Cyberpunk has been bleeding slowly ever since, never quite dying but no longer capable of the dazzling fictional displays that made it seem, for a time anyway, immortal.

Neal Stephenson dealt the genre a killer blow with his virtual swift sword in Snow Crash (1992). But in retrospect, like the musical movement it invokes, cyberpunk appears shockingly short-lived: Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (1985)-only a few novels still wear all that black with panache. It was Goth angst meets digital wizardry. It has been over twenty-five years since Gibson hacked his way onto the science fiction continuum, creating a subgenre that became instantly infamous: cyberpunk. Old punks get day jobs, like Joe Strummer-or William Gibson. Old punks never die, only young ones (think Sid Vicious). Stephenson also discussed trends in science fiction and futurism, saying, “I, at a certain point, got tired of the dystopian thing.” He suggested that Hollywood has embraced dystopias because it’s “cheaper and quicker to do that than to meticulously extract a whole alternate reality.The king called up his jet fighters He said you better earn your pay In his view, that’s something that always happens across media, but “there are these moments that come up from time to time, when a new medium emerges, when nobody knows anything … This is one of those moments, I think.” “It’s easy to get those financed and not as easy to get other kinds of indie films financed.” “If you want to make a movie, everybody knows that superhero movies make money,” Stephenson continued. He contrasted VR/AR with more traditional art forms, where he said, “Everybody knows what works.” He could, however, speak more broadly about the possibilities he sees in these technologies. In addition to his work as a science fiction writer (he appeared at Disrupt SF today to promote his novel Seveneves), Stephenson is chief futurist at secretive AR company Magic Leap, but apparently he’s not allowed to talk about his work with the company. Neal Stephenson, who inspired much of the current VR industry with his novel Snow Crash, explained why he’s excited about virtual reality and augmented reality - and it’s for less technical reasons than you might think.

Snow crash di neal stephenson