Just wondering what 2020ish or later cyberpunk books/authors you’ve read and would recommend. Every list I find is either the same handful of admittedly quintessential 1970/80s stuff (Gibson, Stephenson, Dick, etc), mega compilations that aren’t deliniated by year/quality (and haven’t been updated in years), or wildly irrelevant bot slop.
Human authors only… nothing AI/LLM-generated, please.
“How has cyberpunk been updated for the modern era” is indeed what I’m ultimately asking about. I figured there would be a chance that the genre wasn’t everlasting and that modern takes would either ultimately be throwback fanservice, or something so wildly different that it couldn’t even be considered cyberpunk anymore… but that’s why I asked.
I had Gibson’s and Morgan’s works in my list already, though I’m definitely going to have to bump “Altered Carbon” up given your recommendation. Does Gibson’s style differ in “The Peripheral” compared to “Neuromancer” though? I’m currently reading the latter but not having the best time with his style/flow so far and am unsure if that’s just him, or the book/Sprawl series… or me, for that matter.
Oh and I had originally posted a more long-winded version of the OP in [email protected] but it was with my now-deleted piefed account that was just too buggy to keep using. Given how book-specific the ask was I figured here was probably a better fit.
I think this is where we’re at, yeah. If a novel actually fits the hard definition of “cyberpunk” then it’s most likely using that cliched setting of a retro-futuristic 1980s. And yet if it includes all the aspects of our modern dystopia then it just becomes “near future” and not cyberpunk anymore.
Yes, absolutely. As genre-defining as it was, Neuromancer was actually Gibson’s first novel. He has grown a lot as a writer since then and I think The Peripheral is much more approachable.
Did the post not go through? Did you delete it? I’m sorry you weren’t able to make the post there. I’m definitely open to more book-specific discussions, but the majority of that community is just me shouting into the void and I haven’t had anything to say about books recently. Feel free to post there!
I don’t so much mind if a modern writer is doing a throwback to 1980s retro-futurism so long as it’s still an intriguing story. That’s all part of my curiosity of what cyberpunk would even be nowadays. Though from other posts it seems like if my goal is to find the cyberpunk equivalent (i.e. the reaction to our current situation) something akin to “solar-punk” would be more applicable. But that’s a rabbit hole I’ll dive into later. One obsession at a time!
Glad to hear about Gibson’s later work. I had actually stared with his short story collection “Burning Chrome” but even in the forward he admits it’s basically trash and only kept around for the sake of it. I read through a few stories but got itchy for “Neuromancer”. I’ll keep pushing through… the bones (and historical significance for the genre) of it are intriguing after all, even if some of the proverbial meat is a bit off.
And my post on [email protected] did indeed go through at the time, but I deleted it prior to deleting the account since I wouldn’t have been able to reply (that was part of what was so busted with the piefed side of things). It was more a question about the difficulties I had with “Neuromancer” itself anyways, with the subject of contemporary writers being an aside. I’ll certainly visit in the future since I expect I’ll be in this cyberpunk hole quite awhile yet.