I will say to start, I think there's more of a difference than we realized between overt, direct oppression which gives people a concrete foe and opponent to fight (the dystopian world) vs the soft, gentle "nudging" of the very passive-aggressive oppression that doesn't seek to crush you, just smother you. One you can at least go out in a blaze of glory and heroic martyr fighting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnnbP7pCIvQ). The other just makes you an insane crank when you fight it. "Why are you being unreasonable about this little thing?"
Sisyphus struggled with one giant boulder. TPTB have figured out if you want to put a stop to something, make them push a pile of gravel uphill. There is no martyr's death in a thousand papercuts.
The main reason the original Blade Runner has retained its allure across 43 years is its sheer beauty. The future society it depicts may be broken and dysfunctional, but it’s also magical and enticing. There’s always glitter in its grime. I wouldn’t ultimately want to live in that Blade Runner world, but I’d really, really love to visit: it’s my favourite dystopia. It’s this strange magical allure which, for me, Blade Runner 2049 completely lacks. I can’t think of any recent sci-fi films which come close to the original Blade Runner in visual sumptuousness.
I particularly hate the “Oliver”-style children’s work-house in BR 2049. Not because hi-tech futurism can’t co-exist with child exploitation - we know it can. But because it lazily ports into the film a ready-made and rather tired package of Dickensian imagery. The Ridley Scott of 1981 wouldn’t be satisfied with that. The Syd Mead of 1981 wouldn’t either.
Eldon Tyrell clearly has better aesthetic taste than Niander Wallace (never mind Bill Gates et al). His boardroom evokes Hindu and Jain temples, crossed with the pyramids, crossed with the most de luxe millionaire architecture of 1940s Manhattan. In comparison, Wallace’s looks like rich man’s Ikea. Again, I’d love to visit Tyrell’s sumptuous boardroom, where Deckard first meets Rachel. I wouldn’t want to visit Wallace’s.
There are moments in the original Blade Runner which are narratively unimportant, but which, for me, are vital for enriching the world of the film. I love the moment when some cycle riders wearing traditional Asian conical hats ride between two stone columns. It tells me nothing about the main characters or the plot. But it’s so intriguing. It hints at background levels of richness and complexity to this society.
Probably the greatest such meditative moment is when Deckard looks over his balcony, staring at the city below, while drinking whiskey. More than any other shot, this one shows the ambiguity of Scott’s imagined dystopia: fractured, alienated, flawed, but still somehow gloriously impressive.
As I child I was told living on the moon would be commonplace come the Millennium - 'Space 1999' etc. Instead, no human has stepped foot on the Moon in over half a century. Our weakened capacity for risk and danger will prevent further progress.
The underlying themes in St John Mandel's recent novel 'Sea of Tranquility' might be of interest. Here are some pertinent quotes:
"A life lived in a simulation is still a life."
"No star burns forever."
"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."
"If eggs are getting too expensive at the grocery store, is it not better to have a friend who raises chickens?"
"...and if collapse comes, you can bet all those hungry masses will go after the homesteaders once they’ve ransacked everywhere else. "
Ahh, I see - the plan is to get a little looting done ahead of time, and beat the rush. Very clever.
Great article overall, and the point is very well taken. We've had plenty of fiction warning us about the horrors to come - and, at best, they seem to have shunted us into a different set of arguably worse horrors. Cautionary tales can only get us so far - we need tales of actual optimism and victory.
Yes, I believe we've met once or twice on JCW's blog - the code word is 'Voodoo Shark'. Or, failing that, some other appropriate SFDebris reference. Good to see you around these parts.
I'm curious to find out about what you think about Atom Smasher. In the world he is one of the most powerful people in it, yet all he does is does is pursue his bloodlust, just seeking a strong opponent. Not to mention the contrast between him in the show vs him in the game. What if Atom Smasher was a warlord who preserved his own vision of humanity away from MEGA-CORP rule only doing something if a proper offering was made. I think that is much more interesting then him being some thrill seeking cyborg killer for hire.
If he had some ulterior motive or ideology, I could comment further. As it stands, he's just a cyberpyscho. Narratively formidable, but not philosophically.
I still haven't found the definition for "gay space communism." Guessing it's either a Star Trek convention with a bunch of Klingon LARPers, or simply our present reality.
I really enjoyed this piece. I've had to think over many of these same issues while crafting my own cyberpunk-adjacent series. Ultimately, I ended up going in a more realistic yet hopeful direction with my plots, because I can't escape universal constants about human nature and the idea that God is still guiding things.
Have you seen the 1974 sci-fi movie Zardoz? For years it’s been derided as a piece of camp silliness. The film certainly has its faults. But it feels as if a new audience is starting to see its merits too. It depicts a protected elite, the Eternals, who have lost all sexual desire and drive and become incredibly, err, “soy”. They are eventually overrun by the more vigorous Brutals.
There’s a flying stone head, a false god for the unwashed masses. It bears a strong likeness to the carved head of Karl Marx on his tomb in Highgate Cemetery. The director, John Boorman, has always denied any intention in that. I don’t believe him.
Quite the article! I agree on many of your points there. One thing I've come to realize though is the "cyberpunk" genre is becoming our current existence through the filter of Hollywood production design and genre fiction. Which means it's going to be a stylized version of our current life, the same way Miami Vice was a stylized version of what they 1980's wanted to be.
It's too bad reality won't be so nice as we are on an unavoidable slide into the next dark age which will begin the day the power goes out. That event is also as unavoidable as dusk falling at this point. The question is only when the grid fails. Not if.
" We’re not netrunners, surfing a bizarre digital archipelago. We’re not cynical mercs, heisting corrupt corporations for all they’re worth. We’re not even rockstar punks, sticking it to the man. With only a few exceptions, we are very much trapped by our jobs and bank accounts."
That's a key point. In much cyberpunk, even though the world itself is inhuman and oppressive, there's always a human niche (or niches), oases from the outside world. Yet, exactly what's happening in our world is that the niches are closing. So, any cyberpunk story would need a convincing human niche within an inhuman world.
I'm also skeptical about techno-utopianism. Many of them would consider themselves hard-nosed pragmatists, but they end up giving technology metaphysical qualities that it just doesn't have.
There's just no reason to believe that technological change is an inevitable development and either always for the good or always neutral. Technology doesn't invent itself, it is invented by human beings. People try to invent things based on their ideas, which are informed by their values and philosophy of life. A good age will produce good inventions and a corrupt age will produce corrupt inventions on the whole (though of course individual inventors may not necessarily be corrupted).
If you think about all the possible inventions that could exist, the things that aren't forbidden by any law of physics (or metaphysics), then it's an unimaginably huge. And no one has any idea what exactly is and isn't in there. It's easy to look backward and trace how any technology built on what came before, but it's hard to look more than a few steps ahead and see what new things can be invented. So, there's just no reason to think that technological change is inevitable.
Plus, unexpected things can happen. It looks like that even going back into the 1800's, inventors unleased forces that went out of their control and now we have to live with the consequences. I'm no prophet, and I don't have a comprehensive answer to get out of where we are, but those who spout techo-utopian boilerplate that what is manifestly neither good nor inevitable is both aren't helping us.
“from a young age i was prepared for the world to be evil & cruel, but i was never prepared for it to also be this gay & stupid”
-@ajdhenry on twitter 6/9/19
Oh this is one of those I'm going to have like a dozen comments on. (I did a review of the anime: https://natewinchester.wordpress.com/2023/06/14/what-did-i-just-watch/)
I will say to start, I think there's more of a difference than we realized between overt, direct oppression which gives people a concrete foe and opponent to fight (the dystopian world) vs the soft, gentle "nudging" of the very passive-aggressive oppression that doesn't seek to crush you, just smother you. One you can at least go out in a blaze of glory and heroic martyr fighting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnnbP7pCIvQ). The other just makes you an insane crank when you fight it. "Why are you being unreasonable about this little thing?"
Sisyphus struggled with one giant boulder. TPTB have figured out if you want to put a stop to something, make them push a pile of gravel uphill. There is no martyr's death in a thousand papercuts.
While certainly not optimistic, Zero HP's work definitely captures a lot of the negatives of our current use of technology.
The main reason the original Blade Runner has retained its allure across 43 years is its sheer beauty. The future society it depicts may be broken and dysfunctional, but it’s also magical and enticing. There’s always glitter in its grime. I wouldn’t ultimately want to live in that Blade Runner world, but I’d really, really love to visit: it’s my favourite dystopia. It’s this strange magical allure which, for me, Blade Runner 2049 completely lacks. I can’t think of any recent sci-fi films which come close to the original Blade Runner in visual sumptuousness.
I particularly hate the “Oliver”-style children’s work-house in BR 2049. Not because hi-tech futurism can’t co-exist with child exploitation - we know it can. But because it lazily ports into the film a ready-made and rather tired package of Dickensian imagery. The Ridley Scott of 1981 wouldn’t be satisfied with that. The Syd Mead of 1981 wouldn’t either.
Eldon Tyrell clearly has better aesthetic taste than Niander Wallace (never mind Bill Gates et al). His boardroom evokes Hindu and Jain temples, crossed with the pyramids, crossed with the most de luxe millionaire architecture of 1940s Manhattan. In comparison, Wallace’s looks like rich man’s Ikea. Again, I’d love to visit Tyrell’s sumptuous boardroom, where Deckard first meets Rachel. I wouldn’t want to visit Wallace’s.
There are moments in the original Blade Runner which are narratively unimportant, but which, for me, are vital for enriching the world of the film. I love the moment when some cycle riders wearing traditional Asian conical hats ride between two stone columns. It tells me nothing about the main characters or the plot. But it’s so intriguing. It hints at background levels of richness and complexity to this society.
Probably the greatest such meditative moment is when Deckard looks over his balcony, staring at the city below, while drinking whiskey. More than any other shot, this one shows the ambiguity of Scott’s imagined dystopia: fractured, alienated, flawed, but still somehow gloriously impressive.
As I child I was told living on the moon would be commonplace come the Millennium - 'Space 1999' etc. Instead, no human has stepped foot on the Moon in over half a century. Our weakened capacity for risk and danger will prevent further progress.
The underlying themes in St John Mandel's recent novel 'Sea of Tranquility' might be of interest. Here are some pertinent quotes:
"A life lived in a simulation is still a life."
"No star burns forever."
"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."
"If eggs are getting too expensive at the grocery store, is it not better to have a friend who raises chickens?"
"...and if collapse comes, you can bet all those hungry masses will go after the homesteaders once they’ve ransacked everywhere else. "
Ahh, I see - the plan is to get a little looting done ahead of time, and beat the rush. Very clever.
Great article overall, and the point is very well taken. We've had plenty of fiction warning us about the horrors to come - and, at best, they seem to have shunted us into a different set of arguably worse horrors. Cautionary tales can only get us so far - we need tales of actual optimism and victory.
Are YOU a familiar friend elsewhere on the Internet? Doest thou know the secret handshake?
Yes, I believe we've met once or twice on JCW's blog - the code word is 'Voodoo Shark'. Or, failing that, some other appropriate SFDebris reference. Good to see you around these parts.
Ah yes. We went with Voodoo Shark because "poor, dumb harry" got confusing that we weren't talking about you. ;)
I'm curious to find out about what you think about Atom Smasher. In the world he is one of the most powerful people in it, yet all he does is does is pursue his bloodlust, just seeking a strong opponent. Not to mention the contrast between him in the show vs him in the game. What if Atom Smasher was a warlord who preserved his own vision of humanity away from MEGA-CORP rule only doing something if a proper offering was made. I think that is much more interesting then him being some thrill seeking cyborg killer for hire.
If he had some ulterior motive or ideology, I could comment further. As it stands, he's just a cyberpyscho. Narratively formidable, but not philosophically.
I still haven't found the definition for "gay space communism." Guessing it's either a Star Trek convention with a bunch of Klingon LARPers, or simply our present reality.
It's a colloquialism for the Left's ideal "utopia". That's the future they are trying to manifest (maybe not the space part anymore though).
I really enjoyed this piece. I've had to think over many of these same issues while crafting my own cyberpunk-adjacent series. Ultimately, I ended up going in a more realistic yet hopeful direction with my plots, because I can't escape universal constants about human nature and the idea that God is still guiding things.
Have you seen the 1974 sci-fi movie Zardoz? For years it’s been derided as a piece of camp silliness. The film certainly has its faults. But it feels as if a new audience is starting to see its merits too. It depicts a protected elite, the Eternals, who have lost all sexual desire and drive and become incredibly, err, “soy”. They are eventually overrun by the more vigorous Brutals.
There’s a flying stone head, a false god for the unwashed masses. It bears a strong likeness to the carved head of Karl Marx on his tomb in Highgate Cemetery. The director, John Boorman, has always denied any intention in that. I don’t believe him.
Quite the article! I agree on many of your points there. One thing I've come to realize though is the "cyberpunk" genre is becoming our current existence through the filter of Hollywood production design and genre fiction. Which means it's going to be a stylized version of our current life, the same way Miami Vice was a stylized version of what they 1980's wanted to be.
It's too bad reality won't be so nice as we are on an unavoidable slide into the next dark age which will begin the day the power goes out. That event is also as unavoidable as dusk falling at this point. The question is only when the grid fails. Not if.
" We’re not netrunners, surfing a bizarre digital archipelago. We’re not cynical mercs, heisting corrupt corporations for all they’re worth. We’re not even rockstar punks, sticking it to the man. With only a few exceptions, we are very much trapped by our jobs and bank accounts."
That's a key point. In much cyberpunk, even though the world itself is inhuman and oppressive, there's always a human niche (or niches), oases from the outside world. Yet, exactly what's happening in our world is that the niches are closing. So, any cyberpunk story would need a convincing human niche within an inhuman world.
I'm also skeptical about techno-utopianism. Many of them would consider themselves hard-nosed pragmatists, but they end up giving technology metaphysical qualities that it just doesn't have.
There's just no reason to believe that technological change is an inevitable development and either always for the good or always neutral. Technology doesn't invent itself, it is invented by human beings. People try to invent things based on their ideas, which are informed by their values and philosophy of life. A good age will produce good inventions and a corrupt age will produce corrupt inventions on the whole (though of course individual inventors may not necessarily be corrupted).
If you think about all the possible inventions that could exist, the things that aren't forbidden by any law of physics (or metaphysics), then it's an unimaginably huge. And no one has any idea what exactly is and isn't in there. It's easy to look backward and trace how any technology built on what came before, but it's hard to look more than a few steps ahead and see what new things can be invented. So, there's just no reason to think that technological change is inevitable.
Plus, unexpected things can happen. It looks like that even going back into the 1800's, inventors unleased forces that went out of their control and now we have to live with the consequences. I'm no prophet, and I don't have a comprehensive answer to get out of where we are, but those who spout techo-utopian boilerplate that what is manifestly neither good nor inevitable is both aren't helping us.