Hammerjack

It's always been strange to me that Ghost in the Shell is considered cyberpunk. It's about a government agency trying to resolve state-level issues. There are no hard-boiled detectives, no evil corporations, no punk-rock influences, no high-tech low-lifes.

And this isn't unique to Ghost in the Shell either. Lots of classic cyberpunk anime was centered around people working for the government or law enforcement. Appleseed is about a team in the military, Armitage III is about a police officer, Bubblegum Crisis was technically about vigilantes but they worked closely with the police, even modern cyberpunk anime like Psycho Pass centers around a police force. I'll admit Akira starts out with a group of punk biker gangs but it quickly pivots to a story about secret government experiments.

The only thing that really links all those anime to the "cyberpunk" label is the presence of androids and the question of what it means to be human. It doesn't seem to include any of the other aspects of cyberpunk that are typically associated with the more "American" version of cyberpunk. That's not a bad thing by any means, I'm just surprised the Japanese version of cyberpunk didn't end up with its own unique subgenre name since it seems to have evolved from a different set of influences and desires.

And then I discovered Burst City. Burst City was released in 1982 and is heavily influenced by punk-rock culture, to the point that the movie shows entire performances from actual Japanese punk bands. It's an angry, fast-moving, middle-finger to conventional Japanese cinema (with their "cohesive plots" and "story structure").

Any narrative you might expect to find here is pretty thin. If you can say the movie is about anything, it's about a group of punks living in a future dystopian Tokyo who clash with the battle police. And I can see how this movie would fit into the same category as American cyberpunk. It's high-tech low-lifes trying to survive in a dystopian city.

Burst City actually kicked off a small movement of similar movies like Death Powder, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, 964 Pinocchio, and Electric Dragon 80.000V. They're all crazy, kinetic scifi which ignore conventional trends. I'm not saying they're good movies (they're actually pretty hard to watch) but I can see how they fit the "cyberpunk" label more than most "cyberpunk" anime. They are actually punk. If you've never seen any of these movies, I think this video is a good introduction.

Anyway, here's the trailer for Burst City. Of course, being an obscure Japanese movie from the 80s, Burst City isn't streaming anywhere. But also due to being an obscure Japanese movie from the 80s, it's been posted in full to youtube.

Beeple makes a picture every day and a lot of them are cyberpunk. Of course, a lot of them are also just... weird. So it's hit or miss (much like my posts to this community!).

You can see his artwork on his Instagram page or his personal website.

I'm tired of reading books that are somewhat cyberpunk or kinda cyberpunk if you squint your eyes just right. I'm in the mood for something that's more unapologetically cyberpunk. So what Shadowrun novels are worth reading?

I'm a total beginner when it comes to Shadowrun novels and there are way too many to pick one on my own. I picked Dark Resonance at random since it involved a technomancer and I really enjoyed that one. But then I tried Never Deal With a Dragon because it seemed the most well-known and I just found it boring. I don't think the issue was with the book's age, I think I just prefer more Matrix-heavy stories (with hacking and everything).

So has anyone here read a bunch of these Shadowrun novels? Are there any you would recommend? I know I'm not looking at high art here, I want a fun novel with hacking.

Ok, this is a bit of a silly post since this series is very obviously not cyberpunk. But it has hard-boiled detectives and robots, that's all you need, right?

This is actually a series of 5 short films and you can watch the entire thing on youtube. The entire series is less than 50 minutes. I wasn't sure how Lemmy would handle a youtube playlist link so I made this post an image and you can click that youtube link to watch it. For a hard-boiled detective story set in the 1930s, it isn't bad. You just have to not question why there are robots when no other technology has surpassed the 1930s.

It actually started out as a side story from the penny-arcade guys here. And you can read all the combined comics here. Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily call it cyberpunk, but it's pretty neat.

It's a bit of a spoiler to say the movie ends with a solarpunk world, but that's like saying "there's a happy ending" is a spoiler. You know they're going to resolve the conflict, it's finding how they get there that's the interesting part.

Also, I do like how a cyberpunk world is basically presented as the worst possible scenario and a solarpunk world is considered the best possible scenario. Personally, that's the only way solarpunk makes sense to me, as a "and they lived happily ever after" world. Solarpunk, to me, feels like an ideal, an end goal. It isn't a setting for a book/movie in my opinion since if there was conflict, I don't think it'd be considered solarpunk. But that's all my ignorant opinion, I'm no expert on solarpunk.

Anyway, this is primarily a time travel movie that spends most of its time in a desolate wasteland future trying to fix the cyberpunk present. I just like how it included both cyberpunk and solarpunk visuals. I should probably point out the bottom-half of the poster isn't my idea of a solarpunk world, that's the desolate wasteland future part of the movie.

I had originally watched this on Hulu and I know it had been available on Amazon Prime, but it seems the corporate overlords aren't interested in streaming this movie this month so it's only available on Hoopla right now. Oh, and here's a trailer.

I've made a couple posts about Upload before. It's a cyberpunk rom-com so it doesn't exactly get a strong recommendation from me, but it's also the only live-action cyberpunk TV show actively airing right now (at least until we get Neuromancer 🤞).

Anyway, it's nice to hear the show will get a planned ending and not just a sudden cancellation. I'll definitely be watching this final season.

Slave Zero is an old game so the graphics and gameplay mechanics are definitely dated. But I don't know any other game that lets you stomp around a cyberpunk city as a giant robot. The game does a great job of giving you a sense of scale with all the little flying cars moving around your feet as you jump from building to building. I still enjoy it.

If you've never played Slave Zero, here's a trailer. It's available on Steam for $7 but if that's too high a price, it regularly goes on sale for $4.50.

Also, I refuse to accept that the new game Slave Zero X is actually a prequel to Slave Zero. I don't care if this company bought the rights to Slave Zero and claims it's in the same universe. A 2.5D ninja beat 'em up is nothing like jumping around a cyberpunk city as a giant robot.

These are the cover artworks for Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive by Josan Gonzalez (Deathburger). The covers were used for the Brazilian reprints.

Deathburger makes a bunch of cyberpunk art in this style and he posts a lot of it to his Instagram page.

I think eXistenZ is the perfect example of a biopunk movie. But would you also consider it to be cyberpunk? The majority of the movie takes place inside a virtual reality video game but there actually aren't many cyberpunk visuals. And while it does rely on new technology to access this virtual world, that technology is primarily biological.

This is the best trailer I could find but it's pretty low quality. You can watch it on Pluto or kanopy if you've never seen it.

This is an old article but it explains Foundryside better than I could. It's a fairly standard fantasy setting with its own unique form of magic, and yet the story includes multiple cyberpunk tropes.

The article was written before the rest of the trilogy was released. I've read the trilogy and unfortunately, I'd only consider the first book to be cyberpunk. The series goes pretty far off the deep end to the point that the third book is about (I'm trying to use spoiler tags here):

This 6-minute short film does such an incredible job of imagining how far augmented reality could go. Just pop-ups and advertisements everywhere.