Culture

Reading Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a deceptively fun experience for lovers of science fiction. From walls embedded with bioluminescent bacterial colonies that can light dark passages to cyborgs that feel touch so acutely that they can detect the distinct ridges of a fingerprint, the world of Autonomous is packed with fantastical biotechnology.

When CyberPunks.com launched in 2018, it wasn’t long until we were approached by dozens of earnest writers with short stories, novels and series filled with worldbuilding. It’s hard to keep up! When someone says that “cyberpunk is dead,” you don’t have to point at Cyberpunk 2077, you can just look at the creatives working in this genre — cyberpunk is thriving!

Years ago, in a World Bank publication on global poverty, Charles Tilly called sociological control which effectively keeps the masses stuck in the poverty cycle “The Politics of Exclusion” . . .

Rachel Beck’s The Glitch Logs are tapping into the same vein as K.C Alexander’s cyberpunk action thrillers. Glitch is a hacker of some notoriety. She’s a famous yet retired gamer girl and a veteran runner. She pulls off jobs against ‘corps that others only hear about in hushed tones.

I just finished listening to the podcast ‘The Left Right Game’ on Spotify. I gravitated to it semi-organically, as much as such things are possible nowadays, with so many measured clicks and algorithms tracing our desires and histories. It’s ostensibly a horror story . . . a ghost story, specifically, revolving around an urban legend about a game where you get in your car, follow certain rules, and soon . . . you arrive . . . elsewhere.

Solarpunk flies upon simultaneous internet currents, growing in separate biospheres and concocting a lush new movement. Part fictional literary scene, large part aesthetical fantasy hashtag and also a DIY home and garden blogging niche, the genre unifies in a reblogged hope for the near future. 

If within a grain of sand lies the gate of the universe, then Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths emerges from the center of that grain as a twirling pinwheel. 

Inasmuch as I know a bit of Philip K. Dick and his works, the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch displays a character I recognize. It’s that of an outsider fully ingratiate with fringe topics and weird culture trying to make sense of spiritual experiences he’s personally inhabited while trying to bring them back down to terra firma. 

Perhaps no man of the twentieth century embodied the wholesomeness of the universe more thoroughly than Buckminster Fuller. Inventor, architect, mathematician, spiritualist, educator, author and futurist, Fuller led a famously frantic life.

We know cyberpunk movies, so let us tell you what you’re missing. What’s timeless? What didn’t age so well? Share this article, and we’ll make the case for The Fifth Element.