/lit/ - Literature

Specifically looking for charts that will make me a tactical genius, I've got to become the new shogun.

>>11932667
I've read an okay amount, and I'm always going through more, but I can at least estimate the starting points.

>level 1
William Gibson - Neuromancer
William Gibson - Burning Chrome
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
probably watch Blade Runner, too.

This is the level most people mean when they say "cyberpunk". I omit Snow Crash despite its popularity because for the sake of understanding the genre it probably does more harm than good, you really need to be familiar with Stephenson's sense of humor to figure out when he's shitposting and when he's not in that book. Level 1 has been reiterated into cliche, stamped with corporate brands, stuffed full of moronic allegories that never belonged there, and finally recycled into the Default Future(tm). But it's still important, and I still come back to it because the context makes it better.

>level 2
Mirrorshades anthology
John Shirley - City Come A Walkin'
Pat Cadigan - Synners
Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net
Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix
Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy
Lewis Shiner - Frontera

These are where you start to see the blur around the edges of the genre, where the cliches governing cyberpunk's perception no longer hold sway. It was influential within the scene, so it's obviously cyberpunk, and what's telling about that is that it bears the same approach to writing science fiction, and doesn't bear all of the markers that have retroactively been hammered into cliches.

>level 3 // apotheosis
John Shirley - Heatseeker
William S. Burroughs - The Soft Machine
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar

By this point the trappings of the genre are almost completely gone and the only thing remaining is the transgressive approach to science fiction, the style, the grime. Which are the reasons it's called cyberpunk in the first place.

Then fill out bibliographies, color in the edges, read shit like Bruce Bethke and K. W. Jeter that isn't necessarily important for literary reasons but is cool historically. Cyberpunk isn't a big genre, but it's an influential one. Most shit that happens after about 1990 is stuff I consider more 'inspired by cyberpunk', because by that time the community of writers, the "scene", had dissolved entirely and it's hard to weed out the writers who weren't just trying to go to bank on the rising popularity of the style. There's a ton of shit that's been written and I just haven't read enough of it. Though, it bears mentioning that Accelerando by Charles Stross has its own place in the acceleration Mega archive.

Of course, don't everyone take my word for it, I'm limited by what I read-- more strictly, limited by what I've read critically. Analyzing this movement for me is kinda like the Heidegger Trakl analysis that Nick Land re-analyzed. The fiction elucidates because it's detached from the pretensions of academics.