. It's not a "horny" movie.
The manga is different.
I think the sexuality of Kusanagi works on multiple levels. She is a full cyborg, and she could present however she wishes. She explicitly uses her appearance toward social engineering ends in the Stand Alone Complex series. I’m not very familiar with the manga, from what I do remember, Kusanagi is bisexual and is likely “fully functional” sexually, but her body as depicted isn’t really her own, as she relies upon regular maintenance provided Section 9.
I view the portrayal of Kusanagi as being steeped in aspects of the male gaze in a metatextual way. Japanese society has a high emphasis on traditional beauty standards, and the artists depicting her as a character use her beauty as a foil against the audience, by contrasting her beauty with her strength, and by subverting the desires of the audience by drawing our attention to her humanity by alienation through destroying her body at multiple points in the series. Her desire to protect her comrades at the cost of her body shows us how she is willing to sacrifice her femininity, being forced to regress to a childlike body.
The series have a lot of fan service, but I believe that it’s intentional so that the audience is forced to confront their own biases and stereotypes about women and about cyborgs/robots. The cyborg nature of her body as it is destroyed reads to me as a visual metaphor for the Madonna/whore double standard women are subject to society.
I guess I don’t disagree with your view, so much as I think that how she is depicted works on multiple levels in-universe and with respect to the viewer, and said depictions serve multiple functions in the text.
In the movie Kusanagi isn't bisexual. No reference is made to her sexuality at all. One could argue her demeanor is completely asexual. The only human side we see of her is her wondering whether she's human at all.
Movie Kusanagi is her own thing, mostly unrelated to the manga or other adaptations.
A lot of mangaka have done that sort of thing, calling something normal in the industry "infamous" and "corrupting" seems overblown when Tatsuya Matsuki and Nobuhiro Watsuki are grooming children and collecting CP and every other mangaka seems to be shitposting racism.
I called it infamous not because I have a particular problem with it, but because of the way it's characterized by (Western, at least) fans. They snicker at and make jokes about the scenarios he apparently employs. (Admittedly, it doesn't sound like my thing, and I haven't looked too deeply into the material. It could very well be that I'm getting trolled.)
I agree that you can find genuinely disturbing things in the manga world and that Masamune's work is relatively benign (though some of his depictions of less-developed adult women might upset some). In general, I find the idea of commercialized erotica amusing, especially when coming from sources with more mainstream claims-to-fame. In these cases, I don't attach a connotation of moral bankruptcy or anything like that to the idea of them being "infamous", though maybe that's just me using the word wrong. I intend it more in the sense of, "Hahah, oh wow, THAT guy did THAT? That's crazy." Kind of like when we found out about Tezuka's softcore furry/snakewomen doodles.
Most of the new series have nothing to do with the original one, and are original stories.
good adaptations of GitS:
- the first Oshii movie
- the two seasons of SAC + SSS
- this new one*
*so far
I have decided this mention of Mamoru Oshii is a good enough excuse to recommend STEVEM's continuing retrospective series on his life and work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shxS5YpyK04&list=PLyhSewr7ii...
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Fans of Shirow will probably lynch me, but I didn't like the manga all that much. Not even the art style, which the new animé seems to replicate.
To me, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 GitS is THE version, because I'm seldom in the mood for slapstick and I much prefer the introspective mood of the movie, and its cinematic visuals. And the music!
I haven't liked any other adaptations since. To me, the movie is almost perfect. I didn't like Innocence much though.
I liked Innocence for the overwhelm-of-ideas. I will say outright that 'i don't entirely get it' but I very much like that it exists and I rewatch it every couple of years to just sit under the waterfall of concepts, no matter how pretentious it all may be.
That's valid!
I just can't get over how pretentious it is, and also I miss Motoko in it. I mean, the first movie (1995) also toyed with pretentiousness, but this was miraculously curtailed before it had a chance to bog the whole movie down [1], and its awesome mood, soundtrack -- much like with Blade Runner, another favorite of mine, I find it hard to separate the movie from its awesome soundtrack -- and visuals overpowered everything else. Motoko questioning if she was human, and what it mean to be human, it all worked for me. Maybe if she had spent the whole movie doing this, without any payoff, I'd like it less.
Innocence has great visuals too, I'll grant you this!
[1] mostly because the movie ends :D
I really like the art direction of the new GitS adaptation (I hope this retro style gets used more), but yeah it's completely different in tone from the '95 adaptation and most of what followed.
I've enjoyed it so far.
The website for the new series;
https://www.theghostintheshell-anime.jp/
> style and mood are closely aligned with the original 1989 manga, which is to say it's more cartoonish and light-hearted
Did you get your manga the same place they sell the 15 minute long Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260712230824/https://shellzine...
also go read my comic about a robot lady with reality issues, http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/, it's got cover quotes from three people with seven Hugos between them.
Wow, that looks amazing, well done, and thanks for sharing!
Thanks <3
It might be skirting the edges of what is considered cyberpunk since it has Mecha elements but Patlabor is a fantastic manga/series that should have been included in this list [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patlabor:_The_Movie
It is especially strange not to see it in the list given GiTS is heavily featured (according to the comments, I can't access the page or web archive ATM).
Patlabor movie 2 was directed by the same director as the original 1995 GiTS animation movie. Both patlabor 1 / 2 have similar themes to GiTS, and are heavily cyber punk in themes and esthetics.
if for some reason you, random reader of this comment, decide to start watching Patlabor, be aware that there are two continuities:
1. Patlabor The Early Days (88-89, 7 OVA) -> Patlabor (89, Movie) -> Patlabor 2 (93, movie)
2. Patlabor The TV Series (89-90, 47 eps) -> Patlabor The New Files (90-92, 16 eps) -> Patlabor EZY (26-27, 3 movies)
Patlabor is left out of most lists.
The new one (EZY) is amazing if you haven't seen it.
This is a bit of an idiosyncratic list. Two of my favorite additions from my own youth: Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow and Batman: Digital Justice. The latter now reads like a bit of a corny cash grab for the early '90s cyber fad, but I still love the time capsule of some if its art.
It took me twice as long to read Hard Boiled as it should since I spent so much time looking at Geof Darrow’s intricately detailed art. Great story, but the illustrations are on another level.
Also Frank Miller's Ronin has some amazing detailed full page artwork panels.
It's not that idiosyncratic a list, those were the first two graphic novels that came to my mind when opening up the website. Geoff Darrow's art Hardboiled is incredible. I was a huge batman fan as a young teen and digital justice came out at peak Batman hype, and it was much hyped itself, but it wasn't very good.
Batman Beyond is also technically cyberpunk although it has more of a Y2K vibe rather than the retro 80s / early 90s aesthetic.
In Italy (and sometimes abroad, I recall dark horse translated it in English at some point) Nathan Never has been publishing as a monthly comic for a few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Never
Not all stories are cyberpunk, but many are.
Some are great.
Parlare di Nathan Never su Hacker News, siamo davvero al top.
Anche Lazarus Ledd (uno dei bonellidi più famosi) ha un certo numero di storie cyberpunk, alcune delle quali molto carine.
A recent (2023) finding: from Guillaume Singelin, Frontier [0]. Fitting it into "cyberpunk" may need a bit of a push, but since the limits are kind of blurry I don't really care. The narrative is not perfect perhaps falling into wanting to say a lot more than the page limit allows, but all in all it's a good enough read.
[0] https://www.magnetic-press.com/frontier/
I'm vouching for Frontier as well, as well as "Carbon & Silicon" [0] from Mathieu Bablet. All of his work is gorgeous, I love his art.
If you liked Frontier's theme and are into video games I recommend you check out "Citizen Sleeper" [1] illustrated by Guillaume Singelin as well.
It's a 7 hour narrative text-based adventure that really hooked me one week-end. Your choices depend on how you "spend" your dice, dice that are cast at the beginning of every single day on the station so you get to pre-plan your actions somewhat.
Gameplay wise it's mostly reading, but I liked exploring the station they created.
[0] https://www.magnetic-press.com/carbon-and-silicon/
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1578650/Citizen_Sleeper/
I wonder if Pluto by Naoki Urasawa would be considered Cyberpunk? Even if it isn't, it's a must read.
There is also Pluto anime on Netflix
That was a pretty great show. Recommended.
Don't let that stop you from reading the Manga.
I wasn't even aware there were Blade Runner comics, that's awesome.
Anime counterpart to this article: https://shellzine.net/cyberpunk-anime/
No Judge Dredd (which dates back to 1977) or anything else from 2000 AD?
I did a pandemic project of reading Dredd from the start for as long as I could. I made it through about 25 case files volumes, which took me from 1977 to the late 90s (I think).
Is Judge Dredd cyberpunk? I don't care. It's an incredible run of comics, that touches on many of the same themes as cyberpunk.
There are many people involved in Dredd over the years, but I do think John Wagner has had the rare opportunity among work for hire creators to shepherd a fictional universe over decades of real and in universe time.
Is Dredd considered cyberpunk? I know the definition is fluid but I wouldn't think so.
OTOH, robocop is ok on the list, so probably it should be there too.
Judge Dredd is mentioned in there lost of cyberpunk movies.
Blame!'s manga style is the most unique and it created unforgettable atmosphere not replicated from what I know.
Cyberpunk seems less charming now that we actually do live in a techno-feudalist dystopia.
I am somewhat surprised not to find any Jodorowsky in there.
Maybe the incal world doesnt really qualify as punk and more like regular scifi or perhaps bordeline new-agey, but it doesn’t strike me as fundamentally different from Akira in story style.
I remember collecting original Shatter when it came out. The big novelty was that it was 100% created on a computer. Pixels and all in the output.
The article should add the excellent Marvel Graphic Novel adaptation of Neuromancer:
https://archive.org/details/william-gibson-s-neuromancer-vol...
It was a shame it never finished covering the entirety of the first novel.
What's the current status of color e readers?
In particular: is anyone personally using a color eink device that's as practical for .cbr files as kindle is for regular ebooks?
I guess no answer is also some answer.
If someone is interested in a rare gem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_(comic_book)
It is by the same illustrator as Thorgal, Grzegorz Rosiński.
(PS. in Rosiński's home land, Poland, those comics have been know under the name "Yans" because Hans was too German for that time)
The one I'd highlight from the list is Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World, it's my favorite manga. It's beautifully drawn and incredibly grounded in tone and oddly relevant.
The overarching story is about a pandemic that starts as a backdrop and becomes more important and metaphysical and religious as the story goes on but the core of it revolves around crime bosses in Latin America, the lives of prostitutes, a Uyghur rebellion in Xinjiang, political conflict and organized crime all done in a very real way. It's completely devoid of any (manga) tropes or genre aesthetics.
I gotta resume GANTZ
GANTZ more like scifi in a city setting
It's interesting to me that most cyberpunk manga isn't Japanese cyberpunk.
Worth noting that Cyberpunk as a genre was at least intended to be a dystopia.
The thing about dystopia is that it's never a dystopia for everyone.
One of the better moral philosophic suggestions I’ve heard: “imagine you don’t know who you will be in the world you are trying to create.”
I've honestly not ever considered Ghost in the shell to be under the cyberpunk genre. It's too clean and the characters too ingrained in the working of the system. And the system "works", it's not a sanitised depiction, gits society feels much like our own with a detailed techno-realism it's a society still at the transitional point to something more radical; exemplified by humans still doing very manual things - take for example that classic scene from the 1995 film, where the man uses multiple fingers to extremely fast into a terminal, this would seem impressive but pales in comparison to a direct cyberbrain connection, they still have terminals because this is a world still in transition. Another of my favourite but less known scenes is this scene from gitsac: https://paul.kishimoto.name/2017/01/barcodes/
But the point about the multi-finger fingers -xD- was not about transitional technology, but about explicitly avoiding direct brain connection as an additional layer of security.
Appleseed missing! But maybe it's more solarpunk?
Funny for some reason the submission title summoned this manga in my mind even though I've never read it only a free chapter in a magazine I was obsessed with.
Nothing by Adam Warren? He took the Dirty Pair comics somewhere very cyberpunk in the last three volumes.
Everything is a clown. There is no more serious deep content out there. If there is, it's incredibly difficult to find.
Anyone have recommendations for cyberpunk enthusiasts who love William Gibson?
I can’t believe they cancelled the tv show :(
What TV show are you talking about?
I'm assuming The Peripheral.
Great show, agree with the intense disappointment of it's cancellation.
Their separate lists of movies, shows, and games are also worth a peruse.
A few things to add to my ever-growing list.
Ghost Rider 2099 is sadly missing from this list
Rich Veitch, he and Alan Moore. As Moore would later write:
I thought battle angle alita could be cyberpunk
It is on the list, as Gunnm.
The series is still ongoing as well.
You’re missing the Incal and Metabarons
No mention of Lone Wolf 2100.
as someone who loves Astro Boy (and everything else Tezuka made): Atom The Beginning was a disappointment. But I also believe that Pluto sucks too (some smaller stories, like the pianist, were great).
The Ghost In The Shell: Global Neural Network features one story by LRNZ. His work Geist Maschine (in italian only) is amazing.
Among the Cyberpunk 2077 comics, Big City Dreams is also very good.
It's interesting how genre coding have become much more enforced these years. Back in the early 2010s we would call most of these just "sci-fi", because the influence and aesthetics of cyberpunk has already bled into the wider genre that you'd be more hard pressed to find a story without some influence on it.
But despite the author's veneration of 90s and 2000s, I'd argue the works from the late 2000s and early 2010s are just as sophisticated and arguably more relevant to our modern world; Project Itoh (Genocidal Organ, Harmony), Gatchaman Crowds, Beatless, alot of their themes were prescient; Because the frontier isn't hardware, it's ontology and semantics.
I think the list could include Transmetropolitan.
It is an excellent comic. It’s a pity bowel disrupters aren’t real, they would certainly keep scrum from running over time.
... it does?
Oops, yes it does. Scanned too quickly.