Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

A new fiction

Now that cyberpunk is dead, it must be replaced with something…I’ve heard a couple of people talking about the next wave of fiction, but I don’t know any details. Anyone know anything about it? Who/what should I be reading next?


Categories: Memories.

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5 comments

  3. scifilittlemy

    Seems to be a lot of big epic space stories around (Peter F Hamilton etc) and you have to at least release a trilogy ATM that is 900+ pages long to be anyone. I’m just please Kim Stanley Robinson’s still writing. 40 Signs of Rain is looking like the beginning of quite a good trilogy. Not sure I can wait a year for the next one ;-)

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  4. stouters

    I think cyberpunk is dead, personally. It was a complete product of its time and all its motifs (American isolationism, Japanese business models, hyper-capitalism, gadget fetishism, a desire to be achingly hip etc) are mired firmly in the early 80s with it. Okay, so several people have tried to move it on, but the furthest they’ve got to is a strange Wired, pre dot.con bubble, techno-pagan landscape that feels like Silicon Valley at the turn of the millennia. The fag end of cyberpunk if you will.

    Near Future sci-fi tends to come and go in waves, riding just behind the introduction of a new technology and extrapolating its social impacts (when I get home, I’ll look it up in my Big Bumper Boys Book of Sci-fi and come up with a couple of other examples from the 20th C). The biotech industries are still fledgling enough to have not thrown up any convincing near future that doesn’t just feel like cyberpunk with oozing bits (biotech is Godzilla after all). Maybe once it really kicks in we’ll get BioPunk. For the moment though, it looks like ecological disaster novels are the closest near future movement we have.

    As to movie fx, we’re not there yet. Watch the current best we can do (Weta Digital’s work on The Return of the King), and while some of it – such as the majority of the Gollum sequences – is faultless, there are a lot of ropey images in there hidden by zooms, pans and fast cuts. Landscapes are still a problem, realistic human motion can be.

    My current sci-fi recommendations:

    Pandora’s Star – Peter F Hamilton
    Ilium – Dan Simmons

    Stout (Mr scifilittlemy)

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  5. neilh

    Psychadelic cyberpunk wierdness, comes across like Gibson transcribing a philosophy primer while on acid

    eeps, do I need to be in a similar state of mind for it to make any sense?

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