It’s definitely getting harder and harder to draw genre boundaries - cyberpunk quietly infiltrated mainstream scifi to the point where you can find cyberpunk elements in almost any modern scifi. Not bad for a subgenre the corporations and marketers misused and overused until it crashed. I remember people talking about it like a joke in the 2000s so I’m very pleased it won in the end (though I wish people treated it more like a warning than a roadmap).
I can definitely see the inclination not to include Murderbot (I thought twice about including it on the list) mostly because it doesn’t feel cyberpunk. It’s very clean, there’s no sense of decline or collapse the corps are ruling over, and the locations by and large don’t fit the usual. Heck one area is lowkey solarpunk. I think it has a ton of cyberpunk elements, story beats, etc, but it’s almost fridge cyberpunk, you have to walk away and think about it before enough of them line up. And feel is a big part of the genre, I think.
Given there are corp controlled areas and egalitarian government controlled areas, it is closer to the star trek universe with as many situtations as worlds.
I’d call murderbot more sci-fi but I can also see all the cyberpunk characteristics of it. Also I love that series.
It’s definitely getting harder and harder to draw genre boundaries - cyberpunk quietly infiltrated mainstream scifi to the point where you can find cyberpunk elements in almost any modern scifi. Not bad for a subgenre the corporations and marketers misused and overused until it crashed. I remember people talking about it like a joke in the 2000s so I’m very pleased it won in the end (though I wish people treated it more like a warning than a roadmap).
I can definitely see the inclination not to include Murderbot (I thought twice about including it on the list) mostly because it doesn’t feel cyberpunk. It’s very clean, there’s no sense of decline or collapse the corps are ruling over, and the locations by and large don’t fit the usual. Heck one area is lowkey solarpunk. I think it has a ton of cyberpunk elements, story beats, etc, but it’s almost fridge cyberpunk, you have to walk away and think about it before enough of them line up. And feel is a big part of the genre, I think.
I do find it Freudian that only evil corporations use fiction about evil corporations as a road map.
Given there are corp controlled areas and egalitarian government controlled areas, it is closer to the star trek universe with as many situtations as worlds.