My favorite parts of cyberpunk books are how some things aren’t as dystopian in retrospect, and how wildly clashing the tech levels can be.
There’s a part in “Trouble and Her Friends” from 1994 where a character on a bus overhears some people talking about a recent congressional bill, so he heads into a bar to watch the news on TV. This is a setting where people have fully cybernetic brains and go into a fully realized VR world and people still have big tube TVs. I’m pretty sure pagers are mentioned a few times as well.
Also that book is great and it was the first time I remember seeing openly queer characters in fiction.
The last time I read Neuromancer was in the 2000s and didn’t even get that flat screen TVs were supposed to be futuristic. Of course the most obviously dated part is the 8 MB of hot RAM at the beginning.
I appreciate that Snow Crash still has a nice mix of tech which in retrospect decades later is quaint, plausible and fanciful. E.g. skateboard wheels that shape themselves in realtime to confirm to a scan of the ground ahead of them.
My favorite parts of cyberpunk books are how some things aren’t as dystopian in retrospect, and how wildly clashing the tech levels can be.
There’s a part in “Trouble and Her Friends” from 1994 where a character on a bus overhears some people talking about a recent congressional bill, so he heads into a bar to watch the news on TV. This is a setting where people have fully cybernetic brains and go into a fully realized VR world and people still have big tube TVs. I’m pretty sure pagers are mentioned a few times as well.
Also that book is great and it was the first time I remember seeing openly queer characters in fiction.
The last time I read Neuromancer was in the 2000s and didn’t even get that flat screen TVs were supposed to be futuristic. Of course the most obviously dated part is the 8 MB of hot RAM at the beginning.
I appreciate that Snow Crash still has a nice mix of tech which in retrospect decades later is quaint, plausible and fanciful. E.g. skateboard wheels that shape themselves in realtime to confirm to a scan of the ground ahead of them.