Over at cyberpunkreview.com there is a great article on the perhaps fallacious distinction of ‘post-cyberpunk’ :
Post-Cyberpunk? Why not Cyberpunk 2.0!
Genre definitions are only settled retrospectively, we may wait a hundred years before critics proclaim that they have post-modernism and it’s successor all worked out. Perhaps one of the problems with living in a so-called post-modern age is the utter resistance of clear genre boundaries and categories.
I think the term post-cyberpunk may be meaningless but it has been important in drawing attention to the evolution of the genre. Almost the entirety of 50’s Sci-Fi failed to predict the internet and the CP of the late 70’s & 80’s was revolutionary in re-imagining a vision of the future based on present trends.
But of course, as the present trends change so do the imaginings. The problem with being so close to the decade of emergent CP is that we are desperate to move beyond it’s highly stylized 80’s imagery, even the term ‘cyberpunk’ somehow sounds outdated. But in doing so we risk destroying the very distinction this genre affords.
The future didn’t turn out as bleak as we thought? Maybe. Alienation and isolation are gone, heroes are those who uphold the status-quo? No bloody way. I think the world is just a little more complex than the perhaps simplistic imagery of CP. It is cleaner and more efficient at hiding the horror.
I think those critics who want to dismiss the dystopian themes of CP as hackneyed and clichéd are the one’s unwilling or incapable of seeing the darker trends of current society, they believe the hype about living in some 50’s style golden age of technological endeavor.
I think the challenge for the genre is to tackle it’s themes in a way that engages a new generation that is dismissive of the cold-war dystopia / post-apocalyptic scenarios. It needs to accumulate credibility in its vision of the future as being one extrapolated from ‘present’ society not yester-year.
It is a dangerous task, by the mere fact that we are not all drug-addicts existing in a meaningless consensual hallucination, present existence seems like paradise by comparison. But a victory over the worst-case scenario is hardly a victory at all.
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