What Makes A Story Cyberpunk? – A Ramble

Well, continuing my series of articles about writing cyberpunk fiction (which were originally written when I was writing these stories), I thought that I’d look at what makes a story cyberpunk.

Like all genres, “cyberpunk” has a few common traits but no real fixed boundaries. For every rule someone can come up with about the cyberpunk genre, there will be an exception.

For example, if you think that things in the cyberpunk genre should revolve around computers or the internet, then what about “Blade Runner” ? It’s the film that pretty much defined the look of the entire cyberpunk genre, but you’d be hard-pressed to find more than the most basic computers in it. The internet isn’t even mentioned once.

Jeff Noon’s “Vurt” is a strange and surreal novel about people who use hallucinogenic feathers in order to explore alien dream-worlds. It sounds more like some kind of hippie fantasy novel from the 1960s, but it actually comes from the early-mid 1990s and the writing style, the characters and the premise of the story are about as cyberpunk as you can get! Seriously, if you aren’t easily shocked, just take a look at this partial webcomic adaptation [NSFW] of it by Lee O’Connor if you don’t believe me.

On the other hand, George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” ticks all of the boxes for a cyberpunk story. Rebellious protagonist? Check. Dystopian future? Check. Omnipresent technology? Check. But, that novel was published in 1949, long before personal computers were even a thing and at least a decade or two before the earliest beginnings of the internet began to form. It is not generally considered to be a cyberpunk novel, despite having a lot in common with cyberpunk fiction.

But, then there are Eric Brown’s excellent “Bengal Station” novels. These are novels that are set on a giant space station, and they follow a hardboiled detective who sometimes uses cybernetic implants to read minds. It sounds very cyberpunk, but the actual stories are more like classic sci-fi and/or ordinary harboiled detective fiction. They’re more like something you’d expect to see in a Hollywood movie than in anything in the cyberpunk genre.

So, there are no fixed rules or boundaries. But, you can still often tell whether or not something is cyberpunk. But, why?

Well, it has to do with the attitudes, inspirations and/or style of a creative work. The first clue is in the name, cyberpunk. Things in the cyberpunk genre often have a very distinctive rebellious attitude. Whether it’s done in a fairly subtle way (eg: through moral ambiguity) or whether it’s exaggerated for comedy value (like in the old “Judge Dredd” comics), it’s usually there. Cyberpunk stories often either tend to have a playful sense of cynicism, or they express outright nihilism.

The main characters are usually “outsiders” of one kind or another. Often, they’re morally-ambiguous magician-like computer hackers, bounty hunters, assassins, private investigators etc…. But, then you have a TV series like “Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex” where the main characters are official government agents who are very clearly “the good guys”. Yet, this show is also pretty much the textbook definition of “cyberpunk”.

I suppose you could say that, if something is inspired by a lot of other cyberpunk things, then there’s a good chance that it’s probably going to be cyberpunk too. Then again, the cyberpunk genre was in it’s infancy when many of it’s defining works (eg: “Neuromancer” by William Gibson, “Blade Runner” etc..) were released. They couldn’t have been inspired by too many, if any, other cyberpunk things.

So, that just leaves style. There’s a very “traditional” cyberpunk writing style, invented by William Gibson in the 1980s, that moves along at a mile a minute – dazzling the reader with vivid descriptions and futuristic jargon. It’s like hardboiled pulp fiction turned up to eleven and pumped full of amphetamines. It is sublime.

But, people were writing cyberpunk fiction before Gibson was and they used slightly different narrative styles, like in this earlier short story by Bruce Bethke. So, “does it sound like William Gibson did in the 80s?” is hardly a way to judge whether a narrative is cyberpunk or not.

So, I guess that if you’re writing a vaguely cynical sci-fi story which includes some kind of focus on technology, then it’s possibly cyberpunk. If you’re writing a slightly gothic sci-fi story with “outsider” main characters, it’s possibly cyberpunk. If the humour in your story is of the cynical dystopian variety, it might be cyberpunk. But, like the shifting ever-changing mass of the internet, nothing is ever fixed in the cyberpunk genre.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Today’s Art (16th August 2017)

Well, today’s digitally-edited painting was kind of random. Basically, I’d pulled an all-nighter the night before and was fairly tired when I made it. It was originally going to be an art deco/1930s style painting, but it just ended up going in a totally random direction fairly quickly. Still, this is probably the best “tired” painting that I’ve made within the past couple of months.

As usual, this painting is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.

“Around” By C. A. Brown

Three Basic Ways To Connect A Group Of Cyberpunk Short Stories

Well, for this article in my series of articles about writing cyberpunk fiction (which were written at the same time I was writing this old series of short stories), I thought that I’d talk about a general writing technique that can work especially well in the cyberpunk genre.

I am, of course, talking about connecting a group of (otherwise self-contained) short stories. The main advantage of doing this is that it allows you to tell a larger story, whilst only writing several shorter stories. And, if like me, you find longer fiction projects considerably more difficult to write than shorter ones, then it can be invaluable.

1) Settings: The easiest way to connect a group of short stories is to have them take place in the same location. The main advantage of this is that it gives you a chance to develop the “world” of your stories and give them all a greater sense of place with only a relatively small amount of description in each story.

This is especially true if you set your stories somewhere fairly large, like a cyberpunk mega-city. By showing a plethora of different locations within the city in your short story collection, you can maintain the limited number of settings that allow each story to be focused (eg: really short stories should only contain 1-3 locations) whilst still giving the audience a tantalising glimpse at the larger city as a whole.

Plus, of course, the other advantage of doing this in the cyberpunk genre is that the place doesn’t actually have to be a physical place. It can be a virtual reality program or some other intriguing corner of cyberspace. For example, most or all of the cyberpunk short stories I wrote last year refer to a virtual reality program/website called “Winter Wonderland”, even though it’s only actually seen a couple of times in the collection.

2) Technology: Another easy way to connect a group of cyberpunk stories is to use the same futuristic technology in each short story. Since cyberpunk fiction often revolves around futuristic versions of the internet, this is something that you can do even if you don’t try that hard.

However, unless you’re basing your short story collection around the effects that one piece of futuristic technology has on the world, then different stories might require your characters to use different types of futuristic technology.

Still, if you set yourself a few basic rules about the technology in your story, then you can give the impression that all of your characters are using the same type of technology even if they use radically different gadgets in each of your stories.

3) Time: Another basic connection technique that can work quite well in the cyberpunk genre is simply to set all of your stories at the same time. For example, my old cyberpunk short story collection was originally posted online in the days before Christmas 2016. So, all of the stories were either set during the winter or featured references to Christmas.

But, even if you just do something simple like setting all of your stories at night or adding rainy weather to all of your stories, then they will still have a weak connection to each other.

Still, if you want to do something a bit more advanced, then come up with a major event that happens in the “world” of your story and then reference it in each of your short stories.

To go back to my earlier example, many of the short cyberpunk stories I wrote last year focused on the few people who didn’t spend Christmas inside the “Winter Wonderland” virtual reality world where most of the people in the city spend their holidays.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Today’s Art (15th August 2017)

Well, today’s digitally-edited painting was an interesting one. As regular readers probably know, I make these daily paintings ridiculously far in advance – so, this one was made the day before Halloween last year. Originally, it was going to have a more “realistic” colour scheme – but this looked genuinely creepy, so I ended up digitally changing it to a cooler punk-style green/purple colour scheme.

As usual, this painting is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.

“Cryptic Corridor” By C. A. Brown

Do You Need To Be Tech-Savvy To Write Cyberpunk Fiction?

As regular readers of this site probably know, these recent articles about writing cyberpunk fiction were originally written when I was busy writing a series of cyberpunk stories that I posted online last year. So, for today, I thought that I’d look briefly at one of the main questions about writing cyberpunk fiction.

Do you have to be tech-savvy in order to write cyberpunk fiction?

The answer, simply put, is “not as much as you might think”. Whilst having some experience with using computers, using the internet and/or playing computer games will help you write cyberpunk fiction, you don’t exactly need to be the kind of person who actually knows how to use a programming language or anything like that. In other words, knowing a few things about computers is recommended, but being a literal expert isn’t necessary.

I mean, I’m the kind of person who feels like some kind of elite super-geek when I do something as basic as replacing a DVD drive or burning and running a Linux Live DVD. But, if you were to ask me to write a computer program that contained much more than “ 10 PRINT “Hello World”/ 20 GOTO 10“, I wouldn’t have a clue about it (however, I was able to use one of the few other things I know about programming languages in the formatting for this story). So, a bit of knowledge can be useful, but you don’t have to be an expert.

Think about it this way – the first major cyberpunk novel (but not the first piece of cyberpunk fiction) was William Gibson’s “Neuromancer“, which was published in 1984. It’s a massively influential novel, but it was written at a time when computers and the internet were considerably more primitive than they are today. The bulk of “Neuromancer” is just pure imagination – very well thought out and very well-written imagination, but imagination nonetheless.

Yes, it helps to know or have met a few people who are more tech-savvy than you, since you can pick up a lot of interesting ideas and terms that you can add to your cyberpunk stories but, you don’t have to be ultra tech-savvy yourself.

Likewise, if you don’t know anyone who is an expert with computers, then even a bit of basic research will give you the grounding you need to write cyberpunk fiction. So, look at the “tech” pages of reputable news sites. Watch technology-based TV shows like the BBC’s “Click” program (which is broadcast both within the UK and internationally). Likewise, be sure to watch Youtube videos about computer game design etc…. too.

But, more importantly than researching basic technology, research the cyberpunk genre itself. Knowing how to tell stories that make technology seem like magic is something you mostly learn from reading, watching or playing things that tell those kinds of stories. In other words, you can tell a convincingly good cyberpunk story if you get the “storytelling” parts right and just make up all of the technology.

Yes, knowing a bit about technolgy will help you to give your cyberpunk fiction a slightly more “realistic” flavour. It might even help you to come up with story ideas or story concepts, but it matters less than being a fan of the genre and/or studying the storytelling techniques used in cyberpunk novels/games/comics/films etc…

In other words, being savvy about storytelling matters more than being tech-savvy.

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Sorry for the short article, but I hope it was useful 🙂

Today’s Art (14th August 2017)

This silly “mid-2000s nostalgia” digitally-edited painting was surprisingly fun to make. Basically, after watching a few episodes of a ‘so bad that it’s good’ anime series from the mid-2000s called “Tokko“, I was in the mood for making another attempt at painting a ‘nostalgic’ painting set in the mid-2000s.

But, then, I realised that there’s a good reason why the world isn’t saturated with mid-’00s nostalgia. I may have been a teenager back then, but it was probably one of the most hilariously uncool decades ever (second only to this dreary, austere and puritanical decade).

Sure, flip phones were cool and maybe flame shirts were too (not to mention that DVDs are timeless, and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ isn’t a bad book) – but almost everything else was just hilariously silly – sickly alcopops, fake Chinese script tattoos, Limp Bizkit, boho fashion, “l33t haxxor” elitist nerdiness, emo fashion, chav fashion, that bloody ‘crazy frog‘, endless American remakes of J-Horror films, the sequels to “The Matrix”, MSN Messenger, MySpace etc…

So, this painting is as much a parody (I certainly had a laugh when making it) of the mid-00s as it is a ‘nostalgia’ painting.

As usual, this painting is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.

“Like 2005” By C. A. Brown

Three Basic Tips For Coming Up With Cyberpunk Stories

Well, since I was busy with last year’s cyberpunk short stories at the time of writing (I finished this one just before writing this article), I thought that I’d talk some more about writing cyberpunk fiction.

In particular, I thought that I’d look at some of the techniques that you can use to come up with interesting cyberpunk storylines. This article will be about writing shorter stories, but you can probably use these techniques for longer stories too.

1) The unseen: One of the best ways to come up with an interesting cyberpunk storyline is to look at the types of locations that often go unseen in the cyberpunk genre. In other words, it can be interesting to set some or all of your story somewhere like outside of cyberspace (like in “Blade Runner“), or possibly even in a rural area (like in “eXistenZ“). The only limit is your imagination.

Of course, when you’ve found your rarely-used setting, then you’ve got to work out how to use it in a story. Generally speaking, one easy way to get a short story out of an unusual location is to use it as a backdrop for part of a larger story (which is only hinted at during your story).

For example, the short story I linked to earlier takes place in an abandoned shopping centre. Whilst this location is an important part of the story, a few descriptions imply that the story is merely a few moments from a larger story (eg: the story mentions why the characters are in the shopping centre, and it’s hinted that they are trying to find somewhere better to stay).

2) Research: One of the best ways to learn how to tell cyberpunk stories is to read, watch and/or play as many of them as you can. Seeing all of the different types of stories that people can tell within the cyberpunk genre will open your mind to the possibilites that the genre has to offer. For example, not every cyberpunk storyline has to be about computer hackers or even about cyberspace. There’s more to the cyberpunk genre than just three novels by William Gibson.

For example, the films “Blade Runner” and “Ghost In The Shell (1995)” are about robotics, and about what makes us human. Computer games like “Deus Ex” and “Technobablyon” look at subjects such as political conspiracies and the role technology has in politics. Warren Ellis’ “Transmetropolitan” comics look at the role of the press in society (and what a Hunter S. Thompson -style journalist would be like if he lived in the future).

A film like Satoshi Kon’s “Paprika” adds dream-like surrealism to the cyberpunk genre (and is worth watching for the opening credits montage alone). The anime series “Cowboy Bebop” focuses on a group of space-travelling bounty hunters living in a cyberpunk future. The classic computer game “System Shock” takes place entirely on an abandoned space station that has been taken over by an evil Artificial Intelligence.

Computer games like “The Longest Journey”, “Dreamfall: The Longest Journey” and “Shadowrun: Dragonfall” blend elements of the fantasy genre with the cyberpunk genre. A short computer game like “The Last Night” or a webcomic like Winston Rowntree’s “Captain Estar Goes To Heaven” follow the grim lives of hired assassins in lawless cyberpunk-style futures.

So, do some research, and it’ll show you that the cyberpunk genre is about more than just nihilistic computer hackers talking in technobabble (although this is fun to write though).

3) Technology effects: This is one of the classic pieces of advice for writing science fiction, and it’s just as relavent to the cyberpunk genre as anything else. In order to come up with an interesting story, just look at a “futuristic” piece of developing technology and ask what effect it would have on the world if it’s use was more widespread.

In fact, the entire cyberpunk genre itself was invented because the idea of the internet took hold of people’s imaginations. The very first cyberpunk story (“Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke) was written in the very early 1980s, when the internet was known about – but nowhere near as widespread or popular as it was today.

So, one way to come up with interesting cyberpunk storylines is to look at pieces of technology that are being developed today (eg: 3D printing, drone technology, AI-driven cars, Virtual Reality, augmented reality, wearable tech etc….) and to ask yourself how it might affect everyday life in the future. Let your imagination go wild.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Today’s Art (13th August 2017)

Well, I was feeling mildly uninspired when I made today’s digitally-edited painting. Since I was watching the last couple of episodes of season one of “Twin Peaks” at the time, I was in the mood for some 1980s/90s style art but, about halfway through sketching, I realised that the people in it looked like actors on a stage, so the painting ended up going in a slightly more random direction.

As usual, this painting is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.

“Retro Stage” By C. A. Brown

Mini Review: “Interloper” (WAD For “Doom II”/”Final Doom”/ “ZDoom”)

Well, I hadn’t planned to review another “Doom II” WAD quite so soon. But, due to a combination of being in a stressed mood and realising that the indie game I’d planned to review soon (“Shadowrun: Dragonfall”) might take a lot longer to complete than I thought, I was in the mood for some “Doom II”. So, I ended up playing a WAD called “Interloper“.

As usual, I used the “ZDoom” source port whilst playing this WAD, although it’ll probably run on any modern source port.

So, let’s take a look at “Interloper”:

“Interloper” is a five-level WAD that has apparently been inspired by the new “Doom” game that came out last year. Since I haven’t played that game, I can’t comment on any similarities. So, I’ll be looking at this WAD on it’s own merits.

One of the first things that I will say about this WAD is that it (mostly) seems to be a “vanilla” WAD, with no new textures, weapons, monsters etc… However, during one or two parts of the game, I noticed that it contained better lighting effects than “standard” “Doom II” has. These might be the result of subtle sprite alterations (eg: adding orange highlights to the sprites), or it could be to do with the source port I’m using – but it looks really cool.

Of course, it WOULD look cooler if the surrounding environment was even gloomier. But, still, the added highlights are just about noticeable on the imp standing on the platform.

In terms of the gameplay, this WAD is reasonably good. Although this WAD probably won’t take you more than an hour or so to complete, you’ll have a lot of fun in the process. The difficulty level is high enough to be mildly challenging, but low enough to allow this WAD to function as an effective form of stress relief. In addition to this, the WAD actually includes a slight difficulty curve, with each level being slightly more challenging than the last.

As for the actual level design, it’s fairly good. The levels are non-linear enough to require exploration, but they’re also designed in such a way that you are unlikely to get “stuck” for any significant length of time. The only possible exception to this is the very beginning of level two, which features a large pit near the start of the level. This pit seems to have no “idiot proofing” whatsoever and, if you fall into it, you’ll have to re-load a saved game in order to get out of it.

If there’s a lift or a teleport here, I certainly couldn’t find it!

But, this aside, the level design here is really good. Some stand-out moments include a large multi-tiered room in level three which obviously required some rather creative programming and/or source port knowledge to create, since it places something like three or four platforms on top of each other in the same room.

If this level had come out in 1994, it would be put on trial for sorcery!

Likewise, although this WAD only really uses the “standard” textures, they are used in a way that prevents them from becoming visually monotonous. As well as using a good variety of sci-fi textures and “hell” textures, this WAD also features a few interesting-looking areas too:

Like this creepy red room…

… Or this ominously damaged corridor.

The most enjoyable levels in this WAD are probably the final two levels. Although an arch-vile appears in level three, the difficulty level only starts to really get fun from the fourth level onwards. Yes, these levels aren’t extremely challenging, but they’re challenging enough to really be fun.

Whilst the fourth level is a fairly well-designed “standard” level, the fifth level is like a very mild version of a “slaughtermap” level, where you’ll be running along a long corridor and fighting a slightly larger number of monsters. This level also features a climactic battle against a weakened spider demon (it took a mere two BFG shots to defeat, although this could be due to prior monster infighting) and two cyberdemons.

Surprisingly, the cyberdemon battle was fairly easy, due to the abundent ammo hidden nearby, the arena-like area and the fact that there are a few low-mid level monsters nearby who will also start fighting the cyberdemons too.

Yes, this final boss battle is a little bit on the easy side, but it’ll make you feel like a badass.

All in all, this is a rather fun WAD. Sure, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel or anything like that but it’s a solid, well-designed set of levels that will provide you with about an hour or so of amusement.

If I had to give it a rating out of five, it would get a four.

Three Random Tips For Writing Cyberpunk Comedy

(Note: Due to a scheduling blunder, there will actually be two articles today. Stay tuned for the next one [a review of a “Doom II” WAD] in about fifteen minutes or so.)
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Well, it’s been a while since I wrote a writing-related article, so I thought that I’d look at how to write comedy in the cyberpunk genre. This is mostly because, at the original time of writing this article, I was working on last year’s “A Cyberpunk Christmas” short stories.

When I started writing a couple of these stories, I wasn’t sure how they were going to turn out and – to my delight – they ended up including a lot more comedy than I had expected. So, I thought that I’d share some of the ways I got inspired to add some comedy to them.

1) Computer games: One way to learn how to write cyberpunk comedy is to play computer games. The best type of game to play is probably cyberpunk “point and click” games (like “Technobabylon” and “Beneath A Steel Sky“). These games often contain numerous brilliant examples of clever observational humour and/or humour relating to futuristic technology.

But, playing any kind of computer game will help you to come up with better cyberpunk comedy. Even just using a computer will give you some inspiration. And, if you’re reading this right now, then you’re probably already using a computer. Well, all the cool people are anyway. So, put that smartphone down and get thee to a desktop computer!

So, why is this a good source of comedic inspiration? It’s because most games and computer programs have their glitches and quirks which can be a source of humour.

For example, the first of last year’s Christmas cyberpunk stories involved a futuristic cyberpunk virtual reality world, with the humourous twist that it was running slowly on account of the servers being overloaded by lots of Christmas shoppers.

If you’ve every tried access the internet on a Sunday morning or have accidentally tried to play a computer game with the graphics settings on maximum, you can probably see where I got the idea for that particular joke from.

So, just find amusing quirks and glitches in modern technology and try to find a way to add them to the futuristic technology that appears in your cyberpunk story.

2) Styles: Although it’s probably a good idea to have read a few cyberpunk novels ( eg: the “Sprawl Trilogy“), so that you know the type of narrative style that is popular in the genre, don’t feel like you always have to use this style.

Yes, the traditional cyberpunk narrative style does have it’s advantages (eg: the ‘information overload’ effect that jargon-filled cyberpunk narration creates), but occasional sections written using a ‘normal’ narrative voice can be a lot more funny.

This is because they stand out from the ‘traditional’ cyberpunk narration and because the more mundane narrative style helps to highlight the absurdity of the situation you’re describing.

For example, one of the other stories I wrote last year features ‘traditional’ jargon-heavy cyberpunk narration like: “I’d have to triple-wipe the local cache and then send a Bulgarian Burner routine to the cloud servers“.

But, when I wanted to describe an especially amusing use of futuristic technology, I subtly switched to a slightly more ‘old-fashioned’ narrative style: “A rotund man sat on top of the 3D copier machine with his trousers down, a plastic replica of his buttocks gently forming in the tray beside him“. This description happens during a longer description of things that are happening “off-line”, so the change in narrative style isn’t too jarring.

So, switching between cyberpunk and non-cyberpunk narrative styles can be a good way to add some comedy to your story if it’s done well.

3) Large and small jokes: If there’s one thing to be said for the cyberpunk genre, it’s that it is complex. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a genre that relies on “overloading” the reader with information in order to make itself seem like an especially “futuristic” type of science fiction.

So, use this complexity when you are writing cyberpunk comedy. Include a few small jokes scattered around your story, but also make sure that your story has a few “longer” jokes too. In other words, make sure that the central plot of your story is funny too. However, this is probably a lot easier to do in short fiction than it is to do in longer stories.

For example, in the two short stories I linked to earlier, the first one has a lot of small jokes about computer glitches, internet trolls etc…. But, the main joke of the story comes from an over-zealous moderator pre-emptively censoring the funniest line of the story. The main joke is either left to the audience’s imagination, or it’s that the moderator is acting like a humourless rule-obsessed zealot.

Likewise, the second story includes a few small jokes about how futuristic computer hackers don’t get holiday pay, how everyone is spending Christmas on the internet and about how grim futuristic cities are. However, at the very end of the story, it turns out that the whole story is just a cynical sci-fi retelling of a much more traditional Christmas story.

So, yes, include both large and small jokes in your cyberpunk comedy story.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂