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This, but also: to be honest, give me more cyberpunk that is actually written by people who are Not White. There's still so much to explore and say, but we get stuck with some real weird harmful BS that claims its Edginess is Nuanced. https://twitter.com/liquorcanini/status/1338412641211928576
To add: this may also be one of the main roots of my disdain when I see people writing the whole genre off as lost or pointless. Sure, maybe it is if you're only talking about the white stuff. But I don't think that others have been given nearly enough room to expand on it.
@temporalhiccup and BALIKBAYAN scratches the surface of possibility for Pinoy cyberpunk. Then you Talyerpunk, as coined by @bjrecio. @diwataMANILA and I riffed off of that for Public Utility Mechs. In all those cases, they were VERY different from "trad" cyberpunk.
One of my own goals with cyberpunk is to make games that are Metro Manila/The Philippines' current state personified: the bloody, careless corporate hellscape with a government that becomes the main prize of anyone who wrests the Presidency, and power always falls to a few clans.
The science fiction/cyberpunk elements in these cases will be somewhere between a What If, and a This Will Be Reality in XX Years. Cautionary tales, if you will, and a lens that I'd like to offer to a foreign audience that knows so little about my country.
So no, I personally don't think the genre is done. Not when we haven't been able to make room for the demographics that cyberpunk was meant for. Not when we don't have nearly as many visions of a cyberpunk setting that aren't white.
P.S. Fam a genre never "ends", okay, it just mutates, evolves, transforms, and expands.
Love,
A former literature professor
Love,
A former literature professor
