Hammerjack

I've never seen Total Recall 2070. All I know about it is it lasted 22 episodes and was inspired more by Blade Runner than Total Recall. It's one of the few live-action cyberpunk TV shows though, so I'm tempted to watch it.

Have any of you seen it? Is it worth watching? As an obscure, short-lived TV show from the 90s, it's never available on any streaming service but someone posted the entire series in an AI upscaled 4k format to youtube so I'm tempted to try it.

I usually try to find a trailer for people who have never heard of whatever I'm posting about. The best I could find this time was a short commercial.

Archangel Protocol is about a cyberpunk world where everyone has ubiquitous access to cyberspace. And there are reports of people seeing angels in cyberspace. The main character is an ex-police officer who has lost her access to cyberspace and doesn't believe in these angel sightings. But then the Archangel Michael knocks on her door...

I'm not going to pretend this is high art or an interesting philosophical take on Christianity. It's basically a pulp cyberpunk novel. But it is definitely cyberpunk, with cyberspace and hackers and everything.

Also, usually when religion is included in a cyberpunk story, it's more of a cynical view (like The Preacher in Johnny Mnemonic). This novel doesn't go in that direction. It's just a cyberpunk world where all of Christian mythology turns out to be real, with various angels and demons. And for that, I'll give it points for originality. I'm not sure if anyone here would be interested in something like that but I figured I'd post it just to see.

There are 4 books in the series, but I only read the first one.

When I first watched the trailer for Black Lotus I thought it was just a generic story that they slapped the Blade Runner title on for some name recognition. But after watching it, the story truly does fit within the Blade Runner universe. The themes of what it means to be human and whether Replicants should be treated as human is central to the plot.

The animation style still looks too much like a video game cutscene to me, but it isn't a bad show. It's also very slow. I think they were trying to mimic the slow pacing of the original Blade Runner but were only partially successful. They weren't able to pull-off the quiet melancholy feel of the original Blade Runner, or an anime like Serial Experiments Lain. It isn't bad, it just isn't a masterpiece.

The first episode is available on youtube, and the entire series is available on Crunchyroll.

A couple months ago, I posted here to let everyone know about the cyberpunk community on lemmy.villa-straylight.social. We were able to get it up to 1.0K subscribers before that instance suddenly disappeared with no warning.

Well, I'm trying again, this time at [email protected]. Once again, I'm not telling anyone to unsubscribe from this community, I'm just letting you know there are more cyberpunk communities out there on lemmy.

With [email protected], I'm trying to focus more on cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction. That is, movies, anime, books, TV shows, etc. I'm not as interested in news articles about how our real world is turning into a cyberpunk dystopia. So come check us out if you're interested in discussing cyberpunk media.

Elysium hits all the themes of a cyberpunk movie. It has high-tech low-lifes, it has corporations in total control, it has a massive inequality gap, it has technology leading to dehumanization. But what it doesn't have, is neon-lit rainy streets at night.

Cyberpunk as a genre has themes that don't rely on visuals and yet so many cyberpunk stories use the 80s aesthetic as a short-hand for "cyberpunk". I think this makes the cyberpunk "look" feel dated even though its themes aren't actually stuck in the 80s.

This video does a great job of breaking down where cyberpunk came from. It was a product of the 1980s. Specifically (in America), the cultural fears of rising crime rates, removing regulations on corporations, and the rising influence of Japan. These were things people worried about in the 1980s and cyberpunk was able to tap into those fears by taking them to the extreme. And while some of those fears were well-founded (removing regulations on corporations), not all aspects of them remained timeless.

Elysium replaces the cultural fears of the 1980s with the cultural fears of the 2010s. Climate change, access to health care, increasing wealth gap. These things are now taken to the extreme while still following the cyberpunk template. I wish more stories were able to separate the 1980s aesthetic from the themes of cyberpunk. The themes of the genre are still relevant today even if the "look" has become dated.

If you haven't seen it, here's a trailer. And it's currently streaming on Netflix.

This is the pilot episode of an animated series that was never picked up. It's about a cyberpunk world where you die if you have sex. So the premise is pretty ridiculous, but the animation is fantastic. Also, this "pilot episode" is only 7min long.

I think it's really well-done for what it is, although I don't know how it could've been stretched out into an entire series.

Back when this community was on lemmy.villa-straylight.social, I went on a rant about how the TV series Upload on Amazon Prime was set in a cyberpunk world yet the story they chose to tell in this world was a romantic comedy.

Since making that post, season 3 of Upload came out. And it's amazing to me how little romantic comedy is left in the show and they're leaning more and more towards cyberpunk. Season 1 was all "will they/won't they" but by season 2 the couple got together and started focusing more on solving the main character's murder. And now in season 3, they're trying to stop an evil corporation. They even had William Gibson provide a quick 10-second cameo as a holographic librarian.

I'm sure it wasn't much work for William Gibson to show up and record 2 lines of dialog, but I think it's really cool that the people behind Upload would even think to ask him to provide a cameo. This makes me more confident that the showrunners know they're making a cyberpunk show and it isn't just me trying to find cyberpunk themes in everything I watch.

While I still don't know if I'd recommend the show to any cyberpunk fans, it's definitely the most cyberpunk romantic comedy I've ever seen and I'm pretty sure it's the only live-action cyberpunk show airing right now. So I'll take what I can get.

If you go to the Amazon kindle store and look at the Cyberpunk category, you'll find nothing but LitRPG. And while I have nothing against LitRPG as a genre, it isn't cyberpunk. And it's making it impossible for me to actually find new cyberpunk books.

So where do you go to find new cyberpunk books to read? Note that I'm not asking for a list of recommendations for cyberpunk books, I'm asking how you learn about or find new cyberpunk books. Do you have some clever trick for navigating the kindle store? Or is there a better website for finding new books? I know the kindle store has plenty of cyberpunk books, I just don't have a good way to find them. Right now, all I can do is find a book I've already read and check the Customers Also Enjoyed section in the hopes that it'll point me somewhere new.

Do you have any tricks that can help me out?

Sad news. I really enjoyed the recent Deus Ex games. Sucks they got bought out by a company that apparently has no plans to actually release new games.

In the original Tron, the digital world was comprised of visual representations of actual computing components. Programs looked like their authors, there was an I/O tower for interacting with the real world, there are bits that only contain binary yes/no values, etc.

Tron 2.0 took everything established in the original Tron movie and expands on it. You get to visit the internet, a low-powered PDA, fight computer viruses, pull data off a hard drive that is in the process of being wiped, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus you can optimize your weapons by upgrading them from alpha quality, to beta, to the gold release. It all makes sense in-universe and the game is really fun.

I'm still annoyed that Tron: Legacy threw away everything in Tron 2.0 and, in my opinion, cheapened it. In Tron: Legacy, The Grid is nothing more than a video game Kevin Flynn made on his personal computer in his spare time. Now the digital world isn't a visual representation of actual computers, it's just a game. So now it can rain in the grid for no reason, and the city is populated by NPCs who don't really serve a purpose, and having something not written by Flynn (the ISOs) are somehow magical.

I wish the Tron franchise had continued with the Tron 2.0 version of the story. Then it would've made sense in-universe for the graphics to improve, and we could've had quantum computers, virtual reality, and a vision of what the internet looks like now (rather than in 2003). But instead, if the next Tron movie follows the Tron: Legacy storyline where Flynn dies, then The Grid can't change. Because no one is programming it to be different.

Anyway, Tron 2.0. It's awesome. And I think it's the best thing to come out of the Tron franchise.

Here's a trailer. It's available on Steam and GOG. I also recommend the Killer App Mod to get it running on modern systems.

I would describe The Kitchen as pre-cyberpunk or cyberpunk-lite. It's very close to taking place in a cyberpunk world, but set maybe 5-10 years before the world truly turns cyberpunk.

The main character lives in a slum in London. That slum is 100% a cyberpunk setting. Futuristic advertisements everywhere, horrible poverty, yet access to various scifi technology. However, as soon as the main character leaves the slum, it's only a near-future world. The main character has an entry-level position and is saving money to afford a one-bedroom apartment and leave the slum. The very fact that an entry-level position can allow for vertical social mobility tells me this isn't quite a cyberpunk world.

The plot of the movie is this guy, who has been taught repeatedly his entire life to only look out for himself, learns an old acquaintance has died. That acquaintance has left behind a son who is now all alone. So he's torn between not wanting the kid to be alone while also not truly wanting to trust or protect this kid. You'd think over the course of the movie he'd learn to love the kid and then there'd be this big moment of self-sacrifice at the end, but that isn't where the movie goes.

If anything, this movie feels more "slice of life" because very few plot threads are even resolved. If this was an extended pilot to a new series I'd be interested in watching more. But having the movie end where it does just leaves me wondering why I even bothered watching it. I'm not a fan of "slice of life" stories though so that probably says more about me than the movie. Overall, the movie is good, I just wish it had a better-defined beginning, middle, and end.

You can watch it now on Netflix.

I should mention I've never read the manga, I've only watched the Netflix movie. And while I think it's a great post-apocalyptic scifi movie, I thought BLAME! was considered cyberpunk?

The movie is about a distant future where self-replicating machines have covered the entire planet in a giant City (although calling it a "city" is a bit generous, it's mostly a series of pipes and corridors). In this future, the machines now detect all humans as intruders and are trying to eradicate them. So the last remaining humans are just trying to find a way to eke out an existence.

Am I missing something? Can someone explain why this is usually included in lists of cyberpunk anime? It all feels very post-apocalyptic to me. Is it just the lack of plants/nature that gives it a cyberpunk label? Or is there something from the manga that wasn't brought over into the movie and would've added some cyberpunk themes?

To be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad movie by any means, I'm just confused how it's considered cyberpunk. Here's a trailer, and it's still available on Netflix.