Murderbot is MurderBACK in the next installment of Martha Wells’s NYT bestselling Murderbot Diaries series System Collapse 🤖🚀

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Following the events of Network Effect, our favorite lethally cybernetic television fiend has done the previously unthinkable: agreed to accompany the sentient spaceship Perihelion (dubbed ART by Murderbot, short for Asshole Research Transport) and crew on its next mission. 

Unfortunately, they’re not going to get too far. 

Having failed to harvest dangerous artifacts from their target planet by way of Murderbot misadventure, the Barish-Estranza corporation is much angered and determined to recoup their considerable losses. And when you’re a lethally opportunistic space corp, blood and muscle are valuable currency. 

Murderbot, ART’s crew, and the Preservation humans have planetside work to do as Barish-Estranza seeks to claim the planet’s beleaguered colony as a conscripted workforce.  But for Murderbot, the challenge is as internal as it is external. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with it. Normal operational parameters are unmet, but with the corp’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams en route, Murderbot needs to resolve its issues, and fast!

Lancelot: Egad sire! Look at that. King Arthur: Hm, rare to see a VW Beetle this far north. Not impossible, mind.

So obviously, the most obnoxious and useless sort of science fiction criticism is provided by angry dumb guys screaming into microphones about things being "woke"; but I also get annoyed by the people who insist on applying a sort of "roman-á-clé" reading, where everything in the story is merely a disguised stand-in for some real-world human political issue. Like, yes, obviously, sf is used for social and political commentary a lot of the time; but it's *also* used to just kind of play around on the frontiers of possibility. And it frankly seems kind of demeaning to the genre to pretend that its alien, its bizarre, and its inhuman features are necessarily just stand-ins for some mundane, real-world concept. Like, yes, clearly The War of the Worlds is about colonialism; but it's also about alien life; it's also about evolution and ecology; and it's also about "Wouldn't it be fucked up if THIS happened!?" And all of these are irreducible from the genre. Is your robot autistic? Well, maybe you can read it that way. Maybe it's a sincere attempt to imagine a nonhuman mechanical intelligence. Maybe it's both. Sometimes, you write a story strictly for "Wouldn't it be fucked-up if..." purposes and it ends up shedding a whole new light on the human condition; in fact, I think that, if you're taking your concept seriously, it should do this by default. But you have to take the bizarre on its own terms or you might as well be reading realism.

here is a concept: time travel cop, fish & wildlife division

most of their job is dealing with the kinds of assholes who think black market tiger cubs are a great idea right up until someone gets mauled, except these are even bigger assholes with black market Smilodon cubs that they are even less equipped to care for

this is the most straightforward and therefore relatively headache-free part of their job, because it’s the same “put that thing back where it came from or so help me” song and dance every time

it’s also significantly less depressing than the trophy hunters who don’t even want an alive extinct animal. those are extra annoying because you have to undo the time travel that let them kill that poor Megatherium or thylacine or anklyosaur or whatever, and it’s always so much extra paperwork.

and those people suck, definitely, and have fully earned a stint in Time Jail. no question. but they still do not create anywhere near as much work as the obsessive hobbyists with their exhaustively careful best practices and worryingly good track-covering. also, weirdly, it’s almost always birds with them?

like. the guys who will flagrantly abuse Time Law to bird-nap breeding pairs just long enough to raise one clutch of eggs apiece, and return them seamlessly to their spots on the timeline. who are so determined to keep their pet (ha) projects going that no one even realizes what they’re doing until they have an entire stable breeding population of passenger pigeons up and running. who are now the reason that reps from six different zoos are about to start throwing hands right in front of you over who gets dibs.

those guys cause the most paperwork. and half the time they’re snapped up by the same zoo or wildlife preserve that gets their colony of ivory-billed woodpeckers or Carolina parakeets or — once, very memorably — giant fucking South Island moa, and they never even spend a day in Time Jail.

Ooh! There have been a few "surprise, not extinct!" events recently, again weirdly almost always birds, though occasionally fish. What if they really did go extinct, but someone from 2459 went back to 1900, built up a minimum breeding population in 2459, and then released them into the wild in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015? Releasing new groups every five years in our century would avoid a sudden suspicious population surge and no one would think to look for the culprit in their own century because Jerdon’s Babbler (real-world example, rediscovered in 2014) has always been there/then.

You could build a novel around the relationship between the time cop and the rogue bird lover. The time cop caught the bird lover over the passenger pigeons. They went to time jail for 10 years outside the timeline, and then were hired to manage the passenger pigeons by an accredited zoo's. The time cop suspects they're still up to something, but other than the passenger pigeons, all they appear to be doing is raising research colonies of perfectly ordinary birds. Except all the species they're working with were believed to be extinct at one point....

One thing real world zoos do now is...well...something like elven changelings if you think about it. They time the mating of a captive breeding pair to that of an isolated wild breeding pair in places where inbreeding is a serious risk. Then they swap a captive-born offspring for a wild-born--each breeding pair unknowingly raising a foster. Both zoos and the wild population get improved genetic diversity, without the risk inherent in "rewilding" a zoo-born adult. Doing that with birds and time travel would be even easier--grab an egg, take it to the future, raise and breed it, take an egg back to the original nest. The original parents raise their grandchild, not their child.

The hardest part for me would be explaining why the time cop thought this was wrong!

oh I love all of this. i think the time cop would eventually just be like “PLEASE get a license from an accredited zoo already so i can stop having to deal with you” but the accredited zoos aren’t on board with the “release into the wild 200 years ago” part of the scheme

and also our rogue bird enthusiast has a white whale and that white whale is Haast’s eagle

had to stop playing 5d chess with multiverse time travel because my knights fell in love and kept going back in time to save each other in every timeline and creating paradoxical time loops and it was just this whole thing

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

Proposal for a Watsonian explanation:

In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:

1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”

2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.

3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.

4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)

The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.

Hmm.  This is a fair point.  It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter.  Wasn’t made in Texas.”

I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well.  I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients. 

1. It is not just hipsters that act like this about food. All the grandmothers I know feel this way too, and I don’t see that ever changing.

The missing ingredient is love, obviously. You can’t get that from a replicator.

Right, for that you need the holodeck.

Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here: 

The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better. 

Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us. 

First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat. 

You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales. 

You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship. 

You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow  your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass. 

The tamale tastes like home. 

You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it. 

Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and 

Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods. 

The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma. 

Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste. 

Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better? 

Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it. 

And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.

I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.

Fourth:

You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement. 

The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea. 

It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge. 

If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does. 

holy shit boo this is fucking AMAZEBALLS and I miss the tamale ladies at Stone on the way to the Target so much right now but also you *hugs you tight*

Also, regional recipes are calibrated to work with the local tap water. That’s why pizza from New York and sourdough from San Francisco taste better–the micro-organisms in the water enhance the flavor. The chili that wasn’t made in Texas probably did taste subtly different than it would’ve back home.

There are lots of things that would change with replicators because they take out the human factor.

Maybe you really wanted that one meal from that one restaurant except the restaurant doesn’t release their recipe so it’s slightly off and always will be.

You programmed the replicator with your mum’s favourite mac and cheese recipe, but you didn’t know that your mum always added a little more salt and a little less mustard than the recipe called for, so it’s just not the same and it’s not as good.

Pretty much this. Also I think we cannot overstate the degree to which “the food always comes out exactly the same” would end up bothering people over time.

Important point is that these are “military grade” food replicators and military food is never really great. Hence the difficulty with the tea. Food replicators in private homes and restaurants are more controllable and may have programming for varieties of chilies or tomatoes or even carrots. There are 4 basic kinds of carrots but only one is available commercially, the others need to be grown at home. With a programmable home replicator one can have chantenay carrots… all the infinite varieties of foodstuff ingredients will be available with the right programming and therefore civilians in the 24th century in star trek will have perfectly customisable food. My mind is boggled now…

For a real-world example, but in the other direction:

When I was a child, my mother used to make chili using “Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix.” It made… okay chili.

When I was in college I found a book called “Chili Madness” at a local used bookstore, that had the winning recipes from the National Chili Cookoff for the last 30 years. It included Carroll Shelby’s actual recipe. So I made it. (Had to get one of my apartment mates to source beer for me, as I was not of age to purchase it yet.)

Wow. What a difference. Adding the spices at different times rather than as a blob of “spice mix”. Beer instead of water. No masa. So good!

So the bagged mix would be the replicator mix in this scenario.

@subbyp you said what about the tap water?

It has microscopic crustaceans in it.

i always figured they’d have a gourmet chef produce a dish, scan the pattern, store the pattern in a database, and there you go. same dish every time, until the end of time. just have a masterclass chef who had this one dish they’re passionate about and have them make it.

but then you’ll run into the problem of ‘it’s a great dish but it ain’t what pappy used to make’. and that’s that.

look, you can get a gourmet chef to make you some artisanal mac n’ cheese, and it’d be great mac n’ cheese, stellar even. and the computer will even reproduce it indistinguishable from the masterclass chef’s creation- but sometimes the palette of the common folk don’t want the 12 layers of flavor in a masterclass chef’s fancy mac n’ cheese, you just want mac n’ cheese.

sometimes we do be wanting that uncultured stuff.

look, with all the minecraft builders of today, i highly doubt there isn’t some dedicated ensign or other, mucking around in the ship’s library, trying to reproduce a taste of home.

and they’ll probably frankenstein a pretty good approximation that they’ll be so proud of, they’ll have it served at their funeral.

forget that one time i saved a planet’s civilization from radiation poisoning, i finally got the mac n’ cheese right. and it’s just the generic box store mac n’ cheese with butter and cheddar.

fuck the gourmet chef’s 12 layers of flavor, some butter and cheddar? that’s where it’s at.

I don’t know shit about Star Trek but I can tell you:

As a child I loved the hard, crumbly, springy, salty feta cheese that was sold at the deli in Market Basket. (Tell me you’re from NE without telling me-) The deli clerk would pick up these great blocks of feta and put them in a plastic container full of brine. In the UK i was startled to learn that this is not Greek feta cheese, and that feta cheese is actually soft and sweet and sour and smeary, and I don’t like it at all. The closest thing to the experience, “my” “feta” cheese, is Apetina (sold as salad cheese - it isn’t legally feta) when cubed and sold in brine. And it isn’t it. I read pages trying to understand what Apetina is, and it isn’t Feta because it comes from Denmark, not a specific area of Greece, but that doesn’t explain why Market Basket feta and Apetina are both tasty and brittle and dry and briny, and Actual Real Feta is like failed chèvre. “The terrain on which the animals graze (in Greece) is very different from that of Denmark,” one website offered hopelessly. I don’t think a work cafeteria is prepared to deal with this, I really don’t.

Annie’s macaroni with white cheddar, in the purple box with the bunny on it. Smartfood popcorn. Smartfood popcorn! I crossed an ocean not realising I wouldn’t eat it again. People have, with the best of intentions, have heard my grief about this tried to tell me how to make Mac and cheese from scratch as if I don’t fucking know. This is not a bechamel, sir, this is not a roux-based sauce, this is white cheddar powder and if you don’t know then you don’t know. Operating under wild cravings, I bought a packet of UK-produced cheddar powder from apparently the only company in Europe that makes it - apparently as a protein supplement - and cannot explain what is wrong with it to my own family, let alone a computer. Let alone a catering company. Let alone a work canteen run by a catering company’s computer. “White cheddar popcorn,” you say, and it gives you popcorn covered in cold grated cheese. We can’t even reconcile this between friends on a planet let alone the vastness of all spacetime.

Those Maruchan creamy chicken ramen noodle packets - did you know they stopped existing? They never will again. Do you remember them enough to teach a computer?

When my husband moved to the US he just could not get sausage. He was astonished by American sausage: sweet breakfast sausage, fennel sausage, hot sausage - but could not get back bacon (“Canadian bacon?” “No, back bacon”) or sausages for a fry up. He found an English butcher in the USA that would ship the right kind on ice, and had a fry up and was happy. Now I think suddenly of hot sausage, Market Basket again with those twelve-packs of weirdly red sausage. If we can’t argue these distinctions with people then what can we do?

Did you know that Old El Paso spice mixes, those cheap “Mexican” ones, have the same names and packaging but the ingredients vary by country? Just like Coca-Cola, thought to be the universal American import, actually being made from the cheapest sugar source in the country of manufacture.

I don’t know anything about Star Trek. I am absolutely starving.

what if we meet intelligent alien life out there but the novelty eventually wears off and we’re back to “i wonder if we’re alone in the universe or if there’s more than just humans and galorphasians”

The first thing you discover when using the philosophers stone is that since Pb weighs 202 g/mol and Au 197 g/mol, every mole transmuted causes a 107 kiloton TNT explosion. You will not make a second discovery, for obvious reasons.

Edge of the Woods is on GoodReads!

If you are also on GoodReads, it would be neat-o if you added it to your want-to-read shelf!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57056762-edge-of-the-woods

You might be interested in reading this book if you like:

- More queer characters than straight ones (and all the MCs are queer) - (Literal) alpha heroines and (not-literal) beta heroes - Werewolves and vampires treated pseudo-scientifically, a la X-Files - Actually if you like the X-Files this has got some of that flavor to it I’m not gonna lie - Battle couples - Romantic subplots with a major emphasis on consent - Lycanthropy and vampirism not being used as sloppy metaphors for racism, homophobia, transphobia, or AIDS because the werewolves and vampires are racially diverse, gay, trans, and lived through the AIDS crisis. - An entire, book-long running joke tribute to What We Do in the Shadows - A romantic couple who are both chonky - Beating up fascists 

(You can also read a content warning concerning my hero’s career path here on my website).

it’s a valid question

Anyway, my sister-in-law would like me to remind everyone that speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons (and its multilingual sibling magazine, Samovar) are 100% free to read, are always looking for stories by and about marginalized people (all flavors of queer/non-straight/non-cis and intersex, POC, disabled, etc forever), and pay their authors, artists, and translators professional rates for stories that are available to read for free online. They are especially proud to focus on content about a particular identity whenever bigots get up in arms about their inclusion (or, as was the case with the Sad/Rabid Puppies and the Hugos a few years back, have completely misunderstood what the magazine and its staff stand for).

Thank you, that is all.

Thank you for adding links! I know Tumblr can be wonky about stuff that gets linked in replies sometimes, so I wanted to give you a direct boost as well 👍

Anyway, yes! Everyone! Go check out Strange Horizons and Samovar!

(This post got way more popular than I expected it to, and I am living for it.)

@thebibliosphere this looks like something you / your followers would be interested in

Ah, Strange Horizons, they’ve published quite a few of my friends back from the old LJ days. I’d forgotten all about them. Ty for the reminder!

The whole “how the hell does this predatory creature get enough sustenance” thing that plagues fantasy and sci-fi occasionally gets so absurd it loops around into being funny, like the scene in Star Wars when the Millenium Falcon is flying through an asteroid field and gets swallowed by a worm.

I could complain about that, but I could also conclude that the supply of reckless space pilots flying into asteroid fields has been consistent enough for the past few million years for animals to evolve to prey upon them.

Who knows. Maybe there are enough adventuring parties roaming about the Forest of Doom to increase the available biomass at their trophic level in order to sustain tertiary consumers like giant spiderwolves...

“You’re going into the Catacombs? No one survives the Catacombs! Many an adventurer has tried!”

“Uh, how many have tried?”

“Enough to form an entire ecological niche for species specialized to prey upon them!”

“Oh. That, uhh, that is a lot.”

“Right? It’s pretty fascinating actually. I’m writing my thesis on it right now.”

Cyberpunk and the Dark Future of Yesterday

In a minor quibble, I didn’t say, “bad,” I said that “beam weapons wouldn’t fit” with a cyberpunk setting. So, let’s dig into what Cyberpunk as a genre is, where’s it’s ended up, and why I don’t think high-energy weapons fit very well with the genre, even though they are part of it.

The original literature that would become cyberpunk came from William Gibson. For someone living in 2020, it’s hard to articulate just how much the presented world departed from contemporary reality. Early cyberpunk, both from Gibson and also Neil Stephenson focused heavily on worlds heavily influenced by the internet in an era when home computers were still a rarity, used by hobbyists and (the rare) home business.

It’s also important to reference just how radical a departure cyperpunk was from contemporary science fiction, when Neuromancer first hit the market. This was written in the aftermath of authors like Asimov and Clarke. While there were subversive elements, (Phillip K. Dick comes to mind), but a lot of contemporary science fiction was written with the philosophy that technological progress would lead to a better world. If you wanted dystopic material, you needed to look to authors like Margret Atwood, or the post-apocalyptic genre that fed on late-Cold War anxieties.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) came into the picture at roughly the same time, but this wasn’t trying to create a new genre. Blade Runner was heavily inspired by mid-century film noir, and was using that visual language while adapting one of Phillip K. Dick’s novels (Do Andorids Dream of Electric Sheep?) The novel presents a world that is in the process of going into complete ecological collapse. There’s a lot of elements that the film never discusses which still influence the world, and the resulting urban collapse mixed with neo-noir aesthetics created much of the visual language we associate with the cyberpunk genre today.

The thing is, the world that Gibson created is shockingly low tech compared to what you’d probably associate with modern cyberpunk. Most of his work (at least, what I’ve read of it) follows a similar pattern. cyberpunk is the world with a few technological embellishments, and the utter economic devastation of Reaganomics writ large. (Remember, we’re talking about books written in the 80s.)

A lot of the aesthetic elements which came to be synonymous with cyberpunk build out of a snapshot of the 80s. Japan’s economic bubble was at it’s most aggressive, and as a result many writers envisioned a world where Japan’s influence would be felt heavily world-wide. In the moment, this felt like a natural progression from what people were seeing. Today (without context) it feels like an arbitrary inclusion. Japan’s bubble burst decades ago, and the vast majority of Japanese businesses which were investing abroad ended up selling off their foreign assets, either to stay solvent, or during bankruptcy.

To a degree, cyberpunk was a remarkably prescient genre. Gibson (and others) accurately predicted that computers would be become far more prevalent in everyday life, and their networks would expand well beyond the military and academic networks which existed at the time. They predicted the dramatic rise in corporate power, and economic inequality of the last 40 years. Squint a little, and you can even see hints of the gig economy popping up decades before it would filter into the real world.

Reading early cyberpunk, it can be easy to miss some of the satirical elements, because they’ve become reality. I’m thinking specifically of the private security for gated communities in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Though, the part where Snow Crash‘s protagonist is basically an early Second Life adopter in a world where people still care about Second Life is also on point.

So, it’s 2020. Blade Runner was set in the distant future of last year. Many of the original genre’s predictions for the future became today’s headlines. If you wrote a crime thriller set today, and hopped in a time machine to sell it in 1985, it’d be cyberpunk. No bionic implants (probably), but smart phones, computer forensics, the internet, traffic cameras, DNA testing, goddamn Wikipedia, livestreams. This is a cyberpunk dystopia. And, much like the early cyberpunk literature, all the cool stuff that sci-fi had promised its characters, like ray guns, flying cars, and space travel, we miss out on all the cool stuff cyberpunk promised us, like cybernetic limbs, smart guns, and affordable rent.

This is not the genre you were probably thinking of, and you’re not wrong. There’s a second cyberpunk genre that exists parallel to the first. Cyberpunk is a dystopic genre of retrofuturism. As the real world calendar has clicked forward, the timeframe for this sub-genre kept pace. For example the classic RPG Cyberpunk 2020, is now set in 2045, because it’s been 32 years, and 2020 isn’t the distant future. (And, yes, that is Mike Pondsmith’s setting, which is the basis for the repeatedly delayed Cyberpunk 2077.)

Influenced by many things, cyberpunk retrofuturism is the sci-fi setting that cuts uncomfortably close to the real world, except they’re still using CRT monitors, have advanced cybernetic augmentation, more neon lights, and a general aesthetic that looks more like Miami Vice than what you see when you look outside.

To be fair, on aesthetic level, I really like 70s and 80s retrofuturism. It’s an aesthetic I grew up with. Being told, “this is what the future will look like,” it’s been disappointing to get older and not see that emerge.

While I know it aggravates William Gibson, there’s nothing wrong with simply stealing that aesthetic, calling it cyberpunk, and running wild with it.

Both of these genre interpretations are valid. If you want a retro-future dystopia, both can be simultaneous inspirations. I’d argue that, if you remember where the genre came from, and use is at a vector for tech-social commentary, your resulting work will be stronger. Cyberpunk began as science fiction, and the genre allows you to cut deeply into real world society and politics.

If you want to talk about systemic racism, economic inequality, erosion of civil rights, or any number of other very relevant topics, cyberpunk has you covered. It’s always been political commentary.

So, why do I think energy weapons are a poor fit? It’s not the technology is too advanced. It’s that it’s too shiny; too cool.

Cyberpunk, held up that utopian vision of the future, shattered it, and threw the broken shards into a rain soaked gutter.

Beam weapons are part of that package. They’re cool. They’re space age. They feel futuristic, slick, and new. They’re a marvel of technology, and as a result, I feel they don’t fit thematically with cyberpunk as a genre. This is not me telling you, “you can’t do this.” It’s not that the technology is impossible. It’s that beam weapons run contrary to the idea of a sci-fi future betrayed and subverted by corporate greed.

Now, context is everything. If you’re looking at cross-threading the space opera with cyberpunk, yeah, energy weapons being the norm may make sense. If particle beam rifles are a major plot point in your story, set in the near future, if your themes support it, it could work.

It’s important to stress that my opinion is based on what cyberpunk is, as a genre. It is not tuned to the story you may want to tell. If you have a reason you want to mix energy weapons in, go for it. How you handle the presentation, and how you use them, will determine if your story benefits from their inclusion, or if they become a distraction.

-Starke

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Cyberpunk and the Dark Future of Yesterday was originally published on How to Fight Write.

i like the idea of aliens not being able to recognize distinguishing features in humans, the way we don’t with animals. like they can’t tell their age or gender or facial features so hilarious confusion ensues when talking about celebrities

#like all humans are APPROXIMATELY the same shape and height  #and covered in APPROXIAMTELY the same amount of hair  #and they get so confused when humans get offended bc like  #you wouldn’t get mad if someone couldn’t tell the difference between various assorted hamsters 

PEOPLE. Look at this GLORIOUS COVER they made. This book is QUEER AS HELL and they just went for it.

The official cover bit: While the Iskat Empire has long dominated the system through treaties and political alliances, several planets, including Thea, have begun to chafe under Iskat’s rule. When tragedy befalls Imperial Prince Taam, his Thean widower, Jainan, is rushed into an arranged marriage with Taam’s cousin, the disreputable Kiem, in a bid to keep the rising hostilities between the two worlds under control.

But when it comes to light that Prince Taam’s death may not have been an accident, and that Jainan himself may be a suspect, the unlikely pair must overcome their misgivings and learn to trust one another as they navigate the perils of the Iskat court, try to solve a murder, and prevent an interplanetary war… all while dealing with their growing feelings for each other.

It’s out on February 2nd, you can preorder independently here, or on Kindle etc here!

NEW THINGS THIS VERSION HAS:

1. As is maybe obvious from the cover, a BUNCH of new plot

2. Approximately three (3) spaceships

3. More bad idea Iskat wildlife, why did they let the dinosaur enthusiasts on the original terraforming team, nobody knows

And if you’re interested here is the cover reveal post! https://www.denofgeek.com/books/winters-orbit-everina-maxwell-cover-reveal/

I have read this and it was a delight. Just saying.

being nonbinary and a fan of non-human creatures isn’t easy. like i’m constantly struggling with the fact that i’m both like “i wish there was more enby representation in humans” and “i’m the same gender as mewtwo and that fucking rips”

the tension between “representing NBs only as nonhuman characters is dehumanizing and othering” and “but monsters, aliens, and robots are so much cooler than humans”

Everyone Go Read The Murderbot Diaries Right Now

<3 Perfect <3