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Comment by shackenberg | Hacker News Reader

Also check out this neat illustrated "timeline" of "-punks". https://imgur.com/gallery/WkIU2

Only the end I would change. First I would put Cyberpunk into the 1990-2000 years. And then I would add another category for all movies that have this "bright", "plastic" and "clean" look like GATTACA, 2001, Minority Report or Oblivion. And then add another category for all the rough and dirty movies like District nine or Edge of tomorrow that seem to be fashionable now. But I don't have good names for these yet. What do you think?

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First of all, that is a great "timeline" of the "-punks"!

To your question about a name for the District 9, etc. era, I'm thinking something depressive, sort of "not looking forward to what the present/near future holds"...but can't think of anything better than: nihilpunk or nilpunk. Good question though!

Dystopunk?

   First I would put Cyberpunk into the 1990-2000 years.

I don't see how this works, most of the core Cyberpunk books were at least technologically well past even current level, let alone 2000ish. What is your thinking for 1990-2000 ?

Well most of them had a sort of "sideways" technology, better in some ways but worse in others (not unlike how a lot of 1950s SF had people on starships fiddling with slide rules). Cyberpunk generally posited human-level AI and near-realistic VR, but generally didn't feature mobile phones (payphones were common) and presumably analog TV ("The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" implying analog static).

That figure seems a bit confused.

Up until the final categories, it seems more like it is attempting to delineate time periods sourcing that dominant flavor of scifi, not the time period postulated in its fiction. It lists the contemporary topics influencing that fiction.

But, it then goes wrong as it wavers and transitions into future time periods.

Sticking to the writers' eras, it is the listed "cassette futurism" period that is really cyberpunk. That's where it was born, influenced by those technologies, dystopian ideas, and noir aesthetics. By the 90s, we were into post-cyberpunk works like Snowcrash, reacting with parody and snarky absurdity.

I not sure I agree, and read it it is an attempt to map the source material influencing the writing, not the writers eras at all. Steampunk particularly doesn't make sense as a map to writers eras.

At any rate, I understand the confusion now. As you note Cyberpunk proper was having it's obituary written, in some ways, in very early 90s, and the core of it was written well previous to that. So 1990-2000 doesn't fit well as either writers timeline or (in a handwavey sense) technology timeline.

I may be showing my ignorance, but I think those like Verne and even Shelley were the original steampunk authors. I don't think of it as a totally separate genre as people continue to try to recapture and riff on the same styles and set pieces almost two centuries later. It is born of that era.

Similarly, I think you could still write new cyberpunk. It's not dead, but on hiatus.

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