THE MATERIAL BELOW IS OLD AND HAS NOT BEEN CHECKED/UPDATED OR CORRECTED.

Are you kidding me?

Of course not! You know I don’t joke about fun and games. Due to various circumstances I was unable to release a title this year, thats why I started working on this a few days ago to deliver at least something. I’m pretty sure the community would at least like to play something from my workbench after all the promises and plans I put into Catathrenia and all the titles I had to cancel/postpone throughout the years.

Yeah! “Various Circumstances”… the same “circumstances” that kept you from finding a new job and getting laid the last couple months? Also, the community doesn’t care about any of your garbage.

This is a presentation thread, so please be professional. I must apologise I’ve actually sent an E-Mail to Josh Mooney to unlock my Shavra Thread a few days ago to present this there so I won’t clutter the work in progress thread with this mini-game but then he saw the amazing masterpieces that spawned there lately. I swear to the great cthulu, if any of you even dare to develop another lackluster Zombiegame I’ll circumsize your… will you 2 cutiepies cut it out!? You are wasting everyones time with your childish little fights. Look! If you are still reading this… we are making a game for you! Maybe it will get a little popular and help to raise funds for FPSC-Reloaded which is an orgasmic project by the handsome lads at TGC. Silly me! You already know that So, our little project is…

another Mini Title in the Shavra Universe. Its structured a bit like one of my first releases here “The Escape from Reaper Harbour” and it plays a lot like “Deprivation: Direct Action”. Jeez! Your old titles where cheesier than the storyline in an 80′s exploitation porn flick. Figures! Shavra is a planet split in a raging war between…. you know what? The recap would completely blow this out of proportion so lets skip it! What a shame.

Story: All attempts of the Freedom-Faction to keep th New Shavran Order from launching a spiesattelite network has failed leading the NSO to discover strategically important cities in the planet parts controlled by the Faction. The mining-town “Noémie”, known for its iron-mines and alternative energiesource tests has been assaulted by a full legion of the NSO. The battle lasted for 12 hourse leaving the city in complete destruction. Needless to say, the troops at Noémie did not withstand the legion. You, a young soldier of the Faction, have not managed to escape the city as the last troops have been evacuated.

With the battle long over, the city was filled with NSO Troopers, retrieving whatever intel they could find and killing remaining survivors. The young soldier, knowing that survival was impossible but not willing to give up without a fight, discovers a note on the corpse of a Special Ops member of the Faction. An objective so vital to the survival of the Faction that failure was simply not an option. A computerterminal in Noémie had informations on file about the location of New-Shangri-la the underground headquarters and the largest city of the freedom faction. With no change to get out alive, the young soldier makes his way to the terminal clinging to a lost spark of hope…hope that the NSO has not found it yet.
Let me clean this up for you! You are there, everything is screwed. You have to find the thing and shoot everything in between. …and since you make this game there will be a completely unnecessary female character popping up down the road.

You should really work on your english. Its great for the internet but just not fit yet for story summarys, honey!.

Remember Shavra-Dead Frequency? With all the custom guns, waypoint following scripted AI, Shader Intensive Environments and Allies? Well this isn’t it!

With this game I totally reinvented the hammer because in this game you get to collect guns and shoot the bad guys!

To set this apart from all the other first person shooters out there, there is even a freaking Sewer Level! Made with love!

So lets pump out a feature list and get this over with! thats what she said…at least the last part

* Cool Weapon features, such as tactical reloading and visual feedback on some guns if they are shot empty. You can also use a specific ammo type on all weapons that use that ammo. (P.Ex: 9mm ammonition work on all 9mm weapons)

* Enemies react as smart as they did in Deprivation. Maybe a bit better here and there…thats okay, right?

* Cool health system with injections. It works a bit like in F.E.A.R.

* Gritty post war – scifi athmosphere

* Custom Soundtrack

* Okay graphics! I wanted to add some flowers but the 2 stooges said no

* Ultra fast development: release date before 25th november!

I never asked for this

I know…whatever you’re asking for usually scars me for life!

Thehe! Thats because you don’t have a sense of humour…why so serious?

They’ll be busy arguing for hours. I’ll show you the lovely screenshots in the meantime:

Even though we really push this to get it done in one week, we keep an eye for little details like water dripping out of this tank.

Storyline areas are rather vast while combat zones are more constrained.

Outdoor passages are mainly just there to mess with bugsy.

There is a pretty erotic lasershader in this game too

Even though we pretty much make all the levels in one go without much concept…they still tend to have their moments.

EAI’s G36 overused?… yeah! Just like your… Woah! Just escaped a modslap there… now will you be quiet? I’ll get some coffee I had it with my boring and my female side anyway

Well, will you look at that. Your audience took their life after reading through this painful thread.

I made these watereffects using bonds shaders. Special eyecandy for you my love. Its wet…on a totally unrelated note

Bloom in FPSC is still a blast!

Alright guys! I hope you survived my schizophrenic comedy episode and I certainly wish that you’ll provide some feedback…questions…comments. This’ll be released pretty soon as you might have red. This november…hence the title.

You know who I really missed in this conversation? Wolf!

-Wolf

But now its time for a little update!

This shows a prototype of the minimalist HUD system. You’ll have icons that display the amount of medikits you carry above your healhtsphere thingie. There will also be numerics below the Weapon HUD which I’m not happy with yet. Thats really it.

Of course! I will also have “bloody screen” shenanigans.

In the more wartorn areas, you’ll have frequent firefights but also a lot of cover.

It took me a bit longer to make these bombed areas than the average level but I think it was worth it and the set fits well with the skybox.

These green fields are tactical energieshields the NSO uses to block paths and enhance their fixed positions. These will hurt you.

Some scenes look a bit grim

Thats it for now!

-Wolf

Video on youtube

The Thai Kingdom is one of the last countries yet to bend to the will of the calorie companies. Their secret? The world’s last seedbank, guarding the genetic material of everything lost to bioterrorism, and a mysterious generipper, a genius at bringing extinct species back to life and immune to everything the calorie companies can throw at them. The fate of the Thai Kingdom rests on control of the seedbank. The calorie companies want in, by any means possible.

There’s a lot going on in this story, and the first half of the book almost seems schizophrenic in the way that it jumps between threads with vastly different tones. Anderson Lake is a “calorie man” working the streets of Bangkok to track down the generipper and the Thai seedbank, secure the resources for his employers (a massive food and energy conglomerate), and do so without blowing his cover as a factory manager.

Jaydee and his humorless lieutenant Kanya are high officials in Thailand’s Environmental Ministry. Jaydee has made a name for himself as a tireless crusader against the pestilence threating the countryside, and is parleying his popularity into a quest against corruption in the government. However, corruption is most prevalent in the Trade Ministry, which has been steadily gaining in power as global trade recovers.

Hong Seng was a powerful businessman when the economy collapsed. After barely escaping his home country with only his life and the clothes on his back, he works in Bangkok as Lake’s factory manager, waiting for an opportunity to restore his business empire by making off with plans for a new form of energy production.

Then there’s Emiko, the titular windup girl. Genetically engineered by the Japanese for the workforce, windup people are created with certain unique characteristics. A genetic loyalty to the owner is one, as is a start-stop motion to movement designed to help keep the windup people in their place. Emiko once belonged to a Japanese businessman, but was dumped in Bangkok in favor of an upgrade. She works in a seedy bar to survive.

Not until about halfway through the book do these characters meet, and even then, in some cases, their interactions are indirect at best. Once the main players do start interacting, the different threads of conspiracy intersect to produce a chaotic political situation that only slides further downhill. Without trying to spoil too much, Lake finds himself co-opting a plan by a shipping company to forcibly open the Thai Kingdom for business, while Jaydee’s actions in the Environmental Ministry push the governmental factions closer to open warfare. To make things worse yet, a new virus is poised to become an epidemic, but it goes unnoticed in the tumult.

One of the things I liked most about this story is the sheer amount of intrigue that goes on behind the scenes. There are tantalizing pieces of information that are doled out in small amounts, yet their relevance to the bigger picture remains unknown until later in the story. In places, the narrative almost seems to be high-Gibson: a dazzling array of facts that are just enough to let you see that something is going on and the main characters are heavily involved, but just not enough to know exactly what until late in the story. The Windup Girl is heavily influenced by the ethos of cyberpunk. There are layers of conspiracies everywhere, some visible, some not. Just when you think you find someone pulling the strings, there is another puppetmaster, further back in the shadows.

Perhaps most menacingly, some of those conspiracies seem rooted in modern corporate trends. In The Windup Girl, food companies dominate the world trading system. To put themselves in such a position, these companies released genetically engineered viruses that rapidly destroyed the food web. In response, they created genetically modified plants resistant to those very viruses, but sterilized, ensuring that farmers would have to buy new plants from them every season. Further, the companies compete by releasing new viruses that attack their competitors crops, breeding newer and more deadly forms of pestilence as the years pass.

This trend towards monopolization and consumer lock-in has been occurring in Western business for the last several decades. One need look no further than the computer business (Apple, Amazon, and the like), or banking (a handful of banks control a significant percentage of American finance), or even food production (Monsanto in particular is noteworthy, as it has already begun selling sterilized, genetically modified crop seeds). Patent and copyright law is increasingly used as a tool to further solidify market gains and guarantee a consumer base.

Free trade agreements have helped large corporations in this regard as well. Rather than spur general development of an economy, a developing nation in a free trade agreement with a Western power is often delegated a specialized role in creating goods for a Western economy. One such case is the Thailand of the real world. Rather than having a broad industrial base, it specializes particularly in car parts, electronic appliances, and computer parts. Economic reality also ensures that goods outside of this role will be cheaper to import from elsewhere, rather than to create a new industry at home. Instead of developing the economy, these policies  leave nations trapped in a role that leaves them vulnerable to the economic winds in distant countries.

Bacigalupi has his finger on these trends, and takes them to their logical extreme. Sterile seeds are distributed to countries, where engineered pestilence leaves farmers unable to grow anything but crops genetically modified to be disease-resistant. Any attempts to break “patent” on these strains is met with trade embargoes and focused campaigns to destroy any crops a farmer may successfully grow on their own. The inability of a country to grow its own food is then used as leverage to open up its economy and labor pool to further the goal of “global trade”.

In the end, the story really boils down to an argument between two sides. Both ministries in the Thai government wish to maintain their self-sufficiency, and their policy differences are just a matter of degree. However, they both see the amount of influence that the foreigners want as a bad thing for the future of their country. The story is interesting to watch as all parties try to stack the deck in their favor in a winner-takes-all game.

One of the weirdest things about the book (and I can’t really call it a complaint, since authors aren’t generally in control of this) was the cover blurb. It really doesn’t have much to do with the story at all, as it focuses most of its attention on Anderson Lake and Emiko. While they are important players in the book, they hardly stand out from amongst the rest of the cast.

The blurb also builds up the idea of post-humanity as a central idea of the story, while it seems hardly anything could be further from the truth. While the windup people are genetically enhanced humans in some ways, they have also been engineered specifically to avoid having them replace the human race. The story doesn’t dwell on this point, and even Emiko’s story doesn’t focus on whether or not she is human, but her suffering at the hands of people who decide she isn’t. The idea that humanity as a whole is approaching post-humanity is only brought up a couple of times during a story, by a generipper intent on giving civilization a final push over that particular ledge.

So in my opinion, this is where The Windup Girl shines best: as a political thriller set in a near-future dystopia. While themes of science fiction aren’t at the forefront, they’re definitely there, their use is about what you’d expect from a book claiming cyberpunk heritage. Despite the somewhat slow start, Bacigalupi spins a plot that has the rush and urgency of a real political crisis. The cover-to-cover blitz of information helps build a paranoid world that follows in the very best tradition of the cyberpunk movement.

As a technologically conscious teen, I remember discovering William Gibson’s Neuromancer and falling hard into his cyberpunk world. The gritty streets and clever, but despondent characters spoke to me of the troubled future we were all heading for. I was hooked. I read all the cyberpunk I could.
Soon after I discovered the work of Neal Stephenson, whose writing was given the banner of postcyberpunk. It was then that I started to appreciate that both these styles of writing were in fact very specific generational responses. The writers sit, in the cultural history, ten years apart. Evidently that is as long as it takes for a whole new way of thinking to arise. Where Neuromancer was all high tech and low life, Snow Crash [Stephenson] focussed on protagonists that, though equally marginalised, had moved from the slums into pretty standard, if not comfortable living.

In the mid 80s as Gibson’s books were entering the market, and the cultural consciousness, Microsoft had only just started releasing any kind of user-friendly home computer (the first version of windows came out in 1984) and the internet wouldn’t be culturally and commercially accepted for another decade. The future he portrayed was one of unwilling adaptation, hardship and fear for the everyman. Corporations took the place of countries and individuals out of the loop lived in slums. This countercultural viewpoint was a reflection of the public’s outlook towards its own future. Opposed to the near utopian (at least within our own civilisation) far-future frame that general science fiction was portraying, this was a future that was just around the corner. Something we would all see in our lifetimes and should be wary of. In the Sprawl trilogy [Neuromancer, Count Zero & Mona Lisa Overdrive] the protagonists are archetypal antiheroes. Their main attributes are a working knowledge of the darker aspects of computers and paranoia. This sentiment of expert paranoia became a cyberpunk trope and carried on through the genre.

A decade later cyberpunk evolved. As computer technology grew to be the norm in mainstream culture, our relationship with it became far more accepting. This was reflected in what has become known as postcyberpunk. Championed by Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling, the postcyberpunk world, while remaining gritty and oppressively urban, gained a certain optimism and even a sense of humour.  The protagonist no longer lives on the fringes of the urban mess, they speak directly to the reader as skateboarding couriers and pizza delivery men (this was the 90’s remember). They are still particularly clued up on the working of technology, but instead of it being a hard-earned gift that lands them in less than legal jobs, they are just kids who have grown up with computers. They are every child born in the 80s. The concerns of the postcyberpunk novel are much the same as those of its predecessor; multinational corporations and privatised security forces throwing their weight around the real and virtual worlds, but a street-savvy teenager inevitably deals with these problems differently to a gristled ex-hacker running with mercenaries.

Jump forward again to 2012 and it seems as though the genre has evolved once more. Using the novella Holophin by Luke Kennard as an example, it appears we have reached (dare I say it?) postpostcyberpunk. Kennard utilises all the tropes that identify Holophin with the cyberpunk legacy. The near future world is governed chiefly by corporations instead of now defunct countries. The protagonist is a young, exceedingly bright, girl with a flair for computer engineering. The narrative takes place in both the real and the virtual world. So far it all sounds totally in keeping with cyberpunk and postcyberpunk stories, but we live in the 21^st century now. We have been essentially living alongside computers, near sentient software and enhanced human beings for over three decades. Any residual fear of the technological future is gone. The thought of computers leading to a hyper-urban noir wasteland is over. Kennard’s future is a pleasant one, not without its dangers, but immediately more appealing than Gibson’s Chiba City or Stephenson’s Burblaves.

The reflection of the writer’s era continues further. Like our own technology, the units that enable the characters to access cyberspace across all three generations of books have got smaller, less angular and less clunky. Gibson’s description alludes to a rather hefty desktop computer in his earlier books. This shrinks and streamlines to a laptop ten years later and now, though it looks like a holographic dolphin sticker, Kennard is essentially describing an iPhone. This becomes all the more apparent when a rival company appears with the Nautilus; their version of the Holophin which has open source software and is free to alter as the user sees fit. Sound familiar? The Android/Apple battle is used as the inspiration for a compelling adventure in cyberindustrial espionage.

It is this method of using contemporary issues that really binds the three generations of cyberpunk books together. Topical concerns get blown up and thrown into a near future setting which somehow makes them all the more real. Where general science fiction is a vehicle for speculation and hypothesis, cyberpunk uses its fictional science to cast a magnifying glass over our everyday lives. Technology has become second nature and without this unique family of fiction we forget to question just how ready we are to give ourselves up to the machine.

_____________________________________________________

Holophin by Luke Kennard is published by Penned in the Margins and launches in limited edition hardback on 1st of September.

Avid science fiction reader and practicing geek, Nick Murray, is considering taking this article further and turning it into a short lecture. If you have any comments about the article please do write them below.

Our heroine, Tuan, one of a group of Japanese girls who originally tried to starve themselves to death in protest against the admedistrations, where death is unusual, is largely unlikable, lacking any real personality beyond slight resentments that only seem to surface when they are confronted with the characters responsible for them.  As an outsider who yet enjoys the benefits of the admedistrative society, who is in fact an official in the WHO, Tuan should be a difficult and conflicted character, but comes across as incomplete, and lazily written.  She lurks around the edges of admedistrative society, indulging in illicit substances, but lacks either the pathetic tragedy that marks out Winston in 1984, or the noble ideals of John in Brave New World.  Instead, she comes across as whiny and needling, like Bernard Marx, with equally poor and contradictory characterisation.  Rather than driving the plot, she seems caught up in it, which worked fine in the Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, a similar novel in many respects, but falls flat here; where Sterling’s work seems a parody of the centrality of characters to a conspiracy, Itoh’s is much more orthodox, and Tuan’s lack of agency feels clumsy.  Likewise, the characters she meets along the way seem tailored to advance the plot, resulting in an awkward and churning narrative that feels more like a video game than a novel, where every chapter ends with a Tuan finding out that Bowser has taken the princess to another castle.

If the narrative is clumsy, however, it must be said that Itoh has a knack for choosing interesting backdrops, and that these elements are some of the most interesting parts of the novel.  Baghdad reimagined as a ‘medical Dubai’ after picking itself up after American withdrawal, or the conclusion in Eastern Europe; Harmony is filled with imaginative takes on the world we know, that feel neither too crashingly obvious, or so alien as to be outside possibility.  Nor do the locations feel chosen to add spice, as so many post-cyberpunk novels do.

Although it is a flawed novel, it would be unfair to dismiss Harmony; where it breaks new ground, it suceeds, and its only major failing is a lack of confidence, and a willingness to fall back on standard ideas.  Itoh’s writing makes it an easy page turner, and though the questions it raises are probably more interesting than the story itself, Harmony is definitely worth a read.

That puts today’s cyberpunk (which we are calling second wave cyberpunk as opposed to postcyberpunk which unfortunately implies that the movement is over) in a weird place,  because what would have obviously been part of the genre in the 80s now just seems like real life. In novels like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, the setting is a near-future dystopia where climate change and economic collapse have left poor people with only the internet and an MMORPG called the Oasis as a way of getting away from the harsh realities of existance. In the real world, when you drive down the car, you are bound to see a poorly dressed teenager with a stupid haircut driving a 1992 Ford Tempo with his $600 iPad in his lap. High tech and low life is right. Cyberpunk isn’t really science fiction anymore—it’s just the real world.

That said, fiction writers are still dabbling in it. Aside from Ready Player One, there was also Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW series (the first installment of which was reviewed here last week), which heavily involves the internet in the story of a blind girl gaining sight through an ocular implant that ends up allowing her to actually see the internet. Sure, there are aspects in that story that are slightly beyond our own real technology, but it is not nearly as much of a gap as what was present at the time of Gibson’s original masterpiece.

So what is second wave cyberpunk? It no longer really has the implication of lowlifes whose only assets are their tech—it’s more about the general emphasis of technology with the typical science fiction veneer. If the internet is either the primary setting or actually a character in the story, that’s really what cyberpunk is now. Although all science fiction written in modern times dabbles in the internet, it isn’t always the primary setting (as in Ready Player One), or basically a living thing (as in the WWW series). Purists may criticize the explanation but it is what it is. Kids in mirrorshades and green mohawks was fun for a while, but every genre eventually transitions to a different phase. This is it.

Rating: B

Caitlin Decter is a pretty, young, highly inteligent high schooler who recently moved with her family from Austin, Texas to Toronto. It is the first time she has been at a regular public high school, as up until this point, she had been attending a school for the blind in Austin. Her father, a theoretical physicist, was offered a lucrative job in Canada, and Caitlin wanted so badly to go to a regular high school with regular kids, so the family went. Everything changes when a scientist named Dr. Kuroda from Tokyo contacts Caitlin via email about an experimental procedure that would use computer technology to give her sight. After the experiment, Caitlin begins to realize that she is starting to see is not actually the real world, but the World Wide Web, all around her in colors and light.

The thing about Robert J. Sawyer that perhaps makes him most endearing and yet probably will damn him to a lack of longevity of influence is that all of his novels feel definitively “of their era.” When cracking open a novel by Sawyer, who has won so many major science fiction awards that it is useless to try to list them all, it is always clear that what you are reading was written in the late 20th or early 21st century. WWW: Wake features heavy reference to current day artists, and more importantly to technology that even now in 2012 seems a bit outdated. Caitlin, the wonderfully spunky (though perhaps exaggeratedly teenage) protagonist writes a blog on LiveJournal, a website that wasn’t even hip anymore at the time the novel is set but now even moreso seems to be a fossil of a bygone era of the internet. Because of these aspects, it is hard to foresee novels like this aging well. Sawyer is a capable but not amazing writer, whose strength lies in his ideas and the quality and depth of his characters. Caitlin Decter is an immediately likable and memorable main character, and as in all of Sawyer’s work, his characters feel like real people.

WWW: Wake is sort of a modernist cyberpunk. There are definitely liberties taken, but it reads like the natural manifestation of what happens when you take the slightly optimistic technological prophecy of William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, but set it in the now current era with technology that is closer to what actually exists in present day. The aesethetic isn’t the pure noir feel of the 1980s and early 90s cyberpunk; it feels more like young adult fiction by the basis of the fact that the primary character is a teenager and it sort of borrows what would be her natural narrative voice despite being third-person omniscient in terms of perspective.

Being that the novel is the first book in a trilogy, it has a lot of setup to do for what will come in the other two books in the series. Taken on its own merits, it is still a deeply enjoyable read, despite borrowing so heavily from its inspirations. WWW: Wake is basically a love letter to cyberpunk of old that reinvigorates the genre and makes it a bit more accessible for today’s science fiction reader. Although it is not indispensible reading, it is certainly an enjoyable look at the nature of the World Wide Web and today’s technology as a whole. It bodes well for the rest of the series.

Official Summary:

If you could upload your mind, where would you put it?

A postcyberpunk Extropian sci-fi with psychological and philosophical suspense.

First person, past tense.

I got this book after I saw one reader summarize it as (paraphrasing): “Man evolves itself out of existence when it figures out that artificial-intelligence children are more fun to raise than real children.”

So, where to begin? I was confused for most of it, but couldn’t put it down anyway. I knew something momentous was going to happen, or I would have some grand epiphany.

It was a brilliant novel in that way where you, the not-quite-all-there reader, would think a novel is brilliant because you don’t understand it, but you figure the fault is yours and not the book’s. I kind of got the gist of it: A scientist downloads his mind/soul/personality to a computer, which lives on in various bodies, mostly of the mechanical variety, for thousands of years while the human race goes extinct except for a teeny forgotten colony that lives in magical bliss, where he is pretty much re-seeding the human race with his own genes. Basically, he’s a god, any way you cut it.

There’s a lot of philosophy woven in it with no mention of a creator deity other than the protagonist himself. There is also a bunch of scientific and artificial intelligence jargon thrown around which, although I understood the philosophy and biology, I didn’t understand the tech stuff. Not only that, but I didn’t understand it enough to be able to tell if it was real jargon or made-up jargon.

On the other hand, I liked it and I couldn’t wait to get back to it. I don’t know if that was a function of my engrossment or my increasing need for the epiphany.

MPAA rating: PG for sexual references, a curse word or two, and cartoon violence/death

Grade: 85/100

This week is dedicated to one of my favorite anime films of all time, Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. I even wrote a 20 page paper on it for class last semester, I was allowed to pick my topic *evil grin*. I created a condensed blog post version Cyborgs Exist and Humanity is Doomed. It’s about how we are currently living in a posthuman society (yes right now) and how cyborgs exist. I use GITS as an oracle for what we can expect in the future and debate whether a ghost (i.e. soul) can exist in a shell (i.e. machine). GITS goes much further than the typical self-aware machine, and pushes the limits and achieves a type of techno-transcendence (isn’t that a brilliant word?!).

If I don’t stop myself now I’ll start an entirely new 20 page paper! And you didn’t come here for that, you came here to see tattoos and tattoos you shall see!

Enjoy Cyberpunkers!

I included all the information about the tattoo that was available. If you are interested in having me feature your geeky tattoo on a future Tattoo Tuesday feel free to email me at girlgonegeekblog[at]gmail.com.

Joe Peacock’s gorgeous tattoo of The Major done my tattoo artist Todo, 9-hour sitting, at Hell City in Columbus, OH May 29 2009. [Source: Joe Peacock's Blog]

Major Motoko Kusanagi Leg Tattoo done by the tattoo artist Kryoide [Source: Kryoide DeviantART

Aliensatemyhead Kusanagi Tattoo done by Rachel in Orlando (that's all the info available) [Source: Aliensatemyhead on DeviantArt]

A tattoo of The Major by tetsuonabiki. (No artist info available) [Source: The Adventures of Auck Blog]

Found Melissa’s tattoo of Kusanagi did not include artist info. [Source: The Adventures of Auck Blog & Wired.com]

Nick’s GITS Tattoo. “The upper figure is from the cover of the [manga], the lower from the DVD cover. All the cityspace and wirework is freehand by the artist. Tattoo by Ivan at Chameleons Tattoo.” [Source: Tattoos by Design]

GITS Sleeve done by DanMarshall [Source: BodyMod.org]

Romantist-Egoist Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Tattoo. It was done by Sam at Adorn East in Portland, OR. [Source: Romantist-Egoist on DeviantArt]

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Tattoo from Riokou. The source link only had the image of the tattoo but I found this tattoo on The Adventures of Auck Blog.

Neon-Stitches GITS Data Ports (btw Data Ports seem to be the most popular GITS tattoo) [Source: Neon-Stitches DeviantArt]

Thursday Morning’s (on Flickr) Tachikoma Tattoo [Source: Thursday Morning Flickr]

M1K3Y’s GITS:SAC Tattoo (no artist info available) [Source: M1K3Y Flickr]

[I found a lot of the tattoos on The Adventures of Auck Blog big thanks!]

Postcyberpunk uses the same immersive world-building technique, but features different characters, settings, and, most importantly, makes fundamentally different assumptions about the future. Far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of society (i.e., they have jobs). They live in futures that are not necessarily dystopic (indeed, they are often suffused with an optimism that ranges from cautious to exuberant), but their everyday lives are still impacted by rapid technological change and an omnipresent computerized infrastructure.

One of the things that I found a bit of a logic hole in Inception was the fact that protagonist Cobb, who fled America after being framed for killing his wife, never seems to consider taking on a new identity or even attempting to falsify a passport–despite being apparently hunted enough to worry about extradition, he travels under his own name through multiple countries and, finally, enters the United States again using his own passport, which appears to be the only one he has.

This begins to make sense, however, if you consider Cobb as a postcyberpunk character thrown into a cyberpunk character’s role: He is an alienated loner desperate to return to his function in society.

The fact that he maintains his own identity throughout the movie points to his continued desire for legitimacy in the social order.

Not all classically cyberpunk characters, of course, were alienated, although those who weren’t in William Gibson’s books, say, tended to fall into the role of the ingenue showing us the world, like the Japanese teenager from Mona Lisa Overdrive. And some of the characters in Inception fall squarely into cyberpunk archetypes. The forger, for example, is Inception‘s counterpart to the Dixie Flatline or the Finn, a lifelong criminal with a flair for the dramatic and perpetual stubble (unlike the Dixie Flatline, he’s not stored in a computer.) The greatest cyberpunk archetype is undoubtedly Saito, the energy mogul who hires elite extractors (the updated version of the “cowboys” from Count Zero or the phreakers from an early Bruce Sterling short) to help him break up his competitor’s business. His band of hackers, however, is largely composed of people who don’t seem like people who want to be in the business at all, just momentary pariahs from the legitimate world of dreambuilding.

The last part of the cyberpunk and postcyberpunk world is the corporation. In the cyberpunk world, corporations are a necessary evil: They have amazing power, but it degrades and corrupts, multiplying the entropy of street gangs, softening the brains of its leaders, who become vat-living monstrosities or insane emperors. In postcyberpunk, the corporation is essentially a larger version of the characters, making rational decisions that are sometimes benign and sometimes dangerous.

The corporations in Inception are more than benign, they are positively Pollyannaish. The titular “inception” involves Saito repairing his rival’s relationship to his father in order to get him to abandon the business; the corporation’s only malicious act is to injure a man who sold out the opposite side.

Inception‘s corporations have honor, clearly. In fact, they seem sometimes almost strangely trusting–in a world where strangers might come and break into your mind at any point, you’d really think the CEO of a massive energy company would quit sleeping on the commuter train with no bodyguard. Bruce Schneier, Bruce Schneier please pick up the white courtesy phone.

An instructive comparison between this and Neuromancer is the way the respective benefactors handle their employees. In Neuromancer, the protagonist also trusts a corporate employer to repair his life, or rather his brain, which was damaged as retribution from a previous employer. His new bosses agree–but bond toxin sacs into his bloodstream in case he fails the job, and remove his capacity to process psychotropic drugs. In Inception, the employer rescues Cobb time and time again, from both a company pursuing him for a botched job and from the spectre of his dead wife.

After Target donated money to a conservative Minnesota candidate for political office, people are worrying about corporate states and personhood. Inception, however, depicts a future where the corporation is all right–and certainly preferable to populist mobs or canny politicians.