You Like Cyberpunk? But It's So Dystopic!

I have loved cyberpunk for a long time.

I’ve loved cyberpunk ever since I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer in my early teens. I read it before Burning Chrome, and before I knew it was a part of a trilogy. Then I think I managed to read Mona Lisa Overdrive before Count Zero and still somehow made sense of it all. I don’t know. I was a crazy mixed up kid, but all I knew was this author was doing something right for me.

Yes, it is dystopic speculative fiction. I would never want to live in that world, except we kinda already are. We don’t have all the wild, absurd tech, but we do have all the corporate overreach, oligarchs in government, environment destruction, extremes of wealth and poverty, etc, etc. Most of the time though Cyberpunk authors tell hero stories, of surviving despite the dystopia, or of toppling the status quo and changing things for the better. There is hope there.

Weirdly I didn’t read a lot of other cyberpunk novels at the time. Sure I watched Robocop (yes, I DO think that counts as cyberpunk) and other scifi movies. I devoured the Dune series and adored the Lynch film. I only really went to Gibson for cyberpunk, though. Likely I missed out, and that’s a gap I should fill.

Later in the 90s I watch the 1995 Ghost in the Shell anime and was fully hooked by cyberpunk. It was sleek, sexy and full of wild tech that I’ll admit I didn’t understand at the time. All I knew was it scratched the same spot Gibson did.

Then came Cyberpunk 2077. THAT I played for hours and hours. I put it down, and picked it up, put it down, restarted with the Phantom Liberty DLC, put it down and picked it up again, and of course, Hanako IS still waiting for me at Embers. I had watched EdgeRunners before playing and loved looking for all the places in game that were in the show. That was a fully immersive scratching of that itch. In fact, it was the most immersed in a virtual world I have ever experienced.

Much, much later (I mean really, actually recently) I read the entire Ghost in the Shell collected works. I had heard that there was a new series being made that was supposed to be really faithful to the original art and story of the original Shirow Masamune manga, so I thought I’d read it before the show was released. I had read some of the manga in the late 90s and early 2000s, but never the entire thing. I was surprised by the amount of text in the it, it really is a graphic novel.

Now, I had watched the 95 movie, the 2.0 version, Innocence, Standalone Complex, SAC_2045, and even the live action with you know who. I enjoyed all of it, though the differences in style and story were confusing. Reading the manga clarified a lot for me, and actually had me appreciate the difficulty of adapting the story. There is so much, complicated story to sift through and adapt! I still think that the live action film was a odd attempt at retelling the 95 anime, but I don’t really have strong feelings either way about it.

What I do think, after watching the first episode of the new series, is that it was always possible for a true telling of the original story with the original art. What struck me most after reading the manga and watching the episode was how other versions toned down the silliness of the original characters, played up their abilities (made them near infallible/indestructible), increased the polish of the tech and underplayed the grittiness of the world it takes place in.

The story takes place in a somewhat near future (compared to Dune timescales it’s basically just a few minutes away). The tech is futuristic, but dodgy, and malfunctions easily. There are wires everywhere! Motoko smacks stuff when it doesn’t work right, reminding me of how much we abused our technology in the 80s when it stopped working well. The world is full of trash, refuse and people who are living the worst possible lives. Desperation abounds. GitS 95 and the others don’t really reflect all of this as well as the Manga did. As horrible as it sounds, this presentation is more satisfying somehow, perhaps because it is more realistic. A sanitized cyberpunk world is just not believable.

The new series feels like Gibson, like Edgerunners, like Cyberpunk 2077. It finally tells the original story. That itch is scratched once again.