Week11: Cyberpunk and Steampunk


Snow Crash is the most difficult book I have ever read. I can't understand it at all. I think he mentioned almost everything. Taking the cyber world as an important platform to show the dark and extreme "punk" stories, cyberpunk depicts a not always a bright future, the dazzling high-tech is usually deeply rooted in the slums, gangs and other bad social forms. One important function of science fiction is to sound the alarm bells for fast-moving things like The superbomb that Welles fears; Take, for example, some of the techniques exhaustively demonized in many novels. Personally, I think cyberpunk is a kind of early warning, a genre of fiction that tells about a crazy future society, and the various people who struggle in it, and shows some resilience in a dark environment, and tells about a possibility, and offers a glimmer of hope in a dark future world.

One of the amazing Settings in Avalanche is to use a laser to scan the retina directly, projecting a virtual environment into the human eye. These seemingly sci-fi scenarios are not far from reality. Apart from the 3D movies you see in 3D cinemas, holographic displays that actually implement 3D display came out two or three years ago. Glasses-like displays, which can be worn like ordinary glasses but display a picture at a distance, have long been available on the market.

Snow Crash description of future society, although in the near the edge of collapse, but also to see the indomitable struggle in such an environment, in the chaotic environment, can stick to their principles, live out their own life, I think this is a novel valuable place, at the same time to predict the pessimistic future light the hope everyone's heart.
Personally, I think the mission of science fiction is not to predict a bright future or warn of technological disaster, but to tell a possibility, so that readers can see what the future might be like and think about life in this future in their minds. As a reader, I am alert to the disaster warned of in the novel and look forward to such a wonderful future in the novel.

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