[Link] Nine sci-fi subgenres to help you understand the future

by Jay Owens

“Cyberpunk” has been the go-to imagery of the future for a startlingly long time—Bruce Bethke’s short story of that name is 35 years old, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was released in 1982. We need some newer words for what’s coming next.

So I punted a question out on Twitter, asking the fans, authors, and futurists I know to share what they saw going on in speculative writing around the world and (often) outside the Anglosphere. These visions are, ultimately, reflections of where people believe the world is headed now, and cyberpunk is not the only vision the world has to offer—indeed, it was never the only one.

Read the full article: https://qz.com/quartzy/1447599/nine-sci-fi-subgenres-to-help-you-understand-the-future/

[Link] Cyberpunk is getting its biggest push since the late ‘90s, but why don’t audiences seem to care?

By David Houghton

Dark, technologically driven futures seem ever more relevant. But are we already too far down that path to notice?

The future is getting dark again. Or at least it’s trying to. Largely missing in action since the late-‘90s, the Cyberpunk genre has been trying really goddamn hard to re-establish itself in the mainstream over the last year or so. Once the dominant – or at least most influential and invigorating – literary sci-fi genre of the ‘80s, and a major shaper of cinema in that decade and its follow-up, the world of grim-dark, neon drenched, near-future hellholes and invasive, revolutionary tech-use has rather diminished since then. Under the weight of flopped movies, aesthetic fatigue, and The Matrix getting way too big and then becoming rubbish, Cyberpunk fell hard and rather fast. But now, it’s trying to rise again.

Read the full article. https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-is-getting-its-biggest-push-since-the-late-90s-but-why-dont-audiences-seem-to-care/