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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

> Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan.

Which is why The Matrix and its sequels were a huge box-office flop, why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title), and why there haven't been half a dozen extremely successful adaptations of (mostly recent) cyberpunk works over the last few years. /sarcasm

Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.

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>Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.

Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.

>Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.

Is it? I'd say that's the view from the nice top floors. And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? I'd say cyberpunk hit the nail in the head:

https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2f...

https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-dea...

https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...

Yes. Gibson shows us the dirtiest most dagerous parts of the sprawl, but his world is not the distopya most people think (not that it is necessarily a great place either). On Gibson own words even the poorest inhabitants of the sprawl still have a better quality of life than many third world countries today.

>And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"?

They don't actually intermingle much with the future as cyberpunk might have made us think though. Usually the nightmare cyberpunk scenario was that you find yourself in debt peonage to some corporate overlord. But that's a dramatic overestimation of our value to corporate overlords.

I feel so much like in debt serfdom.

[quote]why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title),[/quote]

I strongly doubt even 10% of the anticipation about Cyberpunk 2077 is due to the title and subject matter. The creators redefined the first person rpg and then the open world rpg successfully with the fantasy Witcher series and there would be the exact same hype no matter what kind of world their next game would be set in.

I'm not saying that it didn't have a huge cultural impact.

As a distinct genre, Cyberpunk lived for maybe 8 years. It's influences are huge, but all I'm saying is that his literary contributions are few. Also in that genre, Harlan Ellison probably deserves as much if not more credit.

He gets way too much smoke for not enough fire.

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