Huntdown, Katana Zero, Dex

One of the things that I wish cyberpunk would explore more actually is the idea of actually fighting back against the system, or trying to build and defend what small positive things you can in the interstices between the megacorporations, and the process of doing those things

This is where I struggle with how far you can take rebellion and still call it cyberpunk. Is Hunger Games cyberpunk? Is Equilibrium cyberpunk? Like you mentioned somewhere else, the setting may be cyberpunk but is the ethos still cyberpunk?

in spite of knowing that, ultimately, you are doomed to fail — the system is far bigger than you, and nothing you or even a small group of people can do will ever really make a difference in the long run.

And this is where I’m back on track with you. The futility of it keeps it cyberpunk. Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother fit this mold. The main character wasn’t trying to overthrow society, they were trying to find their place in the world and push back where they could. I guess maybe that’s the staple of postcyberpunk; it’s still futile, but now there’s optimism/hope rather than depression.

I used to really like this site’s articles. It’s too bad they haven’t written anything in over a year.

I guess postcyberpunk would have to be different enough from cyberpunk to be its own genre, but at what point does it stop being cyberpunk at all? If postcyberpunk is defined by its optimism and being “warm, involved, and connected” it eventually becomes Solarpunk. If postcyberpunk is ordinary people living ordinary lives where technology is society… that’s basically where we are today.

Like you said, this was written in 1999 so the author was just using the words available to him at the time but that’s not how I would describe postcyberpunk today. I don’t think postcyberpunk should be a rejection of the things that defined cyberpunk, that’d be a different genre entirely. Instead, I think postcyerpunk should be updating the cyberpunk genre to reflect current modern societal fears. Cyberpunk was very much a product of the 1980s. The societal fears in the US revolved around rising crime rates, unchecked capitalism, Japan’s rise in influence, etc. Blade Runner perfectly encapsulates all of that. But today, 40 years later, the societal fears have changed. Personally, I think the movie Elysium is the best example of postcyberpunk. It’s still about high-tech low-lifes except the societal fears have been changed to climate change, the wealth gap, and free access to healthcare.

But really, the reason I wanted to respond to this thread is because I disagree with this statement:

Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders.

I see that as a misunderstanding of the genre. One of cyberpunk’s major influences was the hard-boiled detective/film-noir stories where the main character gets heavily involved in a case but their life isn’t personally improved after resolving it (except maybe getting paid). Deckard in Blade Runner, Case in Neuromancer, Hiro in Snow Crash, Kovacs in Altered Carbon. All of these characters throw themselves into solving the case, but they aren’t trying to topple social orders or even improve their standing in life. They just get caught up in something larger than themselves and do their best to find resolution. And I see that as a core tenant of the cyberpunk genre. You could argue it doesn’t need to be a core tenant of postcyberpunk, but the author specifically called this cyberpunk and I think that’s wrong.