September 2021

● ⬈

👉👈 do you by chance have any tips for worldbuilding in a cyberpunk story?

toboldlywrite:

oh boy cyberpunk!

My world-building approach for all genres typically starts out with looking for inspiration. Whether it’s scrolling through pinterest, reading cyberpunk (or other genre) books, watching movies/shows in the genre, listening to cyberpunk music mixes on youtube, or all of the above, inspiration is key. All that (combined with the very weird dreams my subconscious keeps giving me, I’ve gotta be honest) give me a “what” I want in my story. Then comes the “why.”

So for cyberpunk, you’re typically dealing with a dystopia, centered on technology in some way. Basically what I do is think of what kind of technology exists in this world, and then reverse engineer why it’s there. Cyborgs in Bias & Bionics exist in-universe because the very rich fleeing Earth needed “expendable” people to undergo very dangerous and expensive surgery so they could safely fly the ships carrying them. First, I came up with the idea of cyberpunk Pride & Prejudice in space. So of course, there have to be cyborgs, right? But a fundamental part of the story is that Darcy and Lizzie belong to different classes/statuses. So cyborgs have to be considered “less than” somehow. Ta-da, reverse engineering the history which gives the cyborgs a whole hell of a lot of debt that has kept building up over the years.

I don’t know if any of this is actually helpful, or if it’s already really obvious or too general to be of any help. But if you want to talk about more specific details and/or just have someone to bounce ideas off of, feel free to message me!

● ⬀ ⬈

brightwanderer:

prokopetz:

While it’s important to recognise where early cyberpunk literature is coming from with respect to its skepticism of body modification, it feels like a lot of folks are basically using that to excuse the ableism of modern cyberpunk.

Yes, it’s true that much of the chrome angst in first-wave cyberpunk literature is explicitly tied to the corporate state’s efforts to abolish personal bodily autonomy, and to the extent that having a robot arm is construed as dehumanising, it’s dehumanising because a corporation owns your arm, not because prosthetics are evil.

However, it’s equally true that the “prosthetics eat your soul” horseshit of later cyberpunk lit is something that popular cyberpunk authors were very much complicit in. They wanted to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping while dialing back its political dimension in order to better appeal to mainstream audiences; to this end, the idea that having cyborg parts is intrinsically dehumanising was enthusiastically embraced. This isn’t a pop-cultural misunderstanding at work – it’s a shift in attitude that’s present in the literature itself.

Furthermore, that transition happened relatively early in the genre’s history, and was probably the norm rather than the exception no later than the mid 1990s. For those keeping count, that was 25 years ago, which is considerably longer than first-wave cyberpunk managed to remain culturally relevant. Basically, cyberpunk sold out, and it sold out early!

The fact that literary cyberpunk had some interesting things to say about bodily autonomy in 1984 – and that the chrome angst is a core component of that commentary – doesn’t give the genre a free pass for all the subsequent “prosthetics eat your soul“ stuff, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the two thirds of the genre’s entire history can be excused as “not real cyberpunk” on that basis. If you want to constructively address that shit, first you’ve got to own it!

You know, right now seems like a GOOD TIME to ditch “prosthetics eat your soul” and revert back to “your cyber arm and brain implants are owned by Google, which can drop support for them at any time and it’s a crime to jailbreak them” I’M JUST SAYING.