scientiae: Personally, I'm more interested in
Post-cyberpunk. :)
Mafwek: Nah, I prefer anti-establishment nature of cyberpunk, over conformism of post-cyberpunk.
Well, strictly speaking, Post-cyberpunk is more what you describe as your experience of Cyberpunk, in that it is the tunnel of limbo (to use a theological metaphor) that has a far-off light that the characters struggle to reach, lest they fall into grimdark hell.
Traditionally, Cyberpunk assumes that all corporations are evil (simply because they are the accumulated greed of their membership, I expect) which is an interesting (if demonstrably wrong) political assumption [1] and that
everyone is doomed to this dystopian hell. Post-cyberpunk means that, even in the midst of overwhelming self-serving evil,
a few good people can band together for the good of all (if only a few (survivors) and for a short while).
Like 80s Cyberpunk, there was a similar social depression after the Great War (to End All Wars!) when the seeds of deconstruction were sewn. During the interregnum (which is a Kondratiev (1925) cycle earlier), many of the turn-of-the-century optimistic goals of humanity were dashed by unexpected revelations.
Cyberpunk is the deconstruction of the 1950s euphoria of (American) technological supremacy (winning WW2, the economic miracle of mass consumerism in the Fordian era), reaching into the sixties when the Baby Boomers became the first teenagers in history. Their dissatisfaction led to a Postmodernism.
Just as Werner Heisenberg (1927) excluded absolute certainty about sub-atomic particle physics, the seminal construction of Russell and Whitehead (the
Principia Mathematica, published just before the war) was utterly demolished by Kurt Gödel's incompleteness (1931). [2]
Derrida began 1960s Postmodernism with his observation
il n'y a pas de hors-texte [3 — "there is nothing outside context"], deconstructing theoreticians like Russell generally (this optimism is represented by,
e.g., architecture like Клуб имени Зуева [the Zuyev Workers' Club] in Moscow) and specifically the early C20th Constructionist view of Ferdinand de Saussure.
When Japan, through strategic effort (
kaizen: the continual perfection of process), rose to economic near-supremacy, gainsayers had a means to explain their fears. (Hence why games like 80s
Shadowrun and movies like (1993)
Rising Sun predict Japanese
keiretsu corporate dominance.)
Mafwek: Also, question for all forum members - have you ever defined difference between sci-fi and fantasy?
Dunatarh: I prefer an 'old-school' type of sci-fi.
Before Gibson and Dick and
before it became trendy to depict the future in pessimistic tones as a cultural/social decline. Think of Edmond Hamilton and the like.
Mafwek: You don't like the interpretation that sci-fi authors aren't writing about future, but rather using that possible future as a way to describe problems of the present?
Keeping in mind AC Clarke's third law (that sufficiently advanced science would seem to be magic) it is easy to observe that the border between fictive science and fantasy is a porous one. It is fractal [4] (the closer one looks, the more detail one sees). Still, there are definitely phenomena that are fantastical.
For instance, reversing time is impossible (but Einstein correctly noted that time flows differently for every point in space, so intercepting an earlier time for a different volume of space is possible) no matter how much energy is used, since it would be the equivalent of unburning coal to make a living tree branch. (This is the whole point of Stephen Hawking's
A Brief History of Time, the best-selling cosmological text that almost nobody who bought it, read. :)
Similarly, it is almost certainly impossible to know what someone else experiences. If I see the sunset and know that we call the sky's hue "orange", there is no way to know if what I perceive (and label "orange") is the same percept that you have —— maybe it looks blue to me, but we call this "orange" by shared agreement. I can't know what you see.
Dunatarh: […] I'd prefer a 'fairy-tale' kind of sci-fi, something 'infantile' and dreamlike, where sci-fi could touch fantasy and vice versa. Kind of Zelazny's "Creatures of Light and Darkness" sci-fi/fantasy mix where we have mages and robots alike, space stations and ancient gods and mythic creatures side by side. […] Of course, fairy-tales always have the same types of conflicts we see in life (fairy-tales are written by human beings, after all) but fairy-tales offer other means of resolving these conflicts. Yes, some might call these offered means 'unrealistic', idealistic or escapistical or anything, I don't care really. Idealism is what we all severely lack now.
That is a pretty good working definition for fantasy, since fantasy will resolve complex real life problems with magically simple imaginary concepts.
For instance, until JK Rawlings explains the rules of Pottermore advanced phlebotinum magic (in the last book, IIRC;
e.g., magic can't create something out of nothing, but it can make a little become a lot; this makes her magic more
scientific) it was perfectly possible to eliminate hunger by creating food for everyone everywhere instantly whenever they were hungry, simply by invoking a magic powerful enough to do so. Magic = Fantasy.
Magic is a virtual solution to a real problem.
In a virtual world the objects have precisely the properties they are measured for, and nothing else. Every category is exhaustive and inclusive.[5] In reality, complexity is baked into everything, so there is more than can ever be conceived of in everything, depending on the limits of investigation. Thalidomide was a magic solution, until reality revealed that molecules have
chirality, and the useful (right-handed) molecular properties that cured morning sickness were outweighed by the (left-handed) molecular properties of foetal physical deformity. Reality is smarter than humans.
________
[1] It's also very Tolkien: Caradhras, the magical Misty Mountain from which the Dwarves of Khazadûm flee from, and which holds a vast store of magical Mithril, disdains travellers as an animal detests its parasites. The implication seems to be that of C19 Lord Acton's: power corrupts. Given enough power, life tends to evil. (Though of course the elves are a direct refutation of this idea.) If this is the case then socialism is doomed to failure, forever, since corporations are the only successful socialist organizations.
[2] Bertrand Russell and Richard North Whitehead tried to construct a mathematical system that was robust enough to model the universe. Gödel proved that, in any such system, there would always be true statements that were not provable and untrue statements that were not disprovable.
Along these lines there are more subtle conceptions that are impossible, and probably always will be. Physics can calculate the velocity of maybe three objects before the complexity makes it impractical. With technology, this might be extended to a dozen objects. As well, physics also can make astoundingly accurate observations and predictions about uncountably numerous objects using statistics,
e.g. to model the molecules of a gas. In between these two methods physics is incapable of determining the specifics of numerous individual objects.
[3] Derrida could well have read Sapir, whose student is famous for his student who posited the Whorfian theory of relative linguistics (which is the basis of George Orwell's Newspeak, from
Nineteen Eighty-Four), because he published the same concept a half-dozen years earlier.
[4] To explain, think of a scale map of an island (like Britain). Use a piece of string to measure the hydrographic border, and then multiply the length of that string by the scale ratio and that will be a good estimate of the shoreline. If, however, one were to
walk around the edge of the island, the actual perimeter would be greater (since at this larger scale there is more deviation from the average assumed by the scaled-down representation, both above and below the water line and in all the cardinal directions of the map). Likewise, if we were to use a smaller device, like a pair of calipers, and measure the same border (forget the tide variance for this thought experiment) at a smaller scale, then the length would be larger again. And so on, as one looks closer the length will increase,
ad infinitum. This is a property of fractals.
[5] Which is what Russell and Whitehead were trying to do, hence the paradox they couldn't solve: does the barber cut his own hair? If everyone in a village either has their hair cut or cuts their own hair, and never the twain shall meet, wherein does the barber fit?
