Week 11: Steampunk and Cyberpunk

Week 11: Steampunk and Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is the genre for this week, this sub-genre stems from the anxieties people have about the future like the environment and the future of the world.
Common tropes in Cyberpunk/Steampunk are the role reversal of the heroine.  Suddenly we see a powerful, modified version of the typical heroine. While the male seems to be sillier, and less useful this is not typical of the heroic norm.
A lot of people in our class debated about the different ideas of how everything will be in the future. It brought up lots of controversy in our own class and I think that’s the point. A lot of cyberpunk is questioning. The world would be changing, from robots possibly having human rights or showing humanistic qualities.  Automation would eventually take over work, what worth would humans even have if machines could take over the work of humans. Our whole world is going through these changes even now. People continue to alter their own bodies to be genetically modified. These things come from modern day issues, talking about how modern day technical advances and society is changing. Like not having conforming genders, or how science is starting to affect our own bodies.

I read Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson, definitely following these tropes, a strong woman character named Molly and the Japanese mafia the Yakuza being talked about. It even talked about when Lewis needed to get a prosthetic for Molly hurting his thumb earlier. Other than the obvious points that make it a sc-fi, like the RGB code. This is a good short story that covers the very basic of what cyberpunk tropes are.