What is cyberpunk Part 2

Telepaths living in your isolated little world, and penetrating all spheres of human activities. The power of big business, which combines the features of modern American giants and multinational mega corporations at the Gibson. Brought to idiocy, degenerate American dream. That’s where the characters live Bester. And the main role in his novels was given no means a simple boy from rural of the planet, not a mad scientist and not a soldier in the earth space forces.

Under the gun were not average people and not the good guys only the dregs of society and cream, intricately related. Drug addicts, murderers, unscrupulous businessmen their thinking, their actions are vividly described, too, and felt the street, but brighter and stronger.

The ensuing “New wave” of science fiction, the most prominent representative of which was Philip K. dick, in many ways paved the way for cyberpunk, and are supplied based on one of his works is the film “blade Runner razor” became a classic of the genre. But dick’s by and large not interested in computers, but if in the course of action required virtual reality, for its technical implementation were used drugs.

Yes, and protest against society in his novels often are addicted to not the dregs of society, and honest and a bit naive “intellectuals” (as they would be called in the former Soviet Union)… do not disdain of marijuana, of course. Other fiction writers of the “New wave” also from time to time in his work was close to cyberpunk, but almost always computers in their work was like a “wheel Ghost” Zelazny, a strange thing in itself, a symbol of the confrontation between science and magic, nothing more. “New science fiction” was interested in people and only people.

Following the laws of dialectics, cyberpunk has absorbed not only the conquest of the “New wave”, but also the techniques of their predecessors. Preserving high requirements to the literary qualities of the texts, its founders (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Ruecker, Michael Swanwick) have become such serious and technical details. You can laugh at the fact that Gibson knew nothing about computers and a little bit serious matters consulted the sterling, but the desired result he always sought and gross blunders are not allowed. However, the tradition of “know a little bit, but all” in cyberpunk refers not only to computers.

So what is “cyberpunk”? For the first time this term as a definition of the literary direction used critic Gardner Dasua, calling them novels where the focus was on the development of information technology, virtual reality and related topics. In addition, it also refers to one of the stories Bruce Bethke. This was supposed to a joke, but its a term I liked, and then was taken on Board. And no wonder this word contains all that is necessary for the lovers to arrange the genres on the shelves.

“Cyber” is a high technology, not necessarily information, but of direct relevance to the improvement of human capabilities. Not space ships and blasters, but the computer network that circulates in the blood of nano machines, genetic manipulation, artificial implants, bio robots and virtual sentient beings. “Punk” is a protest against the System, this rogue anarchists, cockroaches, living in the cracks of the Foundation of the harsh high-tech companies. “Cyber” the surroundings, the actual topic for discussion, a model for the construction companies, “punk” is the leitmotif of the work.

I would like to draw attention to the fact that, formally, cyberpunk is in no way a separate literary genre, because then the “genres” would have to admit a dozen equally narrow areas of fiction. Sterling calls cyberpunk “literary movement” under which were created the works that became canonical.