I’ve read quite a bit of (what I consider to be) the main classic cyberpunk novels. Stuff like The Sprawl trilogy, Hardwired, Snow Crash. I’ve also read some proto-cyberpunk novels like The Stars My Destination, The Machine Stops, and various Philip K Dick stories.

So I decided to delve a bit deeper into some lesser-known “classic” cyberpunk novels. And I’m struggling. I tried reading Synners, The Shockwave Rider, and Headcrash and I haven’t really enjoyed any of them. But I don’t want to turn this into a negative post where I just whine and complain about these books, so instead I’d like to ask: for those of you who have read and enjoyed these books, what did you like about them? Were they just products of their time and “you had to be there” to appreciate it? Or is there something more I’m missing?

Again, I’ll try not to get too negative here, but I think my main complaint with Headcrash can be summed up by this statement on its wikipedia page:

mixed reviews (often centering around whether the reviewer saw it as satire or a failed attempt at sincere comedy)

As I read it, it felt like a failed attempt at sincere comedy. The jokes are so constant and not funny that I found the writing style irritating. This isn’t like Douglas Adams going off on wild silly tangents; Headcrash has the main character reading through a pile of junk mail where each item is some ridiculous hyper-exaggerated take on modern life. It’s exhausting. Compare that to Snow Crash, which was also a cyberpunk satire, yet the world-building felt cohesive and consistent. Sure, burbclaves might be ridiculous, along with the idea of a mob-boss pizza owner having too much power, but in-universe these things were treated seriously. Headcrash comes across as the author telling the reader how ridiculous his ideas are.

Shockwave Rider was probably just too much a product of its time for me. Being written in 1975, it has some interesting ideas about computers and the internet, yet so much of the story feels too “near future” with the author extrapolating from life in the 1970s and missing the mark. There are too many items which the author didn’t think would change or didn’t take a pessimistic/nihilistic enough view of how people would actually use the technology.

Synners I think has the most interesting story, yet the writing style is so strange to me that I’m having trouble following exactly what’s happening. I feel like I should like this one, yet I just can’t stay focused on it while reading. It’s a shame because I think there are some good ideas here. Unfortunately, I tend to read one chapter, get disinterested, put it down for six months, then attempt to read one more chapter with no memory of what happened in the previous chapter. So it’s probably more of a problem with me than the book, but each time I finish a chapter I don’t exactly feel compelled to keep going.

So those of you who have read any of these books, what did you like about them? What made them special/unique? I’m fully willing to accept that these books were revolutionary at the time but maybe their predictions were so far off that with hindsight, they don’t feel very prescient.

  • HammerjackOPMEnglish
    2·
    22 hours ago

    That’s very true. It was much less likely for a cyberpunk novel to be published at all, so anytime you got any cyberpunk it was a big deal. Now we have a flood of mediocre cyberpunk novels uploaded to the Kindle store daily so it takes more to be remembered.

    I still think one thing that helps a sci-fi novel stand the test of time is when they accurately predict some aspect of the future. For example, The Machine Stops imagines a world where everyone just sits alone in their bedroom staring at a screen reading other people’s opinions and posting their own opinions. And it was written in 1909. It doesn’t matter what else happens in the story, just that prediction is incredible.

    On the other hand, there’s Trouble and Her Friends. I remember seeing some review that said the novel perfectly describes what people in the 90s thought the internet would become in the future. It was open and community-driven with no presence of commerce at all. At the time, it was the dream of what could be. But in hindsight, we know it never happened.