Not everyone agrees. When faced with a burning planet, the idea of using technology to achieve immortality seems naive. Young people in China are “laying down” instead of working, and refugee children in Sweden suffer from “resignation syndrome”; In a world where despair is a #mood, the desire to extend life indefinitely is a tiny vampire, if not simply a gauche. “Cyberpunk is relevant and important to boomers obsessed with questions of law and order, and those determined to avoid human realities and aging. In 2021, we have new and different series obsessions that make cyberpunk seem weird,” said Nebula Award-nominated and Award-winning candidate Kelly Robson. “In short, damn cyberpunk.”
Considering the world has caught up with, if not surpassed, the genre’s imagination, its place in the novel may be limited, or limited, in the same way that the Tolkien remake might constrain the audience. with a fantasy writer. This is one of the challenges of telling a story set in the future: Time is finally catching up, like a rubber band tied into shape. And sometimes it stings. Readers often assume that authors are happy when they “predict” future events “accurately,” but we are rarely asked about the nauseating feeling of witnessing a dire prospect. most of a person happens. Describe his debut novel for CrimeReads, Lincoln Michel said, “The Body Scout is an attempt to replace the ‘cyberspace’ in cyberpunk with flesh and blood, and examines what happens when the human body becomes the mainstay of technological innovation and corporate control… Today, the best incest novel may be the evening news. “
Just because cyberpunk’s history is like the present doesn’t mean it can’t look to the future. Ten years after Bruce Bethke published the short story “Cyberpunk” in 1983, Octavia E. Butler released what is arguably one of the most influential novels in science fiction, Parable of the sower. It tells the story of a young black woman named Lauren Olamina living outside of Los Angeles in the year 2024, witnessing an autocratic president elected, human rights abolished, corporate towns built built and old neighborhoods demolished. Lauren does what heroes do: She prepares. She gathers her wits and seeds and leads her community towards freedom and ultimately in the book’s sequel the stars. Like most of Butler’s novels, it shifts the narrative focus from individual rebellion and success to community emancipation and legacy. If cyberpunk warns of the cancerous end of capitalism, Parables ask, “So what are you doing about it?” And while cyberpunk is a metaphor for slavery and autonomy, Butler’s books have looked at the actual transatlantic slave trade.
Butler’s novels focus on, among other things, genetic engineering, alien and posthuman embodiment experiences, what an individual owes to family and community, and powers and uses. its terrible sacrifices in the name of survival. Recalling dinner with her at Perfume, author and scholar Tananarive Due says Butler expressed the central question in her work, “How can we make ourselves a more survivable species?” Although she is considered the mother of Afrofuturism, her narrative pattern also echoes across all of the successor genres of cyberpunk: hopepunk, biopunk, solapunk, etc. She echoes in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight robbers, Premee Mohamed’s The annual movement of clouds, Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, Becky Chambers’ The long road leads to a small and angry planet, Tade Thompson’s Rose water, LX Beckett’s Gamechanger, and more. In Toronto, Black Lives Matter activists just bought a 10,000 square foot community center for Black artists and activists and named it the Wild Seed Center after one of the books. by Butler. Whether any of these qualifies as cyberpunk activism, it remains the epitome of what the movement might look like.
In his note, Butler said: “The struggle is to hold it together, keep it alive, and teach it to survive and do your best.” She’s summarizing Mother Olamin’s ongoing mission, but she’s also describing the 21st century in detail. This is a futuristic sci-fi work. For better or for worse, a lot of cyberpunk’s android dreams have come true. Now we have to imagine how to rebuild ourselves.
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This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue. Follow now.
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