/lit/ - Literature

>>6671856
>watching/reading derivate material before the original

>>6671876
You're not wrong about the anime, man. The Dick novels are definitely a prototype for the style though.

Completely feel you op, neuromancer was a novel I forced myself to finish. I haven't read snow crash but I'm hopeful I'll find it at least fun.

This Brazilian cover is badass.

>>6671933
cyberpunk masterpieces belong to other genres - mgs 2, serial experiments lain, texhnolyze, blade runner, transmetropolitan... and in most cases it's just a sideshow, cyberpunk is technofetishistic epistemology at its core. literature works relied too much upon noir style.

>>6671856
>are there any cyberpunk novels worth reading?

Software - Rudy Rucker
When Gravity Falls - George Alec Effinger
Islands in The Net - Bruce Sterling
Mirrorshades
Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi? It's more biopunk than anything but it's immensely more readable imo.

>>6671917
Snow Crash was essentially a satire of the emerging cyberpunk movement; it's ridiculous and completely over the top. If you found Neuromancer a slog to read, I'd say Snow Crash is much easier to digest.

>>6671956
>texhnolyze
So boring that 12 years later I still haven't forced myself to finish it.

>>6671999
trips tell the truth

>>6671956
I'm starting think pretty much the same thing.
>>6671962
I'll give some of those a shot.

>>6671962
>it's ridiculous and completely over the top
I can appreciate that kind of thing so I think I may dig it.

>Snow Crash
I'm too lazy, but I expect to see a meme one day with Neil Stephenson's face and captioned [pooning intensifies]

>>6671999
I forced myself to watch this because I thought Serial Experiments Lain was great and this was always recommended as being in the same vein.

I ground through it. The antagonist being incredibly passive worked with a YOUNG CHILD at the mercy of inhuman forces. However, when applied to a grown fucking man who whips people's asses for a living it was another tedious pathetic anime omega male. I understand being butthurt about getting your arm hacked off but I've known quite a few people who lost limbs and DIDN'T have them replaced by a smoking hot babe who literally rubs her titties on you while you're convalescing and none of them got as angsty. The series was agonizingly slow and relentlessly nihilistic. It had some decent aesthetics, a few neat settings, and did a good job portraying hopelessness but it takes too many dumps on the viewer. Also fuck Ichise, what a goddamn bitch. Get over yourself.

>>6671856
Neither Neuromancer nor Snow Crash are particularly interesting novels, they are boring because they lack characters and themes and as you've said it it is just aesthetics. It would make for a great movie, but it's really just schlock sf. In all honesty The First Heretic, a warhammer novel, is deeper, has better prose.

>>6673757
neuromancer is a very good novel that's also monumentally influential. if you look only at it's plot it's a simple caper but it made most of what slew of subsquent works tried to imitate.

>>6673741
play yume nikki

>>6671856

>cyberpunk thread
>no Asimov's Foundation
>no Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep?
>k.

Vurt is a gem, True Names is great, as is The Cookie Monster short story. Shockwave Riders is tedious.

>>6673862
i had no idea foundation was cyberpunk and pkd is some sort of proto-cyberpunk, also a writer that transcends the genre focused mainly on style. lesser writers like gibson deserve that moniker, pkd dealt with identity problems.

>>6673899
thanks, didn't read any of these. looks interesting.

>>6673899
Cookie Monster is pretty great, have you played MGS 2? It gets relatively close to that kind of 'AI' treatment. As for Vurt, it reads very punky from the get-go, maybe Burgess was bit of an influence since it's so big on the language though not as good at mystification. I like it when a novel opens with a well done action sequence.

>>6673967
Foundation isn't Cyberpunk at all, it's boring parochial shit. Dick may well be "proto-cyberpunk" but I can't believe you haven't read Androids if "Bladerunner is one of [your] favorite movies."

Anyway I think your problem is that Neuromancer is too old (it's not "groundbreaking" to you anymore like it was "at the time") and Snow Crash is too full of 90s irony. You've got some good recs in this thread, so I hope you'll find something you like.

I like Bubblegum Crisis too, even though it's all style.

>>6675864
I haven't read Dick much in general and Blade Runner isn't one of my favourite movies but it is a masterpiece. I find it lacks pacing a bit, I like some other Scott's movies better (Duellists, Alien etc). I plan to read Dick a lot more but Androids are certainly his lesser novel and I have no incentive to pick it up.

Neuromancer is still groundbreaking to me and whole Sprawl trilogy is fun, I'd say Count Zero is the best of the three.

>>6675864
This is OP. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I never said that I didn't. I just listed UBIK and Palmer Eldritch as examples because I like those more and it still gets my point across.

It's not really just that Neuromancer is old. The PKD novels are mentioned are almost 20 years older than Neuromancer. It's because it is old and doesn't have enough impact on me other than it being a historical piece.

>>6675896
>Blade Runner isn't one of my favourite movies but it is a masterpiece.
>Neuromancer is still groundbreaking to me
Sorry, I assumed you were OP.

>Androids are certainly his lesser novel
What do you mean by that? I would say Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly are his most widely read books. Stuff like Ubik and The Man in the High Castle are also well received and well known, but he wrote a lot more outside of all that, so I'm not sure how you figure Androids as a lesser title. Other than, perhaps, in size: it's a fairly short read. It's been a long time since I read any PKD, so maybe a more "adult" reader wouldn't find him as interesting as I did as a teenager, but who knows.

>Sprawl trilogy is fun
Years ago in high school I read a fraction of Neuromancer, and even though the prose was gripping and the setting was fascinating, I misplaced the file I was reading from and never got around to finishing the book. I've been concerned it might be a bit dated by now, but since you say the series is still "groundbreaking" perhaps I'll pick it up again someday soon and give it another shot.

>>6671856
the problem is most cyberpunk is garbage.

check out diamond age, though that is post cyberpunk

cory doctorow has some good cyberpunk/post cyberpunk. eastern standard tribe is a weird instance of "modern" cyberpunk despite technology quickly superceding the story. It has the "retro-future" feel you get from 90s sci fi where they have fax machines and shit.

Rule 34 might be up your alley. It's about a cybercrimes division in london and about someone who is murdering people by shoving dildos up their ass filled with painkillers and then feeding them cranberry juice.

Know any cyberpunks?

>>6677236
I have read PKD's biography and various essays on his work, no one counts Androids as an important novel apart from it being famous through Blade Runner adaptation.

Neuromancer was certainly groundbreaking in a sense that it wasn't the first cyberpunk novel but it is the one that spawned the whole subgenre; Gibson is a very good fetishist and his early work is charmingly retro today (abstract hacking sequences). I think whole of cyberpunk is dated today when we can see that singularity is perhaps unobtainable, that AI research is stagnating, that fusion of flesh and machine is not simple at all (those bionic arms are still pretty simple and there is no direct brain connection, they just reroute impulses to part of the arm that then moves the prosthesis) and subgenre of a subgenre - biopunk - seems to be far more viable. In a sense Island of Dr. Moreau is more pertinent to contemporary society that Neuromancer could ever hope to be. I think it's a fair assessment because cyberpunk often prided itself as being less idealistic than hard-sci fi and perhaps that prophetic streak has done its 'realism' in.

Cyberpunk really works only on a visual medium for me, be it video games, movies, drawings etc.

Most of the actual writers are pretty terrible with prose and only ever had neat ideas about things and that's it, you could just read cliffnotes of their works instead.

>>6678457

>visual medium

ALGAE (Adaptive Learning GAme dEsign) model, a comprehensive adaptive learning model

>>6677268
>murdering people by shoving dildos up their ass filled with painkillers and then feeding them cranberry juice.

what

>>6671856
There was some good shit in the Mirrorshades Anthology, and those are short stories so you've got nothing to lose. A lot of Gibson's short stories are also really good. Thinking of Dogfight.