1. The Broken Soul Project

    The Broken Soul Project Active Member

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    Cyberpunk Films and Books to Study?

    Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by The Broken Soul Project, Nov 24, 2017.

    So I've now classifed my story as sort of a fantasy cyberpunk novel, and due to the rewrite that I'm working on with shattered outcast, i need visual research for the cyberpunk setting as well as some books to work off of.
    3 films that are banned will be the Matrix movies, Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner. I need other stuff other than those films.
     
  2. OJB

    OJB A Mean Old Man Contributor

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    Read works by Philip K. Dick (one of his books acts at the basis of Blade Runner), Frank Herbert, and John W. Campbell.
     
  3. Adenosine Triphosphate

    Adenosine Triphosphate Member Contributor

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    Snow Crash is a classic cyberpunk novel. It's also something of a parody, but the author plays it with a very straight face.

    Many of William Gibson's novels fall into the genre as well. Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, Idoru, etc. He also wrote a trilogy of novels (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) that are set in modern times but read similarly. My personal favorites are Idoru and the modern-day ones, but his others are pretty decent too.
     
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  4. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    Lauren Beukes' Moxyland
     
  5. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but it's no where near as dark as Blade Runner. That said, I don't think either the book or the film can be classed as cyberpunk.
     
  6. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    Well that's an interesting question.

    Blade Runner definitely has a the quintessential cyberpunk aesthetic, it's the Ur-Example, it's where everything takes it's inspiration from. But I agree it's not really a cyberpunk story, it has some cyberpunk themes but it's hard to see it in the same breath as more techy books. In fact Philip K Dick himself used 'androids' in a weird way, because (according to some special features about Blade Runner) he didn't really mean it in the sense of robots, he meant kinda blank, manufactured people. So that's... Weird.

    Anyway, some other stuff that hasn't come up: Akira, obviously. And The Fifth Element. Also Johnny Mnemonic, despite being shit is the only Gibson work to be a movie.

    On the subject, the best work of Gibson's to study is Burning Chrome because it's really short and has all the cyberpunk you need to learn. Also you cna check out two episodes of the X-Files that he wrote (one is First Person Shooter, the other I can't remember the name of).
     
  7. halisme

    halisme Contributor Contributor

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    If you're looking for games as well, I can recommend both Shadowrun and Deus Ex. The former is fantasy cyberpunk as well.
     
  8. Azuresun

    Azuresun Senior Member

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    Over in manga & anime, I'd recommend:

    Ghost in the Shell
    --either the original manga, the first animated film, or the TV series, each of which is a different continuity. It's broadly a police procedural series, with a team investigating crimes relating to cyborgs and artificial intelligence, with a lot of musing on where the line between human and machine is drawn--and if it even matters.

    (edit: whoops, didn't notice you'd ruled this one out!)

    Battle Angel Alita is a manga (the first part was adapted several years back), about a cyborg woman whose body is recovered from the Scrapyard, a massive dumping ground for a floating city, and home to a community of scavengers. Restored to life, she tries to recover the memories of who she was and how she got there. It has a very action-heavy focus, with lots of martial arts battles, but also does a good job of exploring the dystopian world and how it got that way.

    And lastly, Blame!. This one is probably the most distinct and striking one, with very little dialogue, a memorably stark design and colour palette, and themes that often cross between sci-fi and horror. It's set in a mega-city on an epic scale where the automated construction has run out of control after an unspecified disaster and small enclaves of surviving humans hide from murderous robots and the out-of-control "Safeguard" systems of the city. It follows a mysterious man named Killy, who seeks out a way to regain control of the city.
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2017
  9. Adenosine Triphosphate

    Adenosine Triphosphate Member Contributor

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    On that subject, System Shock and its sequel display pretty heavy cyberpunk themes. The architecture is very futuristic, when it isn't overrun by blood or organic material, both games have cyborgs for protagonists, and the backstory revolves around a single corporation of tremendous power, which owns most of the world economy by the second game. The sheer amount of body horror can distract from those elements, and the sequel throws in psychic powers, but the main villain is an A.I. unit created by a hacking operation gone bad, so it ultimately loops back.

    The second game is basically a war between corrupt cyberpunk and a warm, semi-mystical (yet utterly hideous) alien collective. It's exactly as bleak as it sounds.
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2017
  10. Damien Loveshaft

    Damien Loveshaft Active Member

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    The rpg system Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. is dearly beloved to me. It has cool world building and a short story of sorts inside it. I never liked the way shodawrun handled its forced last minute fantasy elements.

    Serial Experiments Lain - an anime from the late 90s I believe. It focuses heavily on "The Wired" and the fine line between people and the internet. Also nano-machine drugs and self upgrading.

    Akira is hugely important; if you haven't seen it I highly recommend you do. It's basically cyberpunk with ESP.

    I've never had the chance to see it, but I heard Johnny mnemonic is cyberpunk. Also, a friend of mine recommended the anime Ergo Proxy.
     
  11. Seren

    Seren Writeaholic

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    Cyberpunk 2077 will be coming out sometime in the future as well. And if you're not a gamer, there's nothing to stop you from watching a walkthrough on YouTube. People sometimes even upload all the cutscenes especially for people to watch just like a movie. So maybe that will qualify as a film for you. (And even if it comes out after you're finished with your visual research, it might give you some fresh ideas.) :)
     
  12. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    Excellent replies upthread, the only thing I can add (although it's heavily fantasy, it's fantasy that takes place in conflict with cyberpunk tech) is Immortal (also known as Immortal ad Vitam or ゴッド・ディーバ [God Diva] in Japanese).

    [​IMG]
     
  13. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    It's funny that you say it because almost every System-Shock-alike has been cyberpunk, and it's part of the reason why I still have a massive erection for them. System Shock 1 and System Shock 2 were, all the Deus Exes, the new Prey (which personally I thought was quite good), and there's even a lot of cyberpunk themes in BioShock although you'd probably rather call DieselPunk. And as others have said; Shadowrun and Cyberpunk itself. And there's a little known but very cool pen and paper RPG called Eclipse Phase that is very cyberpunk (suicide missions into nanoplague infested buildings :D) except it also has space whales that live in the sun :D.
     
  14. TWErvin2

    TWErvin2 Contributor Contributor

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    A movie to look at might be Johnny Mnemonic.

    A cyberpunk novel trilogy that is decent but never seemed to catch on is the Street series by Ryan A. Span (Empathy, Clairvoyance, and Precognition)
     
  15. Mouthwash

    Mouthwash Senior Member

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    Echopraxia isn't classified as such, but the setting is straight cyberpunk.

    Noah Smith is of the opinion that the real world is pretty cyberpunk-y already.
     
    Last edited: Dec 17, 2017
  16. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    Honestly, I think that's miguided of him. For all our advances in the past decades and the changes we've seen in our culture I would say that we are still a long way from cyberpunk. We might have managed to create reasonably close facsimiles of cyberpunky technologies but that somewhat misses the point of cyberpunk. To someone who grew up using a ZX Spectrum then today certainly looks very futuristic. But cyberpunk doesn't mean futuristic. Cyberpunk has 'nightmarish dystopia' almost built into the phrase. That's what makes it different to Star Trek. Just having VR goggles on the market doesn't make us cyberpunk.

    There's two specific things that are really important to cyberpunk settings that we don't have here, at least not in the western world. The first is unchecked corporate power. In Gibson's Sprawl the corporations can just kill people, no questions asked. No under the counter dealing, no bribes required. If you work for a megacorp then the police simply won't touch you. Hell in Count Zero a corporation slings a nuclear weapon at it's own research facility (on US soil no less) to try and stop someone defecting to another corporation. The 'extractor' who is trying to bring that scientist out describes other jobs, including crashing a school bus with cannisters of nerve cast strung along the sides into a corporate building. And that was just business as normal. While I would agree that today's megacorps have more power than we would like they aren't quite that. They don't have their own mercenary armies, they aren't literally murdering their competition to steal their new technologies. And, notably, the fact that corporations aren't paying taxes is a big political issue right now and governments across the world are trying to figure out how to stop them doing it. In a cyberpunk world that would simply be impossible.

    Secondly; I can appreciate that a certain kind of people can't help but see Mr Trump as an idiot or a madman; as a stooge for Russia or for Big Business or whoever else you want to say. But he's not. He's no worse than Bush II, no worse than Reagan, no worse than Nixon. He's a divisive figure, certainly. But he's not something new. He's not us plunging into a dystopia. The hysteria around politics today (and yes, it's just as bad over here in Britain, it's just different issues) is what is making every single thing out to be some catastrophic end of the world event. But it's not man. It's just not. As for Russia and their online meme wars; that's the same thing the US did for decades in South America and Asia, just using new means. And in fact out of the Snowden leaks (I think? One of the leaks anyway) we can see that the NSA is doing the same thing, creating memes to push messages online. It's all just the same old same old. World powers wielding power. And if you think that's something new then you can look at any point in past 500 years and see Britain or France or Russia or even Holland and Portugal doing this same stuff; screwing with foreign governments for their own interests. This is not new.

    Either we've always been living in a dystopia or we never have. Personally I think there's a good argument to be made that we have always been dystopian, right back to the Roman republic where senators murdered radical popularii leaders. Human nature prevents us from being truly utopian. But we aren't doing anything new now, there hasn't been some fundamental shift in power or in political landscape. And I don't want to call an era when I have a computer in my pocket that is more powerful than the desktops I grew up using an era that is terrifying and dystopian. Technology brings change and it brings challenges, but it doesn't make us cyberpunks just because we all are logged into the web all the time.
     
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  17. Adenosine Triphosphate

    Adenosine Triphosphate Member Contributor

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    Come to think of it, System Shock 2 was probably the first cyberpunk work I finished, other than TV shows as a small child that I didn't really pay attention to. The largest plot twist was obvious from the beginning, in part because I'd halfway spoiled it years earlier, but it didn't detract much for me. It feels less cheap than most horror stories. There aren't many jump scares, and the enemies are more fleshed out. Plenty of games use mutants or reanimated corpses, but the Many's hybrids are still human enough to suffer, even when they're trying to beat your skull in.
     
  18. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    System Shock 2 is almost certainly one of the best games ever made, and I will brook no disagreement on that fact. The only games that touch it are it's offspring; Deus Ex 1 and 3. What was so unique about it was the way that it melded together survival horror with first person shooting and with RPG and with a setting that really sucked you into it. It was a game that trusted you as a player to do things off your own back. And sometimes the best thing to do was cower in a corner and hope the monsters will go away and that is something really powerful. A lot of games would make you cower, make you hide, use a cut scene to show you just how damn scary everything is. In System Shock 2 you are just paralyzed by the sound of the Many's creatures just outside the door, all by yourself.

    The best thing about it IMHO? The way that you are just alone. You hear other people's voices through the logs as you piece together the plot of what's happened here. But you are just you by yourself in an extremely hostile place trying to survive long enough to figure out what you need to do to get out of it. This is the real magic in the game. And it's something so successful that it still really works. It was a magic ingredient in Half-Life too, and in BioShock (a game that I still haven't finished because... Eh, I think it's overrated). It worked really effectively in the new Prey. A spin of it was used in Deus Ex, where there are people around but you can't trust anyone.

    Solitude is a critical element. It's how you can create a very strong sense of agency in the character and a sense of power at the right times because every challenge overcome they know they did it themselves. But it also allows you to make the player feel very small and fragile and scared too, because it's just the players wits and resources and you can stretch them past the limit and make them hide and sneak and hope not to be caught.

    And this is actually something very important to what cyberpunk is. Cyberpunk characters seldom if ever really trust each other, they seldom if ever have meaningful relationships. They are very self reliant, very tough, and can even be very powerful (J C Denton et al), but equally they are just one man against the might of the corporate machine. They can win and keep winning, keep killing the bad guys over and over but can they ever hope to really win? They might be able to achieve something meaningful to them, but they never achieve anything on a grand scale. They define their own sense of success because there is no way they could genuinely make a cyberpunk world better. They are still fundamentally alone at the end.

    This is why I always come back to Burning Chrome as the best place to look at cyberpunk. Because Automatic Jack and Bobby Quine are, in theory, a strong, long term partnership. But Jack is always kinda rolling his eyes at Quine. He sees the guy as a poser; a useful poser because he's a great hacker, but the way he just sits in the cool bar with his shades on looking cool is just... Urgh. Jack eventually steals Quine's girl, uses his ill gotten gains to buy her a flight to Chiba City, but he never sees her again. And both of them are still kinda alone. They aren't really close. They just work together. And for all of the drama of their great hack, what difference does it make to anything? Nothing. None at all. They make some money. But they are both still alone.

    Oh and, to get back on topic... Another good thing to look at for cyberpunk stuff is Beneath A Steel Sky, a game which is now available entirely for free and is both funny ("Hey you need a rad suit to go in there!" "Well I think this suit is pretty rad!") and sad and weird and is well worth a play.
     

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