I think I’m getting tired of cyberpunk.

I’ve been deep into the cyberpunk genre since at least high school, reading, watching, and playing everything I could find. It was science fiction that actually resonated with me; computers and body modification and AI all seemed much more pressing, more real than space travel and distant planets, let alone magic and wizards and vampires. When I played Cyberpunk 2020, something I started doing at about 16 years old, I embraced the dystopia of the setting and leaned into the idea that a better way to play the game was a grittier, grimier way to play the game. Even as I lightened up a bit about black market modifiers and blunt trauma damage, the game was an inherently grim one. One of my gaming friends in college reflected on a Cyberpunk game we played where his character was killed at the hands of another PC, the second of a series of exchanges that killed half the party in the span of two sessions. It was actually a great ending for how much intrigue had built up between the characters, but it could still be summed up in three words:

“The future sucks.”

Those are the watchwords of not just Cyberpunk 2020, but arguably the entire genre. Neuromancer is not a book about a hero who changes the world, it’s about a character who, through acting in his own self-interest, releases one of the biggest existential threats the world has yet seen and then nothing happens. William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, George Alec Effinger and other preeminent cyberpunk authors were at their best when writing characters who accepted the worlds around them even as the readers were drawn in to how alien yet upsettingly familiar they were. Good cyberpunk made you think because, like all good science fiction, it was the issues of the present cast upon a vision of the future. The problem is that those visions of the future are here, and yeah, the future sucks.

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