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Once upon a time I was going to post a rant here, but I think I will save that until I am feeling grumpy about something unrelated, so that I can get the grumpy out.
Neuromancer: 25 Years Later
I think it would be fair to say that Neuromancer has shaped me - or my hobbies - more significantly than any other book I have read, and I'm certain I'm not alone in saying that. There's no hyperbole in the statement: Neuromancer changed my views on what the future could be like. When I was very small, The Future was always a place of Lamborghini-style hard lines and swept angles, of jetpacks and humanoid robots, and moon colonies. The Future was pretty damn exciting. In the single act of reading Neuromancer in all of its stiff charactered, crazy-languaged glory, my brain warped and shifted. The Lamborghini lines and swept angles rusted and became bent, the jetpacks stopped working, and the robots ceased to be humanoid, becoming more insectlike and alien.
It was a hell of a sea change.
I recall having a discussion with a friend in 1997 - one that I revisted later, in 2001 - about the gothic subculture and its relation to cyberpunk as a style, a genre, and a vision of the future. I recall at the time being exceptionally excitable about the explosive growth of the internet and all of the upcoming technologies which even now, less than a decade later, we take largely for granted. You know, smart phones, digital storage so cheap as to be effectively limitless for end-users, wireless access in public spaces, remote interaction with private and government entities, et cetera.
This friend of mine informed me that cyberpunk was dead, had been dead for at least five years, since the early to mid 90s. Her rationale was that since punk was dead in its hardcore and smash-the-state incarnation, cyberpunk could only hope to coast along via inertia rather than remain relevant. Naturally, she also said that goth will remain relevant because it looks backward to a static inspirational period rather than being transitory like cyberpunk. I told her that this very rationale is why cyberpunk will remain relevant rather than die off. Because cyberpunk is fundamentally forward-looking by definition, it can evolve and change with time rather than remain locked. Sure, first-wave cyberpunk is quaint by modern standards, but cyberpunk (as an umbrella) has spawned sub-genres, evolved, mutated, and I think very much remained relevant to our current lives. Because it isn't just mohawks and mirrorshades, cyberdecks and Fighting The Man.
It's the root genre of transhumanist fiction. It's commentary on technology in our lives, changing us as we change it. It's genetics, internet law, urban renewal, shifts in moral panic.
Like my argument with  psychik about punk-as-genre vs punk-as-political-movement, I don't think you need to timelock categories to a particular time period and then invent wholly new categories when the original changes: not only CAN you trace an evolution over time, I think in general you SHOULD, or something will never remain relevant longer than two or three years.
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