Cyberpunk Fiction: Search and Destroy

I will try this "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep" that you speak of.

Speaking of Gibson, I saw a copy of 'Virtual Light' for £1.49 in Oxfam at lunchtime, but it was very mistreated and my mum's got a copy which I can steal anyway. Anyone else want me to go back and get it for them?

In other news: read anything you can find of Neal Stephenson's (start with 'Snow Crash'), as he is entirely grebt and knows more about actual computers than Luddite (_he_ says) Gibson. Not that this is necessarily good ipso facto, but it's interesting if you're into all that. You can find his excellent essay about the evolution of operating systems, 'In The Beginning Was The Command Line', all over the web as well.

I hated Snow Crash. Stephenson was trying way too hard to be cool. And the technological explanations with the tower of Babel etc. was some of the worst techno-bullshit I ever read.

Destroy: Anything set in a virtual reality world.

agree with liz re: snow crash though. first couple of chapters, where he's a pizza driver, were great. cryptonomicon was also good but more about the war / enigma machines than cyberpunk. spoilt somewhat (for me) by a couple of passages as terrifying as the 'weirdstone of brisingamen(?)' section that martin mentioned in the phobias thread. yikes!

was also recommended jeff noon's 'vurt' but it wasn't what i was expecting, too much manchester drug scene albeit the cyberpunk version of manchester drug scene. actually, thinking back, i did kinda enjoy it.

enjoyed the other two books in same (loose) trilogy as neuromancer but was disappointed in lack of space rastafarians in the second and third. virtual light / idoru / all tomorrows parties are also very readable. as are the short stories (burning chrome)

slashdot did this a couple of weeks ago (or was that hard sci-fi?) anyway: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49662&cid=5012132

andy

Haruki Murakami's "Hard-boiled Wonderland..." is awesome.

Pass on Jeff Noon, you can hardly parse the sentences in Vurt and it's really not worth trying.

Snow Crash is quite humourous.

(Subsequent reads have shown what genius that first chapter actually is, but MAN did I hate it at the time.)

I like Stevenson's other stuff, too, particularly Diamond Age and...well...everything but Zodiac, which I just didn't get (The Big U made me laugh out loud).

I managed to pick up a copy of ubik by phillip k. dick on the way home today because it was cheapness cheapified, it looks pretty good too but i'm only about 14 pages into it so far.

Maybe you have to be here or something -- the description of everything, from the pizza delivery to the nature of the burbs to all that -- is SO GODDAMN LA and Orange County especially. My laughter was the laughter of recognition. Last year I spoke to an English class taught by an old teacher of mine who was using _Snow Crash_ as a key text (she was the one who actually got me reading the book in the first place) and in rereading that first chapter all I could think of was the 55 freeway and Newport Beach.

Cross-posting: Ballard has next to nothing to do with cyberpunk. Best: I like High-Rise.

Its funny, but other than The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike and Humpty Dumpty In Oakland, "Do Androids Dream..." is the only PKD I haven't read yet. Blade Runner is one of my fave flicks, although to me, Tetsuo: Iron Man is THE cyberpunk movie.

Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown"

TOTBC is on my much-desired list, but the last time I checked Amazon, it wasn't in print, and the ex who introduced me to Erickson lost her copy when she moved.

I don't think Noon and Erickson have much in common. I'm not going to be too informative on Noon, as I read one a couple of years ago. I didn't think much of his prose, and I thought he was a youngster trying to write 'cool' modern SF, full of subcultures and drugs. Nothing of substance there that I could see, and nothing to excite me either. I consider Steve Erickson more in the Auster, Pynchon, Coover, Barthelme bracket, one of the great PoMo novelists, several leagues above Gibson or Sterling, let alone Noon.

I know what you mean about the ... artificial cool of Noon, I guess, although I don't think it's much more noticeable in him than Gibson -- just that the subcultures have changed. If you fold his style into that complaint, though, that's definitely a love it or hate it kind of thing. (He seems to be aware of the complaint, too, and has said that he's more interested in "just telling stories" in the future.)

The Erickson/Auster comparison is a good one -- I'm going to point that out to get more friends to read Auster, which I've been trying to do for years now.

Has anyone read his new book? (Pattern Recognition, just came out last week.) I'm probably going to wait until I can get a used paperback copy of it, but it sounds kind of interesting...

Dude.

I remember when they were NEW.

Cor.

Er - All Tomorrows Parties is alright. I've not read Snow Crash but Cryptonomicon roxx0r.

Also any Jack Womack. Elvessey for starters, but any of his will do.

Okay, I've seen that title -- what's the deal, is it some sort of tribute to Elvis and Morrissey?

You might like Gibson's later books better -- Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties.

Womack's books are all generally batshit crazy. Terraplane and Ambient are also worth checking out.

I'll definitely give one of them a read sometime, as I think the only reason why I thought Neuromancer was only ok was that I read it right after Snow Crash, and it paled in comparison.

http://www.acceler8or.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/cyberpunk-mondo-2000.jpg

me irl

The functionality of all that equipment exists in the average smartphone today. Except the stun-gun. I guess you could try whacking assailants over the head with your iPhone to achieve the same effect.

Also lol at "PGP key exchanges , etc."

The Pattern Recognition trilogy isn't bad, if you can accept the novels as simple thrillers with some interesting characters and the thinnest veneer of cyberpunk/technology.

the Elastica stand-in band involved with the second and third is pretty lol

music video director in the first is Chris Cunningham crossed with someone I'm not sure of

i actually kinda liked the blue ant trilogy a lot more when i went back and reread pattern rec and spook country when zero history came out. i mean, yeah, they're basically very well-written airport thrillers, and i do miss the crazy go-for-broke visionary thing you got in the best parts of the sprawl and bridge trilogies, but as pop pulp books go, they're pretty good.

it's kinda heartening to hear that his next book will be a return to actual sf, though.

just realized that the bridge is a stand-in for the kowloon walled city

lol have you read the other books in the trilogy yet?

no!!

it's kinda funny to see him wear his influences on his sleeve, of that time - AIDS, the walled city having just been torn down a few years before, snow crash

the kowloon stuff gets much more overt with the next book, so you are a psychic friend

haha, I'm just mildly obsessed with the KWC irl. also funny that the real KWC was also the subject of treatment by japanese anthropologists, check out this awesome cross section map they did: http://www.deconcrete.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Kowloon-Cross-section-low.jpg

pretty much the awesomest image ever

so rad

i want like a giant print of that for the giant wall i don't have

that is fantastic

There's an original that was done on glass

Hmm, that appears to be a enlargement of the Japanese drawing at a yamen that serves as a museum on the site of now torn down Kowloon.

goddamnit I never went to that yamen

brb

that's p fuckin rad

OK so somehow no one ever told me about Kowloon Walled City in my life until this thread. Last night I spent a couple of hours reading about it. Holy crap. It's quite a bit like this recurring dream of mine, actually. I can't believe it was real.

ghost in the shell 2: innocence is probably the best film adaptation of neuromancer we'll see in our lifetimes.

"Read Only Memories is a new cyberpunk adventure that takes place in Neo-SF, 2064. Based on 90’s point & click adventure games..."

http://midboss.com/rom/

Can anyone recommend any decent cyberpunk comics/graphic novels from the 80s or 90s? I just finished 100% which everyone on the internet seems to think is cyberpunk, but it really wasn't.

you've read transmet?

nope! I have read little to nothing so far.

that's obv the one to check out then. it's fantastic.

I wish the Ghost in the Shell manga wasn't such a convoluted, sexually creepy slog.... Paul Pope's Heavy Liquid is fun, although its art is more memorable than its writing. Moebius's sf work from the 70s on is essential. If you're open to anime, too, be sure to watch Serial Experiments Lain.

Will I like Heavy Liquid if I thought 100% was kinda boring and hated the drawing style?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Visions

heck yeah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mek_(comics)

just hit me up and I will tell you all the comics

you can probably ignore me if I start talking about Ghost Rider 2099 again, though

Will I like Heavy Liquid if I thought 100% was kinda boring and hated the drawing style?

xp - almost certainly not. your post has left me sad & confused.

I can completely understand not getting into Paul Pope, although I definitely enjoy his work

actually, as far as comics go, you could just read all the collected 2000AD stuff, including most Judge Dredd

Transmetropolitan was completely unreadable to me. Less cyberpunk than shock jock Hunter S Thompson.

Will I like Heavy Liquid if I thought 100% was kinda boring and hated the drawing style?

Honestly, probably not

Oh, and Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series is difficult to categorize, but its "Dream Sequence" arc plays with cyberpunk tropes in a pretty distinctive way.

look I thought 100% would be some Johnny Mnemonic-esque techno-cyber thriller about a night club in the future when it was actually just kind of a few corny romance narratives that just so happened to take place in (but had very little to do with) a night club in the future. Also everything he draws is really cramped and smushed and it's hard to make out details.

like I want computers and action and conflict and cool tech stuff, i'm not tryna read some cliche lovey bullshit

2020 Visions has a little bit of that but it also has lots of future stds and people going splat on the sidewalk

shirow is a reasonable suggestion if you haven't already tried that, ghost in the shell obv but i thought appleseed was very good. convoluted and creepy per post above is accurate but i didn't personally find any of it a slog. eden is another good series, not quite to description but in the ballpark i think.

Moebius is very great, obv, but wouldn't classify his work as being 'cyberpunk' at all - cyberhippy, maybe.

Best SF comic series I've seen recently - Aama by Frederik Peeters, translated in four volumes from SelfMadeHero:

http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2013/review-aama/

I've only read the first volume so far, but Aama really is great so far.

Moebius is very great, obv, but wouldn't classify his work as being 'cyberpunk' at all - cyberhippy, maybe.

Eh, his 1978 collaboration with Dan O'Bannon, "The Long Tomorrow" anticipates enough cyberpunk tropes that it seemed pertinent.

http://bronzeageofblogs.blogspot.com/2009/05/moebius-long-tomorrow.html

Yes, you're right, 'Long Tomorrow' definitely feels cyberpunky, but it's a bit of an exception in terms of Moebius' SF stuff (I guess the early pages of The Incal, also not written by Moebius, might quality too).

I've only read the first volume so far, but Aama really is great so far.

been looking forward to this for a while, but haven't started yet.