My First Sci-Fi Friday
or, a list of cyberpunks
I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications. For the month of September, I’m offering steep discounts on subscriptions.
This is a fun little tradition of sorts that’s sprouted up over on substack Notes. If you’re not on Notes, it’s kind of like twitter but smaller and less weird.
Taking my cues from
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As my first foray into this, I thought I’d just dive in with my Five Favorite Cyberpunk pieces of media, since I’m currently engaging with a lot of cyberpunk stuff.
Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
Akira speaks for itself, honestly. Possibly one of the most important pieces of cyberpunk fiction in history, but also just a great work of art. The manga, stretching over 2,000 pages, is colossal in its achievement and its terrifying vision of the future but the movie adaptation, which is likely what everyone actually knows, is also great. Went on to inspire generations of artists.
The fluidity and detail of the animation is unparalleled. The body horror unsettling. The totalitarian power juxtaposed against gangs of violent teenagers creates such a lived in feeling to the world.
I should probably just write a 3,000 word essay about Akira, but I’ll leave it here as a brick of text of video whose significance cannot be overstated.
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
A quiet cyberpunk novel and one of my all time favorite novels. You could read this, honestly, as a straight literary novel in the near future. Palmer’s vision of the future is no less terrifying, to me, than Otomo’s but he packages it in such an absurd and realistic and affecting way that it feels far more inevitable than Otomo’s future. In many ways, it’s already here, this horror show of Palmer’s near future.
If you’ve talked books with me in the last five years, I’ve possibly mentioned this novel. It’s one of those rare works of fiction that absolutely shatters me, leaves me just a mess of a person for days.
I’ve been meaning to write about Palmer’s three novels since before this newsletter began. Especially what this single book means to me. But instead I’ve only written about his newer novel, Mary Toft.
But Palmer is one of the best around. Dangerously underrated and underread.
The Matrix by the Wachowski Sisters
I don’t even know if there’s anything that needs to be said here. The combination of Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell with John Woo’s gung-fu and the kind of political and philosophical messaging made to drive teenager American boys absolutely insane made this one of the most important movies of the last thirty years.
I’ve been considering revisiting the whole series so I may write more about this later, but I’ll say this now: people who, now, claim that The Matrix was never good are idiots and shouldn’t be listened to.
Xenogears (written by Tetsuya Takahashi, Kaori Tanaka, and Masato Kato)
This game blew the top of my head clean off when I played it as a teenager. Earlier that same year, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment had disassembled my vision of the world and The Brothers Karamazov was building and breaking it in new ways as I played through Xenogears, which terrified and elated me.
Giant robots. Gnostic theology. Freudian psychoanalysis. Wild political machinations. Turn based combat. And your protagonist is losing his mind, losing himself to the Id inside himself.
Just bonkersly glorious. I loved it. I love it still, even having not played it in almost twenty years (though possibly rectifying that soon?). It’s a messy, weird, and dumb game that fits so neatly beside and inside Neon Genesis Evangelion that I find it sometimes astonishing.
One of the weirdest and wildest. One of the best.
Some will tell you that it’s broken and they’re not wrong, but they’re also missing the point.
Continuum
This Canadian TV show came out of nowhere for me and I never would have discovered it if not for Netflix throwing it my way about eight years ago.
It begins as a police procedural with a cop from 50 years in the future chasing criminals from the future. After the first season, it drops the procedural criminal-of-the-week structure and dives into its fascinating story about a corporatocratic dystopic near future where the villains may, in fact, be the key to unshackling humanity’s future from technocratic control.
And so while this cop from the future protects a teenager who will one day create this future, we, the viewer, begin to wonder.
It’s sort of low budget and sort of hokey and its runtime was cut short, forcing them to collapse a whole lot of plot into the final season, where things get real weird, but it’s a great show with a lot of interesting elements that just breathe cyberpunk.
And now I’m going to cheat and leave you with a 10 hour video about the game Cyberpunk 2077, which is one of my favorite pieces of criticism around this here world wide web.
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My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Some free books for your trouble:
That's about as good a summary of Xenogears as I've ever seen.
Oh man, you hate Neuromancer and love The Matrix? Well... nobody's perfect. :(
(Actually, it's a pretty good flick, but gosh, it is literally a film about how cool it is to go down Internet rabbit holes, get radicalized, and then shoot up office buildings while dressed like a Columbine kid, lol. The "redpill" morons were not misinterpreting this movie, is what I'm saying. Doesn't mean the film's bad! I just don't love that people have decided it's some intellectual masterwork instead of a fun but kind of awkwardly macho action flick)