What is some Veeky Forums approved cyberpunk? I am totally new to this genre, but intrigued by the aesthetic

Altered Carbon pretty good but still genre fiction. As far as I've read there is no cyberpunk Veeky Forums that's of exemplary caliber. Best is PKD and even then that's not realllyyy cyberpunk. Gibson of course too

OP here, I've never even seen Blade Runner.

Thanks for your trash opinion, pal.

youtu.be/rVarn-m7o9k?t=42s

if you're interested in the 'aesthetic' of cyberpunk, then watch bladerunner. Why even bother making a thread about cyberpunk if you haven't seen all the normie shit yet?

You just Blade Runner wasn't cyberpunk.

Besides, I'm more interested in the books than I am the films. Hence why I didn't make this thread on /tv/.

You just said*

I see it's popular to hate Blade Runner now.
Sure must be tough to be a hip 16 year old nowadays. :^)

I'm Australian. I don't have the bandwidth to watch that. If you can provide a transcription I'll read that though. Is the guy who found an audience through the herculean feat of pointing out that Mass Effect 3 was shit really an authority on movies too though? How fantastic can he be?

I don't hate it. The problem is that it's not cyberpunk but it's the first thing that comes to mind when most people hear the word. This makes discussions hard. Also Blade Runner's contemporaries were often much better but aren't remembered because they didn't have meme-lighting. That doesn't seem fair to me.

I bet you think The Thing is a masterpiece too.

Don't listen to him, he's just a hipster douche.

BR fits in with the cyberpunk aesthetic and themes but simply came shortly before the literary movement that called itself cyberpunk.

>Blade Runner isn't cyberpunk, it's a mediocre neo-noir movie which only remains popular for the visuals

Cyberpunk is neo-noir though

The aesthetic can be pretty much whatever the hell you want it to be. What makes cyberpunk cyberpunk is the 'punk' element, which I think Blade Runner seriously lacks. I really like Ridley Scott but he's a studio director and he was working with a wonky and uncertain script. There's nothing subversive, formalist or radical about Blade Runner. It's a neo-noir hitman movie only some of the characters are robot men, which doesn't really end up mattering in the end anyway beyond a couple of cryptic lines that don't really mean anything.

well all right then, everything's settled

middle brow art has value nonetheless.

Try the Hyperion Cantos, pretty neat sci-fi

Thomas Pynchon and Bill Burroughs are as good as cyberpunk lit gets and they're not even consciously cyberpunk.

The Soft Machine and Gravity's Rainbow in particular

I'm not going to spend half an hour to summarize the video only so you can brush it of with another ignorant comment.

If you think BR doesn't contain most of the major cyberpunk themes you clearly don't know what cyberpunk is about and understood the movie only on the surface level completely ignoring everything from it's exploration of unequal power relationships, allusions to post-colonialism and themes of personal isolation through the overreliance on technology. All of which is also central to Neuromancer.

people here seem to hate it, but i'm enjoying snow crash. i'm also gonna recommend burroughs' nova trilogy.

>It's a neo-noir hitman movie only some of the characters are robot men, which doesn't really end up mattering in the end anyway beyond a couple of cryptic lines that don't really mean anything.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_in_Blade_Runner

literally what about blade runner isn't pure 'high tech, low life' cyberpunk?

I'm trying to see it but I don't.

>exploration of unequal power relationships
ehhhh, Roy is big and pushes people around physically, Deckard has a gun and shoots people.
>post-colonialism
People who go into space get to see C-Beams but people on Earth get nice stuff and aren't robot-slaves.
>isolation through technology
all neo-noir protagonists are isolated. Just because Deckard owns a computer that doesn't mean it's why he's alone.

I'm reading this page but it's making me more unimpressed if anything.

There's more to it than that. By that definition Star Wars: Rogue One is cyberpunk.

Hyperion Cantos is not even *close* to being Cyberpunk, user, did you even read the OP?

Thanks for confirming that you're just a doofus.

Roy is an artificial human created for the sole purpose of being a slave with a limited lifespan.
Rachel is sent away from a discussion about herself when it is revealed she is an android.

The androids are an allegory for colonial slaves. Natives who have no rights in their own country.

The reason Roy tells Deckard some gibberish lines is so he is not forgotten after dying. It is not important what he says, it is important that someone remembers him as a living being and not a thing.

You haven't even noticed how androids are not allowed on earth and that being stuck on earth is generally considered pretty bad and everyone wealthy enough should book a shuttle to the offworld colonies since earth is such a terrible place.

Isolation in BR doesn't come from Deckard owning a computer. People have sex-adroids, personal slaves, they own artifical animals because the real ones have been made extinct.
It's an artificial world for humans that surround themselves with things, not people. And if the things develop human emotions they are being disposed off like a broken tool.

Maybe you should think a little more before talking shit about something.

>The androids are an allegory for colonial slaves. Natives who have no rights in their own country.
wew

>The reason Roy tells Deckard some gibberish lines is so he is not forgotten after dying. It is not important what he says, it is important that someone remembers him as a living being and not a thing.
deep

>Androids don't go to earth and earth is shit anyway
deeper

>people have stuff but still feel bad
deepest

You're not really improving on your initial dumbass statement of "hurr, it's a hitman movie with robots". You're only making yourself look dumber.

OP here, sounds like Neuromancer is the way to go. I'll check it out first. Thank you all for the suggestions.

It's a hitman movie with robots AND the robots want to be considered people

>Hyperion Cantos is not even *close* to being Cyberpunk, user, did you even read the OP?

>BB lived alone in a cheap apartment at the base of a cheap tower in a cheap TC 2 neighborhood. But there was nothing cheap about the hardware that filled most of the space in the four-room flat. Most of BB’s salary for the past standard decade had gone into state-of-the-art cyberpuke toys. I started by saying that we wanted him to do something illegal. BB said that, as a public employee, he couldn’t consider such a thing. He asked what the thing was. Johnny began to explain. BB leaned forward and I saw the old cyberpuke gleam in his eyes from our college days. I half expected him to try to dissect Johnny right there just to see how a cybrid worked. Then Johnny got to the interesting part and BB’s gleam turned into a sort of green glow. “When I self-destruct my AI persona,” said Johnny, “the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time …” “Entry to the Core,” whispered BB, his eyes glowing like some antique VDT. “It would be very dangerous,” stressed Johnny. “To my knowledge, no human operator has ever penetrated Core periphery.” BB rubbed his upper lip. “There’s a legend that Cowboy Gibson did it before the Core seceded,” he mumbled. “But nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared.” “Even if you penetrate,” said Johnny, “there would be insufficient time to access except for the fact that I have the data coordinates.” “Fan-fucking-tastic,” whispered BB. He turned back to his console and reached for his shunt. “Let’s do it.” “Now?” I said. Even Johnny looked taken aback. “Why wait?” BB clicked in his shunt and attached metacortex leads, but left the deck idling. “Are we doing this, or what?” I went over next to Johnny on the couch and took his hand. His skin was cool. He showed no expression now but I could imagine what it must be like to be facing imminent destruction of one’s personality and previous existence. Even if the transfer worked, the human with the John Keats persona would not be “Johnny.” “He’s right,” said Johnny. “Why wait?” I kissed him. “All right,” I said. “I’m going in with BB.” “No!” Johnny squeezed my hand. “You can’t help and the danger would be terrible.” I heard my own voice, as implacable as Meina Gladstone’s. “Perhaps. But I can’t ask BB to do this if I won’t. And I won’t leave you in there alone.” I squeezed his hand a final time and went over to sit by BB at the console. “How do I connect with this fucking thing, BB?”

"Not even close" right?

Moral: don't pretend to have read books you evidently haven't finished.

One section of a novel with a wide-range of sci-fi concepts does not make it a 'cyberpunk novel'.

Stop wriggling.

>not even *close* to being Cyberpunk

the Co-operation and Machines and Modern Industry chapters of Capital are cyberpunk as fuck, but you have to read pretty much all marxism to understand why.

these threads always end up being eager but perhaps naive anons making recs, and autists telling everyone that their recs aren't cyberpunk enough. tell us what cyberpunk is then, hoss.

As a whole, it's not Cyberpunk. It's space opera. You could argue that Star Wars has cyberpunk elements, including pretty large chunks that mirror Gibson's shit. That doesn't make Star Wars cyberpunk, you dumb fucking piece of shit faggot.

Jeff Noon's Vurt and Nymphomation are rare examples of a British cyberpunk aesthetic somewhat different from the American/Japanese one. Mostly it rains, obviously.

>aesthetic
You're one of "those" people aren't you

You've got all the indicators of cyberpunk, the hive city, the 'cowboy', the hardware, the data plume, the glowing architectures of information, 'black ice' and so on. It is hard to conceive of a more faithful rendering of the genre.

None of those things appear Star Wars.

You don't seem very bright to me, perhaps this isn't the sort of conversation you should be inserting yourself into.

>The hive city
You mean like Coruscant?

> the 'cowboy'
You mean like all of these guys?
starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Slicer

>he hardware, the data plume, the glowing architectures of information, 'black ice' and so on
Go watch Rogue One.

Seriously, I'm not sure if someone calling Hyperion a 'cyberpunk' novel is fit to be telling people how intelligent they are.

I second Snow Crash. It's not the best written novel but it was fun and engaging, and the concepts presented within were interesting.

It's quite hyperbolic in its conception, though, and will strike you as ludicrous at times.