Background Pony #E886
"@Background Pony #428C":/images/6510645#comment_13519
[bq]Because this isn't really cyberpunk at all.[/bq]
[bq]Most of the stories that make up this opus are adventure stories in which horrible people do horrible things one another, in a near-future high-tech dystopia that is usually the aftermath of a nuclear war. Usually Japan owns everything—don't laugh, forty years ago lots of people in the US were obsessed with this bizarre idea that Japan was going to displace the US as a superpower—and is turning the planet into a lawless superhyperultramegalocapitalist nightmare. The protagonists are young disenfranchised outsiders and Bohemian types. Some are driven by a compulsion to hack computers. Some want to see the whole corrupt system burn. [/bq]
The Sunjackers is a story about how young disenfranchised lowlifes are hijacking shipments of -neuroposyne coal- sunstone (hence the name) - a literal stone slash drug that all their society is powered with, after Sun and Moon vanished and deposits of said sunstone appeared over the world. Everything outside the sweltering cities is frozen - as in, -200 degrees Celsius, nothing-can-live-there frozen, because Sun is completely gone. There's a corrupt system that they are fighting against, and some of their friends/relatives are part of said corrupt system. They have plentiful high tech and cybernetics, which are powered by said sunstone too, hence the jacking so that lowlifes can afford it. It's a near-future story that follows a (far less retarded because the writer wasn't a woke cretin yet) near-near-future story about Spitfire x Soarin, hence her presence in the above picture.
Anything "not cyberpunky" is either a failure of your definition of cyberpunk, or writer as a writer.
[bq]angry young outsiders who thought 1960s-70s sci-fi was too conservative—both politically and in terms of writing technique—too optimistic, and too American[/bq]
Anything woke is anti-american, anti-conservative, and anti-optimistic though not by their intention, so I don't see your point.
[bq] For it to be cyberpunk, the production of sunstone would have to be destroying all life, or else a lack of sunstone would have to be destroying all life[/bq]
See above on the setting.
[bq]Even if the author wants this to be cyberpunk it can't succeed on that level, because it's in a fantasy setting with nonhuman characters and I haven't yet seen them screaming in the reader's face about the apocalyptic threat of GLOBAL WARMING or NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN or MICROPLASTICS ARE POISONING THE OCEANS or anything else that has a concrete connection to the real world.[/bq]
Yup, problem with your definition of cyberpunk. Tying the definitions to "real world" is retarded. As retarded as wokies inserting real-life bullshit into the story about ponies, in fact.
[bq]Unless the author is trying to convince us that not appeasing the trannies and using their retarded made-up pronouns is going to bring about the end of the world. That'd be hilarious.[/bq]
That said, I really won't be surprised if this is exactly what he'll end up having about disappearance of the Princesses.
[bq]Because this isn't really cyberpunk at all.[/bq]
[bq]Most of the stories that make up this opus are adventure stories in which horrible people do horrible things one another, in a near-future high-tech dystopia that is usually the aftermath of a nuclear war. Usually Japan owns everything—don't laugh, forty years ago lots of people in the US were obsessed with this bizarre idea that Japan was going to displace the US as a superpower—and is turning the planet into a lawless superhyperultramegalocapitalist nightmare. The protagonists are young disenfranchised outsiders and Bohemian types. Some are driven by a compulsion to hack computers. Some want to see the whole corrupt system burn. [/bq]
The Sunjackers is a story about how young disenfranchised lowlifes are hijacking shipments of -neuroposyne coal- sunstone (hence the name) - a literal stone slash drug that all their society is powered with, after Sun and Moon vanished and deposits of said sunstone appeared over the world. Everything outside the sweltering cities is frozen - as in, -200 degrees Celsius, nothing-can-live-there frozen, because Sun is completely gone. There's a corrupt system that they are fighting against, and some of their friends/relatives are part of said corrupt system. They have plentiful high tech and cybernetics, which are powered by said sunstone too, hence the jacking so that lowlifes can afford it. It's a near-future story that follows a (far less retarded because the writer wasn't a woke cretin yet) near-near-future story about Spitfire x Soarin, hence her presence in the above picture.
Anything "not cyberpunky" is either a failure of your definition of cyberpunk, or writer as a writer.
[bq]angry young outsiders who thought 1960s-70s sci-fi was too conservative—both politically and in terms of writing technique—too optimistic, and too American[/bq]
Anything woke is anti-american, anti-conservative, and anti-optimistic though not by their intention, so I don't see your point.
[bq] For it to be cyberpunk, the production of sunstone would have to be destroying all life, or else a lack of sunstone would have to be destroying all life[/bq]
See above on the setting.
[bq]Even if the author wants this to be cyberpunk it can't succeed on that level, because it's in a fantasy setting with nonhuman characters and I haven't yet seen them screaming in the reader's face about the apocalyptic threat of GLOBAL WARMING or NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN or MICROPLASTICS ARE POISONING THE OCEANS or anything else that has a concrete connection to the real world.[/bq]
Yup, problem with your definition of cyberpunk. Tying the definitions to "real world" is retarded. As retarded as wokies inserting real-life bullshit into the story about ponies, in fact.
[bq]Unless the author is trying to convince us that not appeasing the trannies and using their retarded made-up pronouns is going to bring about the end of the world. That'd be hilarious.[/bq]
That said, I really won't be surprised if this is exactly what he'll end up having about disappearance of the Princesses.