Cyberpunk 2077 came out last week and, despite its rocky release, it succeeds in building a world that stays mostly true to the roots of the genre. Behind all the familiar set dressing (multinational corporations that operate more like nation-states, reappropriated prosthetics grafted onto mobsters so they can do much cooler crimes, samurai swords as a viable self defense tool, virtual reality sex dungeons), is a story that isn’t afraid to show the raw ugliness of late capitalism and the technology people use to survive it. If that’s the vibe you’re looking for, if you’re ready to jam with the real console cowboys in cyberspace, check out these books at your local library/bookstore. Or if you’re looking to bring us one step closer to a neon-soaked hellscape run by corporate god-emperors, crack open a Samurai Cola and just order em on Amazon.
The Tiger Flu — Larissa Lai
Futurists, eccentric billionaires, and science fiction writers have been pushing the idea that we’ll one day be able to upload our minds into a computer for so long that it feels like the inevitable next step in human evolution. Liberated from our frail human bodies, our digitized souls will float around in the electronic ether, living forever as immortal constructs. Tiger Flu takes place on an earth orbited by two moon-sized mainframes, owned by competing megacorps, where minds are uploaded and stored forever. They’re advertised as a way to escape a dying city ravaged by a pandemic, but there’s a price to pay for living on a corporate vanity project. On the outskirts of the city, a commune of women have lived happily for generations by harvesting organs of key members who can regenerate their flesh. Tiger Flu makes the case that immortality is grotesque from any angle, and that we should be skeptical of any technology that eschews our humanity to sell some vague idea of progress.
Virtual Light — William Gibson
Neuromancer is a great intro to Gibson, but Virtual Light hits a little closer to home. Set in a bizarre, alternate San Francisco where housing costs are astronomically high and tech millionaires are the only ones who can feasibly live there, a rag-tag group of squatters has reclaimed the Oakland Bay Bridge and established an ad-hoc community, or “slum” depending on who you ask. It’s a hyper-dense settlement of apartments, shops, barbers, dentists, food stalls, home to hundreds of people. Think Kowloon Walled City. The story follows a bike messenger who lives in this improvised community and gets mixed up in a plot to reshape the city forever. It asks us to consider who cities are built for, and is by far the most thrilling story about urban planning you’ll ever read.
Vurt — Jeff Noon
The world of Vurt is slick. Not the kind you’d use to describe some new product, but the wet, dirty kind. Slick with rain, petroleum jelly, saliva, sweat, oil. It follows a team of small-time hustlers, cruising the city to get their grimey hands on a drug called Vurt, multicolored feathers that store a single-use hallucinogen/virtual-reality trip that you activate by jamming into the back of your throat. How it works is a mystery, but has something to do with the evaporating boundary between dimensions. It’s the most important discovery in the history of humanity, so naturally it’s been commoditized and made prohibitively expensive. Follow Scribble in his mad sprint through the underbelly of Neo-Manchester, desperately trying to rescue his sister from a deal gone wrong.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism — Aaron Bastani
This is a breezy introduction to one of Marx’s big ideas: capitalism favors automation. Since the goal of the capitalist is to minimize costs and maximize profit, they’ll always be incentivized to eliminate the most expensive part of the production process, human labor, from their workflows (or find cheaper sources of human labor to exploit). This trend has been unfolding for centuries, and cyberpunk stories often follow it to its worst conclusions: a surplus of labor in a dog-eat-dog, capitalist future pushes most people to crime and other precarious/risky work, encourages reckless body modification to make their labor more marketable, and allows corporations continue squeezing humanity for its few remaining drops of profit. FALC is a wakeup call to take this trend seriously, and start working today towards a future of shared abundance. This book explores the tools we already have to make energy, food, information, and healthcare available to all without a corpo middleman trying to collect rent on it.
Ubik — Phillip K. Dick
Every chapter of Ubik starts with a commercial for Ubik. It’s a coffee creamer, a salad dressing, god himself, a breakfast cereal. But what is it really? In the future, the mega-wealthy are cryogenically frozen to prolong their lives. They remain conscious in this state, but need to be connected to a matrix-like virtual world that’s indistinguishable from reality. When one of these half-dead well-to-dos is under attack, they hire a team of mercenary psychics to jack into the system and investigate. Ubik is an enigmatic substance that keeps this virtual world from deteriorating. This story expresses a paranoia we should all feel when we realize how much advertising, and systems that use the language of advertising, affect our worldviews.
Cyberpunk is having a moment right now, but many recent examples don’t go much deeper than covering everything in heaps of neon. Maybe we can credit its mainstream success to the fact that we already live in a future that’s transparently dominated by huge corporations, but it’s not as cool looking as we thought it’d be. Happy trails, samurai!
