THE BOOKWORM
Neon lights bleeding through fog and steam ripple across puddles in the rain. Neon and flickering streetlamps faintly light a crowded street; the stars and moon, perennially obscured by clouds and steel, have been long forgotten by a populace that never looks up anymore. Towering skyscrapers disappear into clouds, crumbling foundations contrasting mirrored gleaming peaks soaring above the street and the gaze of the lower city’s denizens. In those towers live and work corporate elite, garbed in glitzy fashion, adorned with the best augmentation money can buy, oblivious to the dregs shambling through overcrowded streets beneath. For “corpos”, cyberware is yet another accoutrement, luxury adornments replacing flesh with metal, flaunting extreme wealth. On the street, nothing is luxurious or ornamental: enhancements, like everything else here, are cobbled together and utilitarian, necessary prosthetics making better workers.
This is the world of Cyberpunk…A dark, gritty dystopian hellscape of “low life and high tech” juxtaposing the hopeful utopian science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. The genre has its roots in the writing of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams and Harlan Ellison in the 1980s. Cyberpunk continues its popularity today, featured in series like Westworld, Altered Carbon, and Cyberpunk 2077 Netrunners; movies such as the Ready Player One, Upgrade, and Blade Runner 2049; and video games Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk exemplifies Dickens’ famous acknowledgment: “It was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times” painting a world of amazing technological advancements, marred by a crumbling society. Cyberpunk is typified by pervasive technology that puts individuals at odds with mega corporations, gangs and/or technology itself. It explores where the soul starts and ends, the morality of artificial intelligence, and humanity’s struggle versus overwhelming structures. Cyberpunk warns of a possible near future if we neglect our humanity in pursuit of greed and technological advancement.
Cyberpunk is about underdogs, struggling against the system to survive. Cultural rebels or outcasts clinging to individuality, against a system of pervasive conformity often influenced by corporate control. In the book “Ready Player One”, Wade Watts is an orphan living in a vertical trailer park, dubbed the “stacks”. When he cracks the first clue in a digital scavenger hunt, he crosses Innovative Online Industries (IOI) in a race to save the OASIS, a virtual reality universe where the world works and plays. IOI leverages its worldwide assets and wealth against Wade to gain control of the OASIS, not afraid to threaten death or indentured servitude to win it all. If Wade is to survive and remain free, he must use his wits and prowess in this modern- day David and Goliath story.
The common villains in these stories are mega corporations; large corporations exercising monopolistic control over markets and people. Mega corporations, such as Robocop’s Omni Consumer Products (OCP), often supersede governments, exercising control in the lives of their employees and consumers. In the movie “Robocop”, Detroit has been largely privatized by the OCP corporation, including the police department. When Officer Alex Murphy is gunned down in the line of duty by a gang with ties to OCP, the corporation reanimates Murphy’s corpse as Robocop as a means to replace an underfunded and understaffed police force. In the world of Cyberpunk, life is cheap and when you die your employer can still demand you come to work.
If you enjoy hard edged science fiction, noir stories, stories about technology, or stories about underdogs, you might enjoy the Cyberpunk genre. For young adults, I recommend Marie Lu’s “Warcross” series, S.J. Kincaid’s “Insignia” series, and Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother”, as well as the movies “Tron” (1982) and “Tron Legacy” (2010) rated “PG”, and “I, Robot” (2004), “Ready Player One” (2018), and “Alita: Battle Angel” (2019) rated “PG-13”. Adults might try “Neuromancer” by William Gibson, “Altered Carbon” by Richard K. Morgan, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick, and “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, and the movies “Blade Runner” (1982), “Terminator” (1984), “Robocop” (1987), “Johnny Mnemonic” (1995), “The Matrix” (1999), “Elysium” (2013), “Chappie” (2015), “Blade Runner 2049” (2017), and “Upgrade” (2018) rated “R” and “Ghost in the Shell” (1995) rated TV-MA
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