What are the important works of cyberpunk besides Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Blade Runner, and the Matrix?

Mostly mangas:

Akira
Gunnm (or battle angel alita)
AD Police
Transmetropolitan
Lazarus Churchyard

Dark City. (Knowing why this is cyberpunk is knowing what cyberpunk is beyond the ascetic)
A Scanner Darkly (kinda proto cyberpunk, like much of pk dick's works)
Johnny Pneumonic (hilariously terrible, but very cyberpunk)

all the rest of william gibson's books

>Because the Laughing Man certainly isn't.

first of all, the laughing man is ONLY in SAC. And even then the real main characters are government officials.

Second of all, the Laughing Man is literally a parody of traditional cyberpunk protagonists, and part of the discussion at the end of the first series, about liminality etc... is also about how cyberpunk was a liminal sub-genre laying the groundwork for post-cyberpunk things like SAC or psycho-pass, but is also about the teenage liminality of the sort of punkiness the laughing man and salinger's Catcher in the Rye, as even the laughing man couldn't have done anything unless the truly anonymous, presumably a state official, had leaked the existence of the list that started the laughing man off on his stand alone complex, nor would anything really have happened with it if Section 9 hadn't worked both through and outside the governmental system towards the end of the series.

Thus the true standalone complex at the heart of the series is the sense of justice of all the characters who work to uncover and defeat the conspiracy at the heart of the complex episodes.

Whereas in a straight cyberpunk story the laughing man would have been the main character and section 9 would have died nobly midway through the series or been his main enemy.

>Johnny Pneumonic
The Bollywood ripoff of Johnny Mnemonic, where everything is powered by compressed air.

>watched GitS
>enjoyed it
>everyone discusses its themes and deeper meaning
>I didn't understand any of it

Tyger Tyger (AKA The Stars My Destination) is another proto-cyberpunk, it's got all the themes of cyberpunk and general attitude, but with psionics and ubiquitous psychic and teleporting powers and far more retro space and robots elements instead of the "cyber".

Ehhhhh...

Now I want this to exist.
But could it possibly be more silly than the original?

>the characters are fully integrated members of society

>first of all, the laughing man is ONLY in SAC.

Oh and I guess the Major's alienization about being a full body cyborg aren't really cyberpunky themes.

>unless the truly anonymous, presumably a state official, had leaked the existence of the list that started the laughing man off on his stand alone complex

I bet a fucking dragon was behind it all.

>Whereas in a straight cyberpunk story

Ok, so it's not a "straight", "vanilla", "standard", "old and tired", "unoriginal", "typical", "been there done that", flavor of cyberpunk that we all know and love and cuddle up with at the end of the night. You got me.

>and part of the discussion at the end of the first series, about liminality etc... is also about how cyberpunk was a liminal sub-genre laying the groundwork for post-cyberpunk things

Holy shit dude, have you ever listened to yourself?

I had that same shit with Akira.

A lot of people want it to have some sort of deep meaning, and maybe the manga really dives into it all, but the anime is just eye-candy and action scenes with a freaky psychic kid.

Ghost in the Shell the Movie and Stand Alone Complex are cyberpunk from the perspective of The Man, dealing with terrorism and politics.

Ghost in the Shell manga is a weird thing that goes into mysticism and souls and transhumanism.

Movies:
>Batman Beyond
>Escape From New York
>Dredd
>Blade Runner (Final Cut)
>Freejack
>Sleep Dealer
>Cyber City Odeo
>Paris 2054: Renaissanc

Books
>Idoru
>Neuromancer
>Island in the Net
>Mona Lisa Overdrive
>Mirrorshades (cyberpunk shortstory anthology)

akira was great until the blue kids showed up.
fucked that movie right up

There aren't any themes or deeper meaning, people just pretend there are to make themselves feel smart.

>Neuromancer, Snow Crash,

Did anybody else not like Snow Crash as much as they thought they would? Like I loved the first part with the Cosa Nostra Pizza shit and the world building, but the rest of it just kinda lost me as time went on.

Gunhed, Hardware, Death Powder, Tetsuo: The Iron Man are great movies if you like the cyberpunk genre

I'd really recommend the manga overall. The movie only covered the first part, and the writing doesn't shine as it does later on. Definitely a cyberpunk work, with emphasis on the punk.

The movie gets too much praise IMO. It's a great movie, but it loses a lot of the meaning and character development the manga has because it squishes the entire series into a single movie.

Robocop and Totall Recall. At least for tone.

Seconding the manga. I read it before seeing the movie and other than the visuals was a bit disappointed. It skips a segment of the story that contains a lot of the substance

I also felt it lost steam as it went on but it had several memorable parts later on in the book that I absolutely loved, such as "no boat."

Transmetropolitan isn't a chink comic.

Also the film New Jack City.

Burning Chrome.

Everything by William Gibson really.
Most of Bruce Sterling's work.

Is Charles Stross not considered cyberpunk or something? Maybe not essential I suppose, but I highly recommend Accelerando (available for free online) as well as Halting State and its sequel, Rule 34

It doesn't really matter if it's post/pre/cyberpunk. It's still a really influential cyberpunk work.
Beowulf isn't fantasy, strictly speaking, but it's influence on fantasy can't be denied.

The really good thing about GitS, particularly the first (and best) movie, is that it works as a action movie even if you don't get any of the themes and ideas it tries to convey.
It's one of the most unpretentious somewhat-philosopical movies out there.

The ending's fucking weird, though.

That pdf's missing Johnny Mnemonic from the start.

is it the one where an artificial intelligence gains self awareness. then believing to be a living person search for refuge. only to get to motoko ans ask to fuck her because now i am alive and as a living thing i must reproduce then die. so the AI and motoko connect to each other, cyberfuck then the AI gets shot. and a new Motoko 2.0 gets born. because apparently cyberreproduction means 2 beings becoming one. or at least that is my shitty interpretation.

Something like that. And then the second movie has hundreds of copies of her strewn throughout cyberspace for some reason, apparently.

SAC is best GitS.

>cyber mulatto samurai

Truly dystopian.

Dominion - Tank Police

Conflict One's damn good too.

I guess.
Maybe it would be fun to show the movie to some of my more "normal" friends, just to see what they think about it.

It's not really THAT strange. You could probably just see it and think the Major gets shot and ends up in a new body and just kind of gloss over the rest.

More or less. Post-humanism, specifically post-human reprduction and sexuality, is a major theme in the movie.

Nah. SaC is fun, and I like it a lot, but the first movie is peak-GitS.

No mention of Deus Ex or EYE?

Doose Eggs was mentioned up top, you're the first for EYE

I actually found the first movie to be quite boring, really.

How influential is EYE, anyway?

Probably not, but it has a cult following that may influence future cyberpunk works.

Is Stainless Steel Rat cyberpunk?

Beneath a Steel Sky

No mention of When Gravity Fails?

gravity falls does have a lot of outlandish technology, but it's not really cyber, it takes place in the 21st century and the future tech isnt influential to the people, nor is it punk as most people maintain 21st century values as well

>a lot of outlandish technology
I've only read the first one - the only cool tech I recall was the moddies/daddies, and they seemed pretty in-keeping

oh crap, i read that as gravity falls, and thought you called it "fails" because you hate it

Nah man, When Gravity Fails is pretty good book - kinda low on the tech, but the characters are good.

'ave a link
fiction2.com/when-gravity-fails-online-george-alec-effinger

youtube.com/watch?v=qoqQnR8NOVI

How many here are old enough to actually have played it back then?

>back then?
Not me, I just play it on ScummVM.

I feel old now. Thank you.

It's 22 years old man, it's been drinking for at least a year.

No. They're just sci-fi with a con artist main character.

Well, not Gibson's newer stuff. He's moved beyond cyberpunk because his whole cyberpunk premise was that ,eventually, a world would form inside cyberspace. But instead, cyberspace has moved into the world with ubiquitous computing and Augmented Reality.

We are just getting there. Only now we are getting the first models for consumer VR.

Shadowrun Core 1E

>having such a narrow definition of cyberpunk
lay off, faglichen

Half-Black, Half...was it Japanese or Korean? I can't remember precisely.

But he was Blasian (or whatever the term is). Black American military father, Asian somethingsomething mother.

I wouldn't call it a deeper meaning but the movie does get some pretty solid imagery and themes going. It parallels adolescence and Japanese society. It's all about a painful but inevitable transformation. The only problem is that since it only roughly covers the first two or so books of the series it never gets around driving home what the point of it all was.

But seriously, there are more points on the scale than "2deep4u" and "just fun." Akira has a simple, fairly straightforward theme that gives the kick-ass action structure.

>Did anybody else not like Snow Crash as much as they thought they would?

Oh man, me by a fucking mile.

I picked it up and got as far as "This badass is a pizza delivery boy" and put it down. That was fucking terrible.

After I learned to accept the whole thing as satire, and the mere existence of YT is one giant FUCK YOU to every adolescent, then I could at lest stomach the writing style.

>Like I loved the first part with the Cosa Nostra Pizza shit

That part was ludicrously over the top.

>the world building,

It was alright. Exposition and world-building in a novel is pretty shit, but you've got to introduce readers somehow.

>but the rest of it just kinda lost me as time went on.

Yeah, the Ur-language and ancient civ crap was extra bullshitty. The vain attempt at religious overtones was ham-handed. The ending sucked balls.

I read it as a "classic". Like a high school assignment you have to force yourself to read.

I got you covered here

Jap.

His father was nuked twice or something. Pointless historical-event drop.

>terminator
What are you on?

so they've just taken cyberpunk and replaced it with steampunk

Honestly that sounds more like Brazil - which is probably closest to dieselpunk, but really is it's own thing.

>learned to accept the whole thing as satire
You didn't realise from the get-go?

Ok, going waaay back in this topic - what are good/important works of cyberpunk, when by cyberpunk I mean classic as fuck action stories from Cyberpunk2020 or Shadowrun but without magic (which pretty much makes it C2020...)

You know, typical cybered up outlaws, a megapolis, permanent night so we can see the neons in the rain, megacorps doing terrible things, this kinda vanilla thing.

I am fairly new to the whole Cyberpunk thing (thou I knew what it was since like 13 yers), trying to catch up.

Surprised no one has mentioned Shockwave Rider yet, generally considered the first Cyberpunk novel.

Also Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams doesn't get a enough love. Probably over shadowed by Neuromancer that came out at the same time. If you've ever played a rigger Hardwired is the source for all that.

Remember, we had an Internet outage a week ago because some IoT developers forgot to ICE their webcams.

No, Johnny Pneumonic is about respiratory diseases. You're thinking of Johnny Pneumatic.

Tiger! Tiger!

The main character was named Hiro Protagonist. No shit its satire.

I had that exact conversation with a friend

>Cosa Nostra Express Pizza Delivery

Shit's funny

youtube.com/watch?v=dwBXPsetOHM

Cyber City Oedo 808 owns.

Mein niggah.

>The Shockwave Rider
>Stand on Zanzibar
>The Glass Hammer
>Dr Adder
>Synners
>The Girl Who Was Plugged In
>Vacuum Flowers
>Tea From An Empty Cup
>Hardwired
>The Artificial Kid
>Schismatrix
>The Space Merchants

>cyberpunk and replaced it with steampunk
Not gonna lie: the idea of a consciousness implanted in a giant steam-driven analog supercomputer is pretty goddamn cool.

all this because I couldn't remember what the silent letter was in a title of a fairly obscure b movie.

Joys of the internet.

It's also a short story - which is much better

I'm sure it is.

I do find it kinda funny that the one thing I mentioned that no one commented on was saying that Dark City is cyberpunk.

While I didn't come up with the idea, I do find that talking about why Dark City is and isn't cyberpunk does a lot to get at the heart of cyberpunk.

Dude, have you watched the original GiTS movie? It ends with the Major rejecting her place in society by merging with the puppet-master and letting her old self "die".

So he's literally a rape baby.

rt.com/news/344560-marine-rape-okinawa-confession/

Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy.

It has lots of biopunk elements and predicted memes leaking into reality years before it started to actually happen.

I'm doing this in my game. In a world where steampunk drove the Victorian era (As usual of course)

Wilhelm II, as part of his effort to catapult Germany to the top of the world stage. has implanted his consciousness into this giant analog computer, and his orders are relayed by pneumatic tubes. (Although few know that the huge mechanism, whirling gears and hissing pipes that fill up most of the stadtschloss IS the emperor now, including one of the players who figured it out.) Everyone just think he's retired to Sanssouci after the daily telegraph affair.

The players are currently trying to set up their own colonial empire out of Dar Es Salam and want their own computer tu "do the boring stuff".

Children of Men is low-key cyberpunk. Also considering when it was made it is becoming scarily more and more accurate.

I'd have the gall to invoke System Shock.

The protagonist is the archetypal hacker, the villain is a corporate project gone amok, and the player has to keep upgrading their augs and equipment while sneaking and fighting about to survive the Hell of their own creation.

You can argue if you want, but who are you to defy the will of a a perfect, immortal machine?

Cyber City Oedo 808
Megazone 23 (maybe)
The Big O (maybe)
The Bubblegum Crisis series

Hey, does CP2020 have any rules for what happens if somebody turns off the computer or deck while you're jacked in?

Most people are too dense to catch that the entire fucking genre is satire.

After seeing this, and having enjoyed Blindsight, I ended up just sitting down and reading the first book.
Holy crap, do things continue to escalate at that pace?

Blinds light, a story ruined by science for me.
Not very well proven science, but the article was well written and presented a good point.

[Spoiler] basically it argues that reciprocal thinking, which is necessary for constructing advanced mathematics, leads self consciousness. So basically the primary premise of Blindsight is false [/spoiler]

>the characters are fully integrated members of society performing a role that society more or less accepts as necessary.
Not really. They remind you constantly that their "Section" is a front paid for with a lifetime's worth of favors and secrets.
Society doesn't know what they are or do, but those who try to find out only get as far as their front.

Jesus fucking christ dude, is Cyberpunk old ass anime-exclusive genre?