by Rachel Beck | May 15, 2018 | Uncategorized
Films and television shows like Max Headroom, Aeon Flux, and Blade Runner were game-designer Kira Magrann’s first introduction to cyberpunk. She loved the aesthetic of the cyberpunk – the tall, brooding buildings, the glow of neon, and the slow moving shots. She also loved the complexity of the characters in the stories.
“The characters were really emo and having all these identity crises,” said Kira. “When I was younger, I didn’t quite get it, but as I got older, I realized it was me with my queer identity and being a woman.”
Kira went on to explore her experience, and the experiences with others in the games she creates. Her works focus on games where social prowess is emphasized instead of just physical aptitude. They give space to explore people without power trying to navigate social power dynamics.
Aesthetics Speak
The aesthetics of cyberpunk are visually arresting, to say the least, but Kira noted that it’s more than just pretty neon reflected in the rain.
“Style is really important to cyberpunk,” she pointed out. “It’s not just mirror shades … It’s a cultural and global understanding of style.”
While cyberpunk does have a distinctive look, it is also one of the most fashion-permissive genres out there. Street-samurai, Victorian-punk, and hard-boiled detective are all looks that coexist on the streets on the rainy streets of cyberpunk cities. It’s a genre which celebrates asserting your identity through how you present yourself visually. Kira also noted that style is not something restricted to a person’s personal dress code. It is present in the language of the media, street slang, and the architecture of the buildings that populate a cyber-city’s skyline. Decoding the language of style in cyberpunk requires both an understanding of style-past and style-future, but the payoff is worth it. Style is as much a commentary on the culture it exists in as it is on the person who assembled it.
A Social Science Fiction
Kira believes that cyberpunk is relevant to our culture today especially because of its social commentary.
“The other big element I love [about cyberpunk] is the people,” she said. “The ‘high tech low lives.’ Normal people full of flaws.”
Kira observed that people tend to connect deeply with the characters of cyberpunk.
“I tend to appreciate characters who are sensitive,” she added. “People with high empathy who are aware of their surroundings. It’s basically a superpower.”
Cyberpunk in particular focuses on how humanity will react to tech of the future. It looks at what is possible for people, not just what we ought to fear. It makes cultural observations about how people relate to each other.
“It’s a great social science fiction,” Kira concluded.
Looking Forward
Kira has a few ideas about what she would like to see in the future of cyberpunk as it develops as a genre.
“First, I would basically cast Janelle Monae in everything,” she quipped.
She also wants to see stories about people for whom personal technology has been life-changing. She’s looking for narratives that that explore how people can alter their bodies with tech to reflect their identity. She’s also interested in the meta-social conversation.
“I think cyberpunk should talk about access, and class,” Kira stated. “How does tech help oppressed classes, and how does it also oppress them?”
Whatever the future may hold, it’s sure to be filled with a huge diversity of people, and cyberpunk is a great lens to peer through as we look forward to it.
If you would like to learn more about Kira’s work, visit her website at https://kira-magrann-xf7x.squarespace.com/ or follow her on twitter at @Kiranansi. You can also check out her YouTube channel at https://bit.ly/2ETkGmK.
Kira is a tabletop roleplaying game designer, queer cyborg, and snake mom living in Columbus, Ohio. She currently has a Patreon where she designs experimental games, a YouTube channel where she talks about game design, and she blogs a few times a month at Gnome Stew. With the support of her patrons she recently released a game about Lesbisnakes in wintertime titled A Cozy Den.
by Rachel Beck | May 10, 2018 | Uncategorized
This post is part of the State of Cyberpunk series.
I met Garrett Calcaterra at Fog Con, a writer’s convention he was paneling at and where I was working a table in the vendor’s hall. He’d just gotten out of the panel, but he graciously agreed to do an on-the-spot interview with me. Here’s what he had to say about cyberpunk.
The Human Touch
The dystopian elements of the works of Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash were what first drew Garrett into the world of cyberpunk. He liked that they weren’t simply remakes of 1984.
“It’s a world of our own making,” Garrett explained, one that was both descriptive and exploratory.
As a long-time author, Garrett appreciates the laboratory-like nature of writing as a medium.
“Writing is a way to balance the entertainment with the explorative aspect of stories,” he said. “Especially science fiction… It’s fun to explore the what-ifs.”
Garrett also pointed out that such writing is an experiment that takes humanity into account as a variable. Writing science fiction, be it cyberpunk or any of the other subgenres, requires that readers consider the problem of tech on a social level. To tell a story, we must necessarily look through the eyes of a protagonist, usually a human one. It naturally draws the attention to how technology affects interactions between people, and society as a whole.
“It lets us test things out at a very human level,” said Garrett.
Digital Impact
Cyberpunk in particular plays with that intersection of tech and human relationship in its digital worlds. Garrett believes this is one of the keys elements of the genre as a whole. It’s not enough to assert that these digital and virtual realities exist in the cyberpunk future – their impact must be felt on a societal level.
It’s that digital impact in particular that makes cyberpunk so highly relevant today, Garrett pointed out. The deep interconnectedness brought about through the internet is bringing us quickly into a cyberworld.
People are looking to the genre because they want to know what the ramifications might be. There are an abundance of questions to explore when it comes to any new piece of technology. What are the dangers? How should we think about and deal with surveillance? Who owns the means of production in a digital age, and how are they using that power? The effects of social conditioning through ads alone is still something researchers are working to understand, and the average person scrolls through more a day than ever before in history.
Society has certainly entered a cyber era but, Garrett added, “Whether the punk is still there is debatable.”
Cyberpunk, Not Dystopia
Garrett sees the present age as an exciting time for cyberpunk because the millennial generation has reached a point where they’re ready to tell their own stories.
“They’re the first native generation to the cyberworld,” said Garrett. “What stories will they tell now that the tech is already available to us?”
Just as science-fiction-past has helped to create the tech of the present, Garrett
predicts the new generation of cyberpunk will be formative to our future. He also thinks that this is an opportunity for a fundamental change in the genre as a whole.
Garrett said he hopes to see cyberpunk move away from its dystopian tendencies. Instead, he hopes new authors will not only work to predict new tech, but also to look at the productive ways that tech could be put to use.
“We want tales of warning, like tales of Asimov and his AI,” he pointed out. “But we also want to see cyberpunk move into a direction where we say, ‘how could we make our lives better?’ How could our tech make the underserved lives’ better? Can we turn this world into something closer to a Utopia?”
Garrett’s vision for the future raises the interesting question of whether or not a story is still cyberpunk if it does away with its classic, dystopian elements. It’s an idea that deserves an article in its own right, possibly several. It is, unfortunately, beyond the purview of this write-up, so instead I’ll simply close with this thought: I find the discussion of who’s in and who’s out of a genre’s clubhouse to be generally unproductive. In this case though, I might make an exception.
If cyberpunk is writing the future, then whether or not that future must be fundamentally dystopian is a question not of genre, but of what we believe about the world, ourselves, and our ability to change, before it’s too late.
Thoughts? Leave ‘em in the comments section below, or catch up with me on Twitter at @rachelthebeck.
If you’d like to learn more about Garrett’s work, or his other writings, visit his website at https://www.garrettcalcaterra.com/home or follow him on Twitter at @GCalcaterra .
Garrett Calcaterra is author of the epic fantasy series The Dreamwielder Chronicles. His other books include Dreamrush, The Roads to Baldairn Motte, and Umbral Visions. His short work has appeared in numerous anthologies, speculative-fiction magazines, and literary journals, including Confrontation, Writers’ Journal, Black Gate, Wet Ink, Membrane SF, Arkham Tales, and Fracas: a collection of short friction.
Garrett works as a freelance copywriter in San Francisco and previously taught creative writing at Chapman University and the Orange County School of the Arts. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in applied science from Pacific University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Chapman University. When not writing, he enjoys playing guitar in his band Wheel House, drinking craft beer, and enjoying life with his wife and daughter.
by Rachel Beck | Apr 19, 2018 | Uncategorized
LA, my cyberpunk city.
I’ve started ‘fessing up to where I live when I travel to conventions. The result is usually the same: people say “Oh,” give me an appraising look like they’re trying to decide if they can get away with what they’re about to say, and then announce, “I’ve been there a few times. To be honest, I didn’t really like it.”
I got news for you: I don’t really like it.
I don’t like the trash, the wall to floor to sky concrete, and how the plants all look like they’re dying of thirst, but trying to make it anyway. I hate the vampiric nature of the city – how many people flock to its streets with little more than their dreams and become the lifeblood for the rich and influential to feed on.
But here’s what I realized a few years ago: LA is also a city full of rebels. It’s something you might not notice unless you got out of your car and walked the streets, or, better yet, got an LA native to show you around. There’s an attitude you pick up – we’re all being run into the ground and barely making ends meet, someone’s out to make money on me, and I might give it all up tomorrow… but also, fight me.
That fight we’re all spoiling for takes different forms. Some people protest, others do the back-breaking work of policy reform. Me, I see the signs of rebellion in the art. Not just the violence of graffiti tags or the warnings sprayed in stencils, but the murals so beautiful they take your breath away.
In a society where the bottom line is everything, building something beautiful and putting it in a public space, free of charge, is an act of rebellion. It spits in the face of a system that thinks a person’s value is determined by the number at the bottom of their paycheck.
That’s what I like about LA.
by Rachel Beck | Apr 17, 2018 | Uncategorized
This post is part of the State of Cyberpunk series.
Matthew Cox was twelve when he first discovered William Gibson’s Neuromancer and immediately fell in love with the genre’s vivid imagery and iconic aesthetic. The integration of biology with technology fascinated him and drew him deeper into cyberpunk with its possibilities. His own works, The Harmony Paradox and Virtual Immortality, reflected this mixed paranormal elements with cyberpunk tech.
Then Is Now
As time passed, however, cyberpunk took on a more sinister meaning for Matthew as the evil corporations of dystopian fiction became the reality he saw around him. He pointed to the lurking sense that large and powerful corporations are up to something dangerous and liable to run over anyone who stands in their way as one of the key elements of cyberpunk. In his view, cyberpunk has become largely a replica of what we have today with an added layer of grime, complete with virtual reality, government surveillance, and a host of conspiracy theories.
Matthew pointed out that conspiracy theories in particular play a role in the modern sense of cyberpunk. In cyberpunk, virtual reality often creates a sense of distortion and uncertainty about reality in its users. It’s hard to tell where the real world begins and ends. Matthew noted that with the increase of misinformation adrift on the internet and among news outlets has created a similar effect. The rise of conspiracy theories under such conditions are inevitable and result in a sense of surrealness where people today find it difficult to parse reality from propaganda.
The presence of cyberpunk elements in modern society also makes it harder for creators in the genre to keep up with the trends, Matthew noted.
“There’s a degree of pressure,” he said. “You almost can’t write fast enough.”
Fiction, Not History
Instead of making it an outdated genre, the immediacy of cyberpunk is what makes Matthew believe it is now more necessary than ever. He thinks it helps alert people to the danger of small groups of people controlling vast power structures or resources. He speculates also that cyberpunk is about to make the jump from niche subgenre into the mainstream consciousness.
“A couple of years ago it happened to fantasy,” Matthew said. “I think cyberpunk is about to do the same…it’s gaining a foothold in larger society.”
He also hopes that cyberpunk will serve as a warning to coming generations and help correct some of the problems it depicts.
“We want to write dystopia,” he concluded. “Not history.”
To learn more about Matthew Cox’s work, visit https://curiosityquills.com/authors/matthew-cox/ or catch up with him on Twitter at @Mscox_Fiction.
by Rachel Beck | Apr 10, 2018 | Uncategorized
This blog post is part of the State of Cyberpunk series.
The striking visuals and digital landscapes of cyberspace were what first drew Brian Woodruff to the genre of cyberpunk, through such works as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero, as well as the writings of Philip K. Dick. To a young man living in an era of dial up internet, the idea of being able to upload your mind into a computer was the perfect cocktail of fantastic and plausible to excite the imagination. He loved the genre’s capacity for intelligent storytelling and it’s demand that the readers keep up, rather than be hand-held along for the journey.
Virtual Storytelling
Brian’s interest in the digital netscape of cyberpunk stories was a sign of things to come. His list of works includes not only books and a graphic novel – he’s also written stories for Virtual Reality (VR) games.
I’ve been curious about how the particular mediums cyberpunk creators use affects the stories they tell, and when I asked Brian about what it was like to work with multiple mediums, he said that he’d found the crossover helpful to his writing holistically. His work translating a story from the medium of a book into an MMORPG when he worked on City of Steam helped him fully separate from the characters he was working with, allowing him to ultimately tell better stories across all mediums. Writing for VR games like Neurowake and Darkout were also learning experiences. Virtual reality games require, first and foremost, a sense of immersion on the part of the player, requiring programmers to take a hard look at the user experience. That detailed-level of perspective taking helped Brian separate himself completely from the characters to focus on just telling a good story.
A Genre That Wrestles With Itself
Digital landscapes and communication across vast spaces weren’t the only draw of cyberpunk for Brian. He also loved that cyberpunk was a genre that wrestled with itself. He observed that stories set in cyberpunk universes tend to build on conflicting worldviews, often with no clear answer at the end. That complexity is what makes cyberpunk so relevant to our modern world.
Brian pointed out that cyberpunk holds a mirror to society, and that makes it an ideal testing ground for opposing ideas and worldviews.
“I like the idea that [in cyberpunk] we can challenge conventions within our own world and try to offer solutions or consequences of them,” he stated.
Cyberpunk offers an ideal testing ground for these ideas because, as Brian pointed out, “We’re getting closer and closer to [cyberpunk] being a reality, if it isn’t here already.”
Hope in the Shadows
Unlike many other creators I’ve spoken to who have expressed similar sentiments with dismay, Brian is optimistic about cyberpunk being a sign of the times.
“A lot of cyberpunk rightly focuses on the lower levels,” he explained, “the unsung heroes on the bottom of society and those living in the shadows. If we can create people who are so miniscule in the grand scale of society, especially in these societies, you have to believe that somewhere in the subculture of cyberpunk, a lot of good is going on.”
In Brian’s view, the silver lining on the gritty chrome of cyberpunk is that it gives hope to people who feel like they’ve hit rock bottom in their lives. If the underdog-protagonists can always find a way to survive, then maybe we as readers can too.
As he looks to the future, Brian hopes people will use cyberpunk, and every other genre, as a space to exercise and enjoy their creativity.
“I hope people use their imagination,” he said. “Go far with it. I want people to go as far as their minds will take them.”
If you’d like to read about Brian and his work, visit his website at http://www.bcwoodruff.com/.
Brian Woodruff is a writer, artist, and video game designer that likes to imagine preposterous realities and manifest them in our own… possibly even more insane world. He loves cats, comics, reading and exploring. His wife, L, puts up with his madness… for reasons beyond his comprehension. Whatever it may be… he is grateful!
I’m friendly! Reach out to me if you like sci-fi, fantasy, creativity, and a dose of the absurd along the way.
