New Cyberpunk CRPG coming from CD Projekt

Sterling declared the genre dead when Snow Crash came out. It hasn't really progressed much since then.

Snow Crash is cyberpunk parody. It takes various themes of cyberpunk and ramps them up to absurd levels. Most blatent in the opening sequence, of course, where cyberpunk's everyone-is-cooler-than-you is extended to everyone including the pizza delivery guy, but also in the way that oppressive corporatism has now led to such absurdities as "General Jim's Defense System" and "Admiral Bob's National Defense". It's both the crown jewel of the genre and it's epitaph; once it was written, there was nowhere left to go.

Would you believe I didn't get "Hiro Protagonist" until the second reading?

Where the steak looks delicious, the plate is dirty, you can't trust the pepper sauce and the knife and fork are made from chrome-edged carbon fibre.

Which was also in "Strange Days", which could be argued as a cyberpunk film (or a film with cyberpunk elements, anyway).

Behind the scenes of Projeckt RED's "Cyberpunk 2077" teaser trailer

An anime series I loved was Bubblegum Crisis, which was heavily influenced by sci-fi/cyberpunk movies such as Blade Runner and Terminator. The teaser trailer reminds me of the ADP police hunting down rogue cyborgs and robots that go on killing sprees.

I thought Snow Crash was just plain awful.

Impressive.

Parodies are often wasted on those who see no humor in the thing being parodied.

Snow Crash as a parody is debated. IIRC, that is a critical interpretation. I've never seen anything from Stephenson confirming it, and most of the people at the time who raved about it that I knew didn't interpret it as such.

I personally could never get into it.

I'm not sure how something with a protagonist named Hiro Protagonist could be taken as anything other than parody.

My favorite part of Snow Crash was the

You are assuming most of the teenage readers of the time understoood the reference. ;-) Now certainly Stephenson did, but while its been a long time since I last tried to read the book my recollection is that the name had some connection to the VR aspect of the story, meaning "Hiro Protagonist" could be interpreted as a name the same way "Keldroc" is a name. In other words, a name created by the person rather then a birth name.

You know, I can see not liking Snow Crash. But not seeing that it's parody? Are there a lot of "teenage readers" who are similarly confused about The Hitchhiker's Guide?

Best documentary ever.

I'm not saying its not a parody, just that its not universally recognized as such. Even now, if you look around you don't often see it identified as a parody. For example, the wikipedia article on the novel simply notes that "Some critics have considered it a parody of cyberpunk."

If it's not a parody, uh, boy does that ever say something about Mr. Stephenson.

I mean, that's the thing. It's such an overt parody that it's impossible to miss. Now that there's the excellent Audible version, you can even get it read at you sarcastically. Let's say, for the sake of argument, you'd only read the first paragraph:

There are some details you don't get right away, but the tone is laid on thick, on purpose. Because it mimics the forms, and not just the content. Parody doesn't mean it lacks other fundamentals of a story, like characterization and plot and all that stuff, and indeed Snow Crash also lets you know pretty early on that it's going to throw in a lot of deep (or "deep") stuff. You could say that Snow Crash is more subtle (relatively speaking) in its layers of satire with respect to contemporary American society and popular/niche culture generally, and indeed part of its appeal could be that it inverts the importance of the cyberpunk tropes in terms of its big ideas. But while it's not *only* a parody of cyberpunk, that's certainly one of its defining characteristics.

Regardless of whether it was a parody (and I don't think it was intended that way) it was awful. Self indulgent, incoherent, Stephenson's trademark weak ending, and more fan service than parody.

I like a good spoof too, but even accepted as a parody Snow Crash falls flat. It takes itself too seriously without being awful enough to overcome that Mystery Science Theater style.

Easily the most overrated sci-fi novel I've ever read. Some of the crappy Shadowrun novels I read as a teenager were better, though both were equally memorable. I had to wikipedia a synopsis since I only dimly remember more detail than that the protagonist (Haha!) was a pizza delivery ninja.

I like his later books far better, although he's yet to quite shake his penchant for weak endings.

Exactly.

Honestly, I think he was just that kind of geek. Like RPGs played in middle school that at first glance are obviously parody but were taken so seriously at the time, or sophist high school debate champs enamored of their own cleverness. That was more than 20 years ago though.

You lose a significant amount of credibility in terms of your ability to assess writing critically when you say these things. Don't say them just for the hell of it.

It's not *just* a parody, but it's not something you have to "even" accept. I would wager that the entire book is pretty difficult to grasp and impossible to enjoy if you miss that bus right from the start. I imagine that includes missing it out of territorial defense of sincere cyberpunk, as well.

Easily the most overstated criticism of Stephenson I've ever read.

Well, if nothing else, this anchors your tastes around quality writing and cyberpunk pretty clearly.

I have no idea what you are talking about anymore.

I regret that I only have one dislike cat. Although Stephenson's endings are weak, and his Baroque Cycle books are pointless jackoffery... But Snow Crash, Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon were brilliant.

ARMS THAT TURN INTO MINIGUNS!

(Hey, at least I'm on topic.)

Now just imagine where the spent brass ejects from

THERE IS NO SPENT BRASS IN THE FUTURE!

Having read other Stephenson Jasper's remarks seem consistent with the impression I get of Snow Crash from précis and... even what you're saying about the book, LK.

Leaving aside from the "not sure if it's parody" thing, that is. And even there, that seems as likely as anything to be a semantic difference about whether sufficiently cornball "playful-meta-relationship-with-genre" is classifiable as parody. What about ironic pastiche? What about enthusiastic-but-ironic-pastiche-homage? What if it sucks? Etc.

I don't really understand what you're saying here.

If you think it sucks, that's fine. If you think Neal Stephenson sucks, well, that's a difference of opinion depending on the criteria and not a particularly interesting one to me. Notice I don't have anything to say about Adree's assessment.

But I don't see what progressively more ridiculous sub-categories do in order to strengthen the case of missing a central facet of the book. I guess The Hitchhiker's Guide is just a playful-meta-relationship-with-genre and Catch-22 an enthusiastic-but-ironic-pastiche-homage if you want to imagine enough negative qualities about the creators at the time they made it, and they probably take on all kinds of ponderous weight as bad writing when you see them in that light.

I'm officially no longer on board for the cyberpunk renaissance if this is the price.

I actually was thinking of taking HGTTG as an example too, one where we can dispense with value judgements about the author since we're probably all benignly disposed to it it/him. I could see someone saying "HGTTG is a parody [of fish-out-of-water sci-fi travel/adventure?]" with supporting evidence being that it has a parodic faster than light drive, a parodic space-President, a parody of everyone speaking space-English, etc. But to my mind as much as that's defensible it'd be more natural for me to just say it's a zany comedic science fiction story (with or without mentioning that it's self-aware/genre-referential).

I'm probably less of a cyberpunk fan than Neal Stephenson.

OK, but that sort of genre parsing is quite different from interpreting HGTTG as a serious piece of science fiction that is just unintentionally silly. At that point we're in "Verhoeven was trying to be faithful to Starship Troopers and sucks at filmmaking" territory.

You and me both.

I think you're correct in saying there was plainly intent to do parody by the broad definition, but reiterating the substance of Jasper's post #100 I think part of the issue is that if you're doing a "parody" of William Gibson you shouldn't be so cute and in love with yourself that you're more in need of having the air let out of your tires than the work that you're ostensibly satirizing.

I guess there's always a built in defence - but that's part of the satire! - but meh.

I don't know enough of the book part of the genre beyond Gibson and a vague sense of other major works, but my guess would be it was not aimed so much at original, creative expressions like Neuromancer and mostly at the hack-ridden cult subgenres that were derived from it. Again, I don't care if someone thinks Neal Stephenson is self-indulgent or whatever, and I guess if Snow Crash is the vessel for that disdain, so be it. But I would attach the "incoherent" part of his criticism, for instance, to whatever blockage prevents people from seeing parody as intentional, because it's really not that hard to follow. The more I think about it, the more it's like Verhoeven-Heinlein Real True Fans all over again.

I think that's an important distinction, and one that actually doesn't have much to do with arguments about the quality of the work, for which there are a range of opinions available and (I'm sure) a variety of negative ones that I agree with.

"Starship Troopers - Satire?" is a bit of a loaded comparison because of the extent to which internet discussion of that has been contaminated by people's curious fervency re: Heinlein's politics. Now, "Total Recall and Robocop - Satire?" I could buy as analogies. Because, as is I think the case with Snow Crash, you could at least make an argument either way.

I think you're mistaken about Snow Crash, but suit yourself. I don't know much about Stephenson, either, except that there seems to me a very clear difference in tone between this book and Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon, although the latter did switch gears a couple of times. Again, I think underlining the difference between satire and parody is important for this overall discussion (although likely not to your particular point). In a way, what Verhoeven excelled at in ST is distilling the intended social criticism/satire into parody, and then he rewrapped the whole thing in his sense of appropriate satire, and while I don't think anything can recreate the wonder of interacting with Heinleiniacs, there's a similar gap between how the works are being assessed at a fundamental level.

I don't know or care enough about what underlies Total Recall/TR source or Robocop to give them much mileage.

Why should stonkingly uneducated teenagers be the measure of the author's expectation of a reader's understanding?

VAGINAS LOADED WITH SPRING-LOADED POISON STINGERS!

My recollection is that W. T. Quck's Dreams of Flesh and Sand and Dreams of Gods and Men from the late 80s were pretty fun in this genre (street samurai, corporate warfare, chicken-brain powered cybernets).

It does in the sense of who was buying the book at the time. My recollection was that a lot of the people who told me it was great loved it because it was an over the top extension of the more serious and slow-paced stuff from Gibson. Neuromancer on steroids if you like. Even today when I was googling around I came across message board discussions where people considered it the most "filmable" of the classic cyberpunk novels simply because its style is very Hollywood-action-movie, complete with a witty sidekick.

This happens all the time in music. The popularity of Springsteen's "Born in the USA" album, and particularly the title song comes to mind. It became somewhat of a patriotic anthem among a certain crowd when I was in high school in the mid-1980s despite the fact that the lyrics are not really patriotic at all. Sometimes people like something while completely ignoring or not paying attention at all to what it is trying to say.

I'm not really clear why you're so defensive and scathing about this, but I just don't like Snow Crash (nor am I alone). There are plenty of popular things I don't like, and I would guess that you're the same way -- is that so strange?

That was largely the effective audience. The only people I know who remember Snow Crash fondly are those who were teenagers or in their early twenties, those older who read it never mention it and seem to barely remember it (though their reactions aren't as strong as mine either!). I also don't see kids these days reading it, unlike the better sci-fi from days of yore (e.g. Hitchhiker's Guide, Foundation, Dune, and yes Neuromancer, etc).

To me the love of Snow Crash looks like the rose tinted nostalgia of youth, much the way my dad (a bigger and more well read sci-fi geek than anyone I've met) is entirely non-plussed by Star Wars, or how awesome I thought Star Blazers was when in middle school.

I also think that Stephenson's later books are just plain better written, leaving aside the subject matter and his lingering trouble wrapping a story up. Writing is difficult, and so this seems entirely natural to me.

And these teenagers you know didn't know what "protagonist" means, as Sarkus suggested?

Anecdatally, I was running the sci-fi/fantasy section at one of the first large Borders store when Snow Crash came out and I sold it mostly to adults.