Love cyberpunk aesthetic and themes

>Arrival was literally Slaughterhouse Five

Wait, what? It's been a few years since I've read it but I can't really see the resemblance other than maybe vague time travelling stuff.

The aliens are exactly the same as the Tralfamadorians, except that in Arrival they are presented as positive forces for good whereas in Slaughterhouse 5 they are used as a metaphor for PTSD and the general ambivalence by people toward the horrors of war.

Eh? Are you suggesting Ted Chiang set out to write a Kurt Vonnegut tribute, but failed? As opposed to, y'know, the two stories using a similar device to address completely different ideas?

>you fucked up Ted, your aliens should obviously be a metaphor for PTSD!

Never read the short story, however the concept of being able to see all of time at once is not a gift, it is horrifying and Arrival tries to present it in a positive light and fails completely.

Sounds like your main objection to a work of fiction is that you don't agree with an idea it plays with, tbph

For the record, in the story IIRC it's not a gift- it's just a radically different way of seeing the world which is forced on her and which she has to come to terms with.

bump

This.

Fantasy should have the ultimate novel, but it doesn't (until i write it)

I really like the Gothic aesthetic and some of themes it can explore, but very few people can actually write anything worthwhile utilizing it. Most people get too edgy or mallgothy instead of having something more subtle in its sombreness that more carefully explores its themes.

:^)

Anything that was written in the last 50-100 years

Can you name the four?

check out neal stephenson - snow crash if you havent already

I'm also curious.

You mean the useless people who would make even being a cyborg look bad? Kill them all and leave the mechanical enhancements to the world's billionaires.

Afrofuturism.

If I could turn deltron 3030 into a book, it'd be the only notable work in the genre.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Don Quixote
Anna Karenina/War and Peace
Ulysses

afrofuturism already sounds awful--black literature is too focused on the conventional aspects of being black, and not the sublime or universal properties of the identity.

I have the same problem as OP and was really hoping someone would recommend some good cyberpunk books ITT

I mean most cyberpunk video games are better than any science fiction based on the theme, and most cyberpunk video games suck ass

>Reading cyberpunk
You play or watch it you fucking pseud.

>only a handful of books worth reading, four precisely.
>mentions five books, one of which is EVERY PLAY by Shakespeare

It's a book and fits the definition. Retard.

Also, take your pick between Anna or War.

It's four books faggot.

space western. I found like, three, and one of them was the Serenity novelisation. I'm reading it right now

>Take your pick between Anna or War

So there are at least five books worth reading?

Sun Ra should have written a novel. Guess we'll have to settle for that film.

cyberpunk fan here. i know this feel.

Anyway cyberpunk isn't necessarily a genre suited only to literature. Apparently there's a lot of good cyberpunk anime (not an anime nerd so i couldn't tell you if that's true). Altered carbon is pretty good for modern cyberpunk and netflix is turning that into a show.

Anyway to answer your question any weird fiction that's as good as perdido street station/the scar?

Better yet, write a satire of it that's actually better than the original.

>no Odyssey

As someone who is a huge fan of everything Neal Stephenson and Peter Watts have written, could someone make me some recommendations?

Most of the Cyberpunk recs I get fall into the sort of bladerunner/altered carbon/neuromancer sort of hardboiled noir cop like writing.

I enjoy more of the immersive and unique world building... I'd appreciate any recs.

bump

spanish magical realism.

>>cyborg studies as an academic discipline is founded in feminism, queer theory, socialism, and disability studies

Maybe the anti-augmentation people in Deus Ex had a point after all.

The Stars My Destination is overlooked as a cyberpunk novel and is at least as good as anything else that's firmly in the genre.

>never read the short story
Why the fuck are you trying to talk about it then retard?

Oh wait, I'm on Veeky Forums where no one reads and they critique based on Wikipedia articles

Man Space is the Place is such a crazygonuts movie. However, I do wish there were similar works that are less... abstract.

lol you're such a bleeding cunt

Steampunk. The Half Made World and Rise of Ransom City are quite good though.

>cyborg studies as an academic discipline is founded in feminism, queer theory, socialism, and disability studies

What the fuck, everywhere? I thought my Uni class was just a fluke

Transmetropolitan is hands-down the best (printed) cyberpunk work

cyberpunk as a genre heavily relies on visuals, and needs a medium that is able to reflect that

also Natural-Born Cyborgs will probably be an interesting read for you if you're into cyberpunk, OP

as a fan of both cyberpunk and HST i really wanted to love transmet, but it was just so dumb. jerusalem is just a shallow thompson, who matches him in invective but never in insight, and the whole thing really reads like a power fantasy, with none of the villains having the slightest bit of nuance. i did enjoy the latter half, though; around when spider took on the president it seemed to come into its own. if the antagonists are going to act like cartoonish supervillains, at least keep the stakes higher than small-time cops and priests.

Ted Chiang is a good writer but he pisses me off. He wrote a story about a device that makes the wearer incapable of judging a person's facial beauty or lack thereof. Universities make it mandatory for "equality" reasons. Of course the antagonists of the story are reactionary white males in the pay of the makeup industry. Teddy Boy actually thinks it would be a good idea.

I mean fiction is fiction and you can write whatever you want, but man, don't be putting ideas into these peoples' heads, we have enough problems already.

I can't think of any subgenres with a dozen good books. The transition to official subgenre causes a stagnation of formalism.

Consider Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as the "prototype" work which contains many of the elements that will become cyberpunk, and Blade Runner/Neuromancer as the archetypes that define it. Anything afterwards that is 100% pure classic cyberpunk will be a derivative stereotype-with-a-gimmick.

To create something new you must create something that is no longer "cyberpunk".

Have you read Permutation City? Egan's clinical, detached writing is similar to Watts'.

To be fair, user's specifically talking about the moving picture.

Most plebs thought that those books were the shit. You know what that means? That no one has written a cyberpunk masterpiece yet, but the genre was so appealing that it managed to become famous anyway.

It's time my friend. It's time for you to write the best, most insightful, sublime cyberpunk novel.

Right now there are very few actual advantages to putting electronics into your body outside of aesthetic/body-mod things. Those largely appeal to people who are deeply dissatisfied with something basing in their life, hence the feminist/queer theory side of things.

Socialism is just because you're in an academic setting, and that's how the majority of faculty teaches. Disability studies actually makes some sense as a lens to look at this stuff through.

Neuromancer is a masterpiece, but one of worldbuilding and providing a foundational schemata; not of true literary merit, which is the kind devoted cyberpunk readers deserve.

The women's/LGBT injection into cyborg studies is just a bunch of useless parasites clustering on the coattails of smarter people who look down on them. They aren't relevant to any serious academic studies, speculative or practical, at all.

Weird shit. I used to study psychology, and went into an engineering-related Master. It was free from politics, we had politically incorrect professors, half the class was autistic chantards. We got a little into practical application of what we'd call cyborg stuff, which came down to human-machine interfaces. I wrote one paper about possible future applications, which was basically a piece of sci-fi wank. No intersectionality and socialism, there.

Figures if you don't want politics, you actually have to look for the practical applications. These early human-machine interfaces are used to improve the lives of disabled people, so there's no wanking about how it all proves post-modernist theory is totally awesome, you guys.

Lmao.
>Taking advice about what literature is worthwhile from someone who can't even count at a kindergarten level.

cyberpunk is not a genre rooted on literature. Cinema and anime are better for it, mostly because the beauty and the shock of the genre are in its visuals.

Cyberpunk in literature is pretty much marxism in space.