Cyberpunk

My favorite aspect of the stories this week was the environments. Aside from Learning about Machine Sex, none of the stories focused much on characters or complex plots; much of the text in each story was devoted to creating nuanced environments. As far as that goes, I think Rat did it best; I liked most of the stories, but Rat was easily my favorite of the week.

Machine Sex was my least favorite. It was terribly depressing. Her cynicism about all sexual relationships being exploitative and cruel doesn’t make for uplifting reading. Writing doesn’t have to infuse us with gilded rays of sunshine, I understand, but there should be some tradeoff in growth or development or some such thing for the hope and dreams that the piece wrenches from our hearts and mangles irreparably. In this case, Candace Jane Dorsey left an enormous gash in my soul, which will forever leak romantic dreams and cinnamon hearts.

I thought 2064 was a mix between hilarity and profound melancholy. The rambling artist dream seemed a little ludicrous, and I can just picture the compound smiling, inside its compound-mind, a wry compound smirk at the nutty vagrabond. But before that, the artist seems, as the narrator comments, heavily burdened. He has devoted himself to finding/creating the great image, but his toiling has been in vain, and he knows his time is slipping away, so there is a deeply sorrowful coloring to his character. When seen through the eyes of the stronghold however, there is a break, a lack of connection, and this sort of empathy feels impossible. This story also did a swell job of environment building.

Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized