{"id":4142,"date":"2025-04-23T10:47:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T14:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=4142"},"modified":"2025-04-17T13:17:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T17:17:41","slug":"cyberpunk-is-gen-xs-populuxe-or-using-aesthetics-to-predict-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2025\/04\/cyberpunk-is-gen-xs-populuxe-or-using-aesthetics-to-predict-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”\u2014or using aesthetics to predict the future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Burning Chrome<\/em> was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cover<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I\u2019d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future Gibson painted, one I could see just around the corner. Some of these stories (like \u201cJohnny Mnemonic\u201d and \u201cBurning Chrome\u201d and \u201cDogfight\u201d) I read over and over and over again. The best of these (esp. those last two) are really solid, tight, classic noir tales (albeit ones modeled after Jim Thompson\u2019s The Grifters<\/em> more than Dashiel Hammett\u2019s gumshoes). The rest are, at best, stylistic sketching exercises; they more often have punchlines than plots. Gibson wrote all but three of these stories before Neuromancer<\/em>, his debut and breakout novel (published in 1984.) Prior to 1982, Gibson doesn\u2019t appear to have precisely known what a plot is. I\u2019m not sure he\u2019d argue with me on that; he\u2019s said himself that although he\u2019d been writing \u201cstories\u201d since the 1970s, the first one that was actually a proper story was \u201dBurning Chrome\u201d (published in 1982, and basically a prototype for Neuromancer<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyberpunk is a future that looks an awful lot like the past, especially now (although even then, Gibson was firmly rooted in the past, sometimes formally\u2014as with \u201cThe Gernsback Continuum\u201d, other times more subtly, as with the noir plots he gravitates toward, and which become the heist\/resistance themes that seem to form the skeleton of most cyberpunk stories still).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m old now, and Gibson, it turns out, is to me what Hugo Gernsback\/1950’s “Populuxe<\/a>“\/Frank Frazetta\/\u201cGoogie<\/a>\u201d\/Eero Saarinen<\/a> were to him. I think it\u2019s appropriate that these are primarily visual artists and movements: Gibson has always been more of a visual artist and stylist than a writer, despite how culturally and politically prescient his writing has been. I’m given to wonder if that is why<\/em> he’s proven so upsettingly accurate in his predictions (which I don’t think he thought of as predictions at all): the “Deep Pilot” might express itself in words, but runs its pattern matching on a purely aesthetic basis. We may be talking apes today, but at heart we will always be the monkeys that first daubed paintings of the world we hoped\u2014or feared\u2014we’d soon see<\/a> on French cave walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“The future is already here \u2014 it’s just not very evenly distributed.”<\/p>\nWilliam Gibson<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Burning Chrome was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore. Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I\u2019d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future … Continue reading “Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”\u2014or using aesthetics to predict the future”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11,153,14],"tags":[1099,572,1100,1098,872,887,108,1101],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/a2mi.social\/@dave0\/114387821376602531","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4142"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4146,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions\/4146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}