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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

If cyberpunk is an imagining of late capitalism, then wouldn’t octavia butler’s parable of the sower be prime cyberpunk?

I don’t think it is. I’m not a scholar of this, but to me it lacks a focus on tech indicative of cyberpunk. Either because it’s told from the perspective of people who don’t have access to what tech remains, or because it’s too far into the collapse that tech is mostly gone?

Either way, it’s a must-read.

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    All that you touch, you change
    All that you change, changes you
    The only lasting truth is change
    God is change

One of my favorites, and much as I love Gibson, I think Butler gets far too little attention and he gets too much. And not only does he get too much attention, he gets too much attention for Neuromancer. The Parable of the Sower is a more interesting and intellectually mature book, as is much of Gibson’s later work.

It's sort of it's own thing -- a pre-post-apocalypse novel, an earthseed novel, a cautionary tale, a book about the fall of empire. But I agree, it's probably not a cyberpunk novel.

That said, it's in conversation with the genre, imo, and imagines a different way late stage capitalism can go -- not up into dystopian spires and neon lights, but down into instability due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed.

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