Still on my cyberpunk bullshit. Had a conversation with a zoomer about the genre, why i find cp2077 disapointing in many ways (though i admit the game has more depth than i had thought. Which is not an endorsement, just credit where it’s due). We got to talking about what was actually in the genre. I mentioned deus ex, the matrix, and a few other things and was surprised they didn’t think of those as cyberpunk. They agreed with me when i explained why i considered them part of the genre.

I really like talking to him. I don’t know many zoomers i can really dig in to culture and politics with. Talking with him got me thinking about how someone born in the 21st century has interacted with sci-fi. I grew up with fifties and sixties scifi books, and 80s and 90s movies. For them, the matrix, deus ex, half life, jurassic park, and all my other childhood movies were a decade or two in the past when they were old enough to start engaging with them. I grew up during the end of history, they grew up amid the fallout of the 08 crisis, the gwot, a world where communism was a fading memory.

Idk, i love learning about people and the world. The world is good and worth fighting for. People are good and worth fighting for.

Something interesting; they took for granted that scifi would be mostly distopian so as to have a source of conflict for the plot. I grew up with a huge amount of scifi that was very positive about the future. Asimov’s robot books mostly found conflict in exploring how his fictive robots would behave given the limits of his three laws idea. Bradbury had a lot of fun, gentle stories, and even the ones with a lot of conflict tended to have whimsy and kindness behind them. There were a fair number of stories about hanging out with weird aliens, or trying to puzzle out different phenomena. Hundreds of short sci-fi stories that were just “what if this weird thing happened? What would we do? How would we experience it?”

Viewing dystopia as the default for the future and necessary to drive a plot is rather grim. It makes sense; good speculative fiction usually reflects the worries of the day and of contemporary people. And dude is much younger than me. He’s encountering stories in a way I’m no longer able to, being able to evaluate them in isolation whereas i can only see them tangled up in a dense web of culture that often obscures things.

Like it literally just now occured to me that cp2077s grating nostalgia isn’t grating nostalgia for people a decade or more younger than me; i lived through some of the 80s and experienced some of the early wave of cybperpunk no more than a decade after it was current. While the internet was still a wild, unformed place with few rules. People in their twenties or younger didn’t have that experrience, they’re not experiencing nostalgia, per se, but more of an adventure in an unfamiliar place. Maybe.