Cyberpunk
Description
Yan:
"cyberpunk, which is an imagination of how a society controlled by computer and internet technologies will look like from the vantage point of science fiction writers of the 1980s. Its protagonists were anti-heroes and its irreverent aesthetics were inspired by the punk music scene that was also coming into its own around the same time. The originators of cyberpunk extrapolated the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years into a dystopian view of the future, where mega-corporations were more powerful than governments, cities were alienating concrete sprawls where an impoverished majority survived by hustling in a gig economy, and shallow virtual pleasures stand-in for the emptiness that pervade people’s lives. If you think that sounds like our actual present, then you are quite right.
One important vibe that cyberpunk was able to convey was how technology succumbs to the flaws in society, instead of technology allowing us to overcome society’s flaws. In Star Trek’s classic science fiction universe, we have been able to harness technology to eliminate hunger, cure diseases, and overcome petty political squabbles. In cyberpunk worlds like those of Blade Runner, however, the rich still oppress the poor out of pettiness and greed. Technology only changes the means of oppression. The downtrodden are also masters of technology in their own way—tinkering with it to rebel, resist, and persist in an unforgiving world, which of course, is punk as f**k."
(https://livingwithshoggoths.substack.com/p/we-have-always-been-seapunks)
Typology
Subgenres, by Yan:
"It is that part of cyberpunk—the idea that social forces subsume technology, and that the addition of technology causes more continuity than change—that spawned dozens of “-punk” subgenres of speculative fiction.
There’s
- steampunk, which reimagines Victorian worlds with automatons and flying machines;
- silkpunk, which blends an East Asian aesthetic and a decolonial ethos; there’s
- dieselpunk, which is like steampunk but set in the 1920s-1940s replete with fascism as a backdrop;
- decopunk, a shiner,
- art-deco dieselpunk;
- biopunk, a riff on cyberpunk with more emphasis on biotechnology,
and a whole bunch of others. And then there’s solarpunk, which, unlike the rest of them, did not come first in the form of works of fiction, but rather as an invitation to imagine."
(https://livingwithshoggoths.substack.com/p/we-have-always-been-seapunks)