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Public Enemy
+-SH safe2394945 +-SH artist:captainhoers1616 +-SH imported from derpibooru3526800 +-SH spitfire17727 +-SH pegasus512602 +-SH pony1596252 +-SH the sunjackers965 +-SH dialogue101579 +-SH female1884671 +-SH glasses96153 +-SH mare757752 +-SH offscreen character55874 +-SH older41813 +-SH solo1528517
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One of us! One of us! We accept you, gabba gabba!
drink some water
So yes, it's a cyberpunk story, and you're being a grouchy obsolete elitist grandpa trying to pretend that only one perfect unchanging definition can exist ever; at complete opposite end of the spectrum from woketards destroying and changing everything just because they can, but still in the extreme instead of in the reason.
Steampunk is a term that does exist, it was coined by K.W. Jeter in reference to Tim Powers's works about ten years after cyberpunk came to be. Unlike with cyberpunk, these authors didn't strictly codify what "steampunk" means. I would say it's anachronism (advanced technology plus), belle époque (late Victorian and Edwardian) optimism and behavior and a world where internal combustion engines never were invented.
Oddly enough Lovecraftian stories are often associated with steampunk, even though thematically they are very different. Although Lovecraft didn't become prolific until well after the Edwardian Era, his ideas were "old-fashioned" for his time as he represented the last of a prestigious family. That said, steampunk is about the scientific capabilities of Man and how these combined with other heroic virtues can overcome Nature. Lovecraftian fiction is about how this doesn't matter and how Man is insignificant, even helpless.
I would blame the mischaracterization of steampunk on its own fans. There are genuine steampunk works out there, but especially when compared to cyberpunk there is a relative dearth. I would say that a major reason for that is, regardless of the work's political content (or lack thereof), the Victorian and Edwardian eras were everything the modern person is taught to hate. They were scientific (and not in the "I heckin' love science" establishmentarian way, actual scientists would have feuds over whose theory was correct), racist, elitist, imposed strict gender norms, disapproved of loose or deviant sexuality, and laissez-faire in economics. In fact, the large majority of steampunk fans would either downplay these aspects or apply them to "villains," because in these days it's more acceptable to be a depressed nihilist than to be an optimistic racist. Because without these qualities all you have left are appearances, garishly putting gears all over something counts as "steampunk" to them. There are actually good steampunk aesthetics though, but it takes creativity, artistic sensibility, and research into styles of the time to pull it off.
But this is getting off-topic. My point is that steampunk, as well as dieselpunk and atompunk, are real genres, it's just harder to find works that authentically adhere to these settings because the cultures that existed at the parodied time periods were aggressively killed off. I suppose cyberpunk really took off simply because Gen X was the cynical generation, as Gen Z is now.
Argue with Bruce Sterling. He and four others invented the genre back during the Carter Administration. They used it to say everything they wanted to say with it and were finished with it by the time the Berlin Wall came down, though a legion of imitators is still writing derivative piffle in an attempt to borrow aspects of the typical settings. You are describing a crime caper story, but it isn't nearly political or didactic or despairing or nihilistic enough for the C-word to fit. Cyberpunk is inherently political, didactic, and depressing, always set in a world where nothing can change or get better. This is an adventure story with a dystopian setting and sci-fi/fantasy trimmings, which is rather older than the C-word label (see also, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, John Brunner, Jean Raspail…) and cute cartoon ponies wedged into it to act as clumsy mouthpieces for the author's retarded politics. You could put these same characters into a pony-flavored 19th Century Ireland and have them smuggling grain for the Young Ireland Party in violation of the Corn Laws. They could even parrot the author's politics at the reader with amusing phonetically spelled accents and nothing would change.
People are clumsily mashing up what they think cyberpunk is with every other genre and affixing the "punk" suffix to the resulting abortions, resulting in cheery optimistic Victorian alternate-universe adventure stories being labeled as steampunk instead of something more accurate, like, I don't know, clumsy Jules Verne knockoffs written by lazy people who've never actually read Jules Verne , which have themselves metastasized into another genre/marketing category with its own distinctive visual cues (women wear corsets and tiny top hats, the hero wears goggles, decorative big brass nonfunctional gears all over everything). It's enough to make me want to give up the Internet and live in a cave.
The Sunjackers is a story about how young disenfranchised lowlifes are hijacking shipments of
neuroposyne coalsunstone (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.
Anything woke is anti-american, anti-conservative, and anti-optimistic though not by their intention, so I don't see your point.
See above on the setting.
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.
That said, I really won't be surprised if this is exactly what he'll end up having about disappearance of the Princesses.
Edited because: oops, erased a part and forgot to restore it
Ah, okay. I haven't read the story, because I fear for my sanity were I to do so, but does the author actually use the word "cyberpunk" to describe it? Because this isn't really cyberpunk at all. It's a story about social groups with opposed ideologies who regard their relationship as a zero-sum game, which is reflected in the way individuals treat one another. In-group morality is much older than cyberpunk. Sexual deviants and diversity hires elevated to high places by goodthinkers in order to signal what good people they were and allowed to make important decisions, that phenomenon is also much older than cyberpunk—or gunpowder.
Cyberpunk, at base, is a subgenre of science fiction literature principally created around 1980 by five authors, four of them Canadian: Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, and Rudy Rucker. Most of this specific body of work has certain themes and imagery in common. 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.
Not all the stories in this oeuvre quite fit this mold in every detail, but all of them are written from the perspective of 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. Those of you who've read "A Boy and His Dog" or "Bug Jack Barron" or "The Forever War" are scratching your heads at these complaints, but that is how they felt. These young authors had sympathetic ears in Ben Bova and Ellen Datlow, who had been hired by Bob Guccione as editors for his extremely gonzo, extremely 1980s glossy-paper S*C*I*E*N*C*E magazine, called "Omni." Bova and Datlow bought just scads and scads of their experimental work , apparently to use as filler in between articles about UFOs and full-page full-color ads for expensive car stereo speakers. Most of it got collected in an anthology called "Mirrorshades," edited by Bruce Sterling, which may or may not still be in print almost forty years later.
All of that is preface to saying that the central idea of cyberpunk isn't people with Ethernet jacks surgically implanted in their foreheads. Cyberpunk was created by people who wanted to experiment with prose and storytelling, and do so while wagging their fingers at the Yanks about environmentalism and the war in Vietnam. They felt that American sci-fi was not dark enough, not bleak enough, not nihilistic enough, and wanted to cram the reader's head into the bucket, then start hitting the bucket with a stick. These people were very passionate about the craft of writing, and felt, legitimately, that too many skiffy writers were writing bland stories with bland prose, just punching a clock and churning out low-quality space-filler for bookstore shelves when they should have been taking risks and being creative, and some of their early-80s material—SOME of it—is brilliant and still holds up. "Knock it off with that lame, boring, worn-out bullshit" is a very old battlecry from young artists on the outside looking in—just read Cheap Truth, their 1980s fan magazine , where they tell the whole world about all of this at great length. Combine that attitude with a monomaniacal obsession with the idea that Ronald Reagan was going to burn down the world, sprinkle with punk rock and microcomputers, and cyberpunk is what you get.
So just at face value, this story doesn't strike me as being cyberpunk at all. It is an adventure story set in a sci-fi dystopia, but that isn't cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is about the contrast, as perceived by Sterling, Gibson, et al, between sci-fi as a genre of popculture escape literature and sci-fi as a tool to produce effective agitprop to terrify people. They use lots of circumlocutions and attempt to make it seem very noble, but that's what it is, and no doubt they're still profoundly irritated that cyberpunk immediately conjures images of computer hacker adventure stories instead of, you know, Antifa. 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, and the author would have chosen a side and every other character would be beating you over the head with it to make sure you knew the author was pro-skub or anti-skub. It'd have to be a very obvious metaphor, and it would be meant to disgust and horrify you, leave you despairing and unable to sleep at night, though the author might or might not succeed on altering your emotions and attitudes on quite that level. 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. 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.
As for the virus, what's frightening to me about what unfolded isn't the virus itself. It's rather obvious that it's the common cold, rebranded in order to turn it into a political cudgel. No, it's the way it was used as a pretext to establish all manner of terrifying precedents. You're unemployable unless you let them compel you to let them shoot you up with experimental gene therapy—it's not a vaccine at all, words mean things, it's experimental gene therapy of new and novel type never before attempted on human beings, and it was pushed out without testing. "Nuremberg Code? Never heard of it!" It is now established precedent that state Governors in the US are now little tin gods who can issue diktats from their thrones to shut down the economy forever, shut down businesses forever, to "protect" you from the common cold. And it is now established precedent that freedom of speech is gone, gone, gone. Question any aspect of this and that's "dangerous medical misinformation," and you will get blocked, banned, and censored—and in the EU they put you in jail. This is banana republic stuff. If you saw on the news that the government of, say, the Dominican Republic, or Equatorial Guinea, had announced it would be jailing dissidents and people who questioned the authority of the government on charges of "spreading disinformation," you'd laugh because it would be so transparent. They're doing it here and now, and I'm not laughing. People are letting them do this. Half the population, or so we are told, are lining up and saying "Govern me harder, Mr. Soros! Harder, Daddy! Harder!" Now that they've gotten away with doing this to us with no pushback and no consequences, now that they've established these precedents, what's next? That's what keeps me up at night.
P.S. And if the conspiracy theorists are accurate with the whole "covid vax gives you a bluetooth address and nanocircuits in your blood", we just skipped cybertech straight to hostile nanotech, Deus Ex-style.
Okay, let me reword/elaborate. While the genre itself isn't about it, one of the fairly major themes in a lot of modern cyberpunk creations is nonetheless the conflict between augmented and unaugmented people. Literally in the rules, cybernetics-prevent-you-from-using-magic kind like in Shadowrun, prejudices like in Deus Ex, factions that over-augment themselves and factions that forcibly stripped their own augmentations of Cyberpunk 2077, et cetera.
It's a conflict where people are hated for being what they are (augmented or unaugmented).
And troonism subplot being present isn't something appropriate to the setting, it's a character being hated for what it is (a disgusting troon). NO PART OF THE PLOT would change if it was biologically female and its parents joined an anti-aug church instead of anti-troon one, moreso, there's a ready-to-use concept of such a church (Celestia worshippers which reject the use of sunstone altogether). It's redundant! And what's worse, it railroads the FUTURE plot into this kind of shit as well, preventing it from exploring the possibilities. The writer can no longer portray, say, good characters which still hate troons, or evil characters who praise them, because that would be both too clever for the tiny underdeveloped and chemically stunted brains of the readers, and against the agenda inherent in virtue signalling.
Which would be impossible in modern media. Nowadays, you either praise the troons, write about troons, or ignore them altogether — nuanced handling cannot be done, as you'll lose viewership from troon poisoning without gaining more through drama.
Dude, we're literally living said future. There are fucked-up troons and niggers, megacorporations buy everything out, a war is being waged online just as much as it is fought physically, there's a fucking conspiracy set to destroy the world as we know it. The only thing we're missing is cybertech.
As far as I know, virtue signalling. Haven't checked on him in a while due to disgust with his actions, though, he might've trooned out already.
cough keffals cough Catboy Ranch cough
lol, troons. They're productive lolcows, just keep 'em away from children.
@Background Pony #4DB5
Not him, but I am not sure I grasp what you're saying. Cyberpunk is a lot of things to a lot of people but this is the first time I've ever heard it described as being about "not accepting people for who they are." I think of the genre in the terms of Bruce Sterling's description of it, and he was one of the Original Five who created it, along with William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley. This article was written just as the original authors had finished saying just about everything they created it to say, just as the genre was beginning to turn into a marketing category and the shelves at Waldenbooks were getting shelved with poor imitations created by and for people who were taken with the mirrorshades-and-car-chases hackers-and-gunfighters adventure-movie trappings but didn't grasp the core, may be the best line from it, but he goes on at great length about what it is and what it isn't:
"Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk."
And I've got to admit that this is the first time I've ever heard of the genre being described as being about people not accepting other people. It's dystopian. It's usually set a few years after that nuclear war so many people were obsessed with forty years ago, which makes it a really dated setting, complete with big clunky 1980s desktop computers, cables and wires everywhere, even inside the protagonist's head, and people with mechanical prosthetic arms that look like they were bought from Joe's Army-Navy Surplus in 1974. It's high-tech lowlifes with tribal tattoos on their faces, tiger fangs surgically implanted in their jaws, and implanted prosthetic eyes with built-in night vision cameras chasing our hero through the back alleys of a polluted city at two in the morning in a torrential downpour, armed with spears that have heads made out of a piece of broken glass, who don't even know they're working for a Japanese megacorporation or maybe the KGB. It's very 1980s, Mad Max plus Max Headroom. It's actually pretty dated and hasn't aged especially well. I don't know what it has to do with troons, other than a throwaway line in the short story Johnny Mnemonic:
"The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and an arcane array of dealers. The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to get out past them if things didn't work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as identical as plastic surgery could make them. They'd been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male."
And you may note that they're not being described as heroic, nor desirable, and they're not the protagonist. They're just part of the background, brought up as a disturbing little detail to drive home to the reader just how weird and creepy and fucked-up this future is. Gender bending as sexual fetish had already been done and done and done and done in sci-fi, to the point where it would have been cliche to do anything but note them in the background and move on—see also, Jack Chalker.
Also, yeah, these political and economic concepts were tested to destruction in the 20th Century, resulting in the wealth of continents being strip-mined and converted into mass graves and a million tons of rusting Kalashnikov rifles, and not much else. Is the author a troon himself, or just virtue-signaling about his sympathies? The Venn Diagram of troons and SJWs shows an awful lot of overlap, if not perfectly concentric circles. Madness calls to madness, and these people bond over shared mental illness and start a movement. A movement to where? I don't want to know.
>at this point of time
He has been retarded for the last two years, ever since he thought that adding a "people don't accept me for what I am" i.e. trannyshit conflict to a people not accepting people for what they are SETTING i.e. cyberpunk is a good idea. It's completely redundant, it's blatantly virtue signalling, and anyone prioritizing this shit inevitably ends up having shit for brains, even if it can eventually become entertaining (see: Ishida going full TERF).
P.S. It's hilarious how those retarded commies keep complaining about landlords while utterly failing to connect the dots and realize that "lack of personal property" doesn't mean "no landlords", it means "government is the landlord, has no competition, and can and will evict you over the slightest misgiving".
Edited
yeah, they're getting really soapboxy and noncommital it's kind of eh… isolation might be wearing on 'em. I just want the characters to start discovering the forbidden secrets and taking back the sun or whatever.
I simply don't think the author of The Sunjackers is in a great mental state at this point of time, simply judging by the dialogue.
landchads forcing your greatest heroes to slaughter innocents for fun, yeah, but it doesn't say whether Spitfire owns land or not.