/lit/ - Literature

>>5318144
>The basic premise is something called Conflict Investment, where various large companies make money by supporting various foreign governments in war in exchange for
Well then it's at least realistic. That stuff is happening by now. (Btw another interesting aspect is the sector dedicated to the cyber arms race: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html))
>Which is basically by killing competing executives in car duels on the highway and taking their business cards off their mangled bodies as trophies.
So is it mainly just bleak violence without a true cyberpunk atmosphere ?
I guess I'm just going to download the ebook of it and buy it if it's better than Altered Carbon.

>>5318173
>Flashback by Dan Simmons also recomended
Sounds interesting. Btw I've seen this "stored memory experience" as a new media form in the PC game "Remember Me", a episode of Black Mirror the movie Minority Report and I think Nirvana or Strange Days and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 (pic related)
>Is A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick considered post-cyberpunk?
No, pretty sure it's not. As said earlier many of Dick's novels are some kind of new form of cyberpunk that I'd call "psyberpunk". But that's not post-cyberpunk (note that in PKD's books ie the way social implications are issued is rather on the mental level, not on the societal):

>"Person's essay advocates using the term postcyberpunk to label the new works such writers produce. In this view, typical postcyberpunk stories continue the focus on social implications within a post-third industrial-era society, such as a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information and cybernetic augmentation of the human body, but without the assumption of dystopia"

>>5318198
Well true, it's not really cyberpunk. It's BioPunk (& SciFi) but it does have elements of cyberpunk (some of them are amplified) like for example "low life, high tech" and human being "lost in/under the machine" and being on one's own with the organizing structure broken down that also invokes the cyberpunkish feeling of "it's not the end but you can see it from here" (also a Deus Ex quote).

>>5318212 Me too. The second book (and in some way the last few chapters of the first one) fit that description perfectly and I'm pretty sure you won't find a better book than it in this area (he's also implementing what Doctorow is addressing in this respect in Down & Out in a far better fashion). So don't stop reading if it at first seems like just some "techno-thriller". It's close to technological utopianism, yes. But I think that's an ill-fit term for books that premiere new(!) directions of ideology & societal organizations etc in conjunction with the ongoing rapid progress of technology. (Other than that "utopia" implies perfection [also with a connotation of unattainability] which none of those books imply)

>>5318336 Got to say that this would also fit Suarez' books if you were referring to them.