Is Cyberpunk Dead? A Conversation with Bruce Bethke
The book &quot;Void Star&quot; is an interesting one. It has a William Gibson style plot very similar to Neuromancer but instead of 1980s aesthetic choices, it has 2017 aesthetic choices.<p>So instead of ninjas you get MMA jiu jitsu guys, US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan, aftereffects of climate change rather than nuclear disasters, cartels rather than Yakuza, and so on. It&#x27;s like 2017 future is extrapolated out instead of 1984 future.<p>But the plot is extremely Gibson-esque: a woman hired as a consultant on a strange project for a mysterious ultra-wealthy client, rogue AIs, interactions between mega corporations and the criminal underworld.<p>So if you take cyberpunk to mean just the synthesizers and neon and chrome aesthetic, then it is getting sort of tiresome. But you can update all that stuff to something slightly fresher and still tell the same kind of stories and it works.