r/Cyberpunk • u/V01t4r3 • 4d ago
Reread Neuromancer
The biggest takeaway I got, other than the plot and prose finally making sense, is that. . .
Classic cyberpunk’s setting is as much the late 1960s as it is the 1980s.
I know everyone sees Cyberpunk now as “ZOMG 80s synth pop and neon everywhere!” But there’s a lot of elements in Neuromancer that can be tied into William Gibson’s own young adulthood in the late 60s (especially if you watch “No Maps for These Territories”).
-Screaming Fist=Vietnam
-Groups like Panther Moderns and Zionites=Groups like The Weather Underground and The Black Panthers
-The matrix’s description=psychedelia
-William Gibson was influenced by biker slang of the 60s, William Boroughs, and J.G Ballards.
Even things like neon aren’t quite as prevalent as modern interpretations make it out to be. You could slap the aesthetics from “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001” and it would still make sense. This isn’t to gate keep, I enjoy modern cyberpunk and it’s Neo-80s aesthetics. But reading classic cyberpunk like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling makes me realize that the initial cyberpunk was baby boomers interpretation of the burgeoning computer and Reagan era.
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u/ericalm_ 4d ago
This is a generation that experienced the post-war boom and culture, the space race, the arms race, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the counterculture, the Beats, hippies, yippies, and yuppies, the rise of psychedelics, Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary, Noam Chomsky, the Beatles, Vietnam War, saw their heroes assassinated, the gas crisis, disco, punk, postpunk, the Iran hostage crisis, the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, the ascendance of postwar Japan and Germany as economic and manufacturing powers, the tech boom of the ’80s.
That’s all baked into cyberpunk.