After the dispute over my opinions about the nihilistic elements of cyberpunk role-playing, I did a little more digging and found that this element of cyberpunk is not exactly considered unique. I also discovered that, rather unsurprisingly, cyberpunk is a rich field of theoretical endeavour. I discovered a cyberpunk course at the peer to peer university (!?) which includes explicit analysis of the nihilistic elements of cyberpunk, along with some interesting discussion of the narrative components of the style. The conclusion of this post is that nihilism is a fundamental component of the genre (and some nice hat tips to the theoretical concept of nihilism are identified in The Matrix).

The P2PU course on cyberpunk also includes links to a lot of open access journal articles about cyberpunk, some of which could be worth reading.

Finally, I found an interesting-looking article on Cyberpunk and Orientalism, which might give an interesting insight into some of the things I’ve noticed before in Cyberpunk – particularly the 90s wave of Gibson et al – which seems to have a heavy degree of romanticisation of the far East. I have my suspicions about Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it does provide an interesting platform from which to analyse Western opinions of Asia, so I’m going to give this essay a go – even though it’s a PhD thesis so probably therefore hideously difficult to read – and I may provide a few interpretations of it on a future post. How’s that for taking one for the team?