THE BOOKWORM
Neon lights bleeding through fog and steam ripple across puddles in the rain. Neon and flickering streetlamps faintly light a crowded street; the stars and moon, perennially obscured by clouds and steel, have been long forgotten by a populace that never looks up anymore. Towering skyscrapers disappear into clouds, crumbling foundations contrasting mirrored gleaming peaks soaring above the street and the gaze of the lower city’s denizens. In those towers live and work corporate elite, garbed in glitzy fashion, adorned with the best augmentation money can buy, oblivious to the dregs shambling through overcrowded streets beneath. For “corpos”, cyberware is yet another accoutrement, luxury adornments replacing flesh with metal, flaunting extreme wealth. On the street, nothing is luxurious or ornamental: enhancements, like everything else here, are cobbled together and utilitarian, necessary prosthetics making better workers.
This is the world of Cyberpunk…A dark, gritty dystopian hellscape of “low life and high tech” juxtaposing the hopeful utopian science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. The genre has its roots in the writing of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams and Harlan Ellison in the 1980s. Cyberpunk continues its popularity today, featured in series like Westworld, Altered Carbon, and Cyberpunk 2077 Netrunners; movies such as the Ready Player One, Upgrade, and Blade Runner 2049; and video games Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077.
