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The show was about a low-life trying to infiltrate a corporation. I find it interesting because all other cyberpunk stories I know will only show the evil CEO hiding at the top of some giant building. It's rare to find a story that shows the life of the average worker drone. Obviously, it was cancelled after one season.
We all know the second season of Netflix's Altered Carbon series was terrible, but Netflix also made an anime movie called Altered Carbon: Resleeved which is completely unrelated to the show. It isn't the best cyberpunk anime ever made but it's still worth watching.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmDxxoFslzs
On Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81001991
I'm not sure how well-known this series is, but I really enjoyed it. The entire series is written in first-person perspective and it has a fun dark humor to it.
Synopsis of the first book:
In the near future, the only thing growing faster than the criminal population is the Electric Church, a new religion founded by a mysterious man named Dennis Squalor. The Church preaches that life is too brief to contemplate the mysteries of the universe: eternity is required. In order to achieve this, the converted become Monks -- cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and virtually unlimited life spans.
Enter Avery Cates, a dangerous criminal known as the best killer-for-hire around. The authorities have a special mission in mind for Cates: assassinate Dennis Squalor. But for Cates, the assignment will be the most dangerous job he's ever undertaken -- and it may well be his last.
More posters here: https://kuciara.com/project/bladerunner
Amazon Prime Video has an original series called 'Upload'. Here's the premise: It's the future. The rich can have their consciousness uploaded when they die. They can spend their digital afterlife in a VR country club/resort forever (or until they run out of money, whichever comes first). In this world, the main character is working on an open source version of the digital afterlife so he can give it away to those less fortunate who can't afford this paradise. But before he's able to release it to the public, he's murdered. So his rich girlfriend pays to have his consciousness uploaded. Now he's in this VR country club with a bunch of billionaires, trying to solve his own murder.
With that premise alone, I'm interested. Sounds totally cyberpunk. The rich/poor divide, uploaded consciousness, murder mystery, all hints of Altered Carbon. And yet... it's a romantic comedy.
That entire premise I described above is just the sub-plot, the B story. What the show is actually about is the love triangle between the main character, his rich girlfriend (who's paying for his digital afterlife but treats him as an accessory), and the tech support rep assigned to his case (who's a genuinely nice person). He's falling in love with the tech support rep but if he breaks up with his psycho girlfriend she'll stop paying his afterlife bills and he'll die. Cue wacky sit-com antics.
If the focus was reversed and the character was spending all his time investigating his murder while gradually falling in love with this tech support rep, I'd probably really enjoy it. But instead, the focus is on the love triangle and his murder investigation is mostly just something to talk about while taking long walks with his tech support rep.
Now, obviously, the show simply isn't for me. It never claimed to be a gritty cyberpunk murder mystery; it was always marketed as a fun-loving rom-com. So it's my own expectations that are flawed. But the world-building is so close to a solid cyberpunk tv show that I can feel the wasted potential. I guess I'd say it's the most cyberpunk rom-com I've ever seen, but that's a really odd category to have.
Trailer, in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZfZj2bn_xg
I've been trying to come up with cyberpunk recommendations for this community to help keep it active. But my assumption is that anyone subscribed here already has basic knowledge of the cyberpunk genre. That is, I don't think we need any "what is cyberpunk?" posts.
But I spend (way too much) time wondering what cyberpunk works I can just assume everyone here already knows about. For example, there are quite a few cyberpunk works that are well-known enough outside of cyberpunk circles that I don't think I need to recommend them. Those would include:
But then there are what I would consider the "second-tier" cyberpunk works that might not have reached pop-culture status but are still classics to those with knowledge of cyberpunk. Those would include:
- Hardware
- Strange Days
- Johnny Mnemonic
- Hardwired
- Cyber City Oedo 808
- I'm not sure where to draw the line here... Hackers? Dredd? Bubblegum Crisis? Serial Experiments Lain?
I also want to make sure my recommendations are truly cyberpunk and not just cyberpunk-adjacent. For example, as good as they may be, I don't personally consider Upgrade or Ex Machina to be cyberpunk. And that brings me back to if something is truly cyberpunk then it probably falls into that second-tier list that maybe everyone already knows about. It's hard to draw the line between "this is unknown" and "this is a cult classic for those in the know".
Anyway, I'm going to continue over-thinking this and doing my best to come up with interesting yet not-widely-known cyberpunk works. I just wanted this post to run through all the cyberpunk works I won't be recommending because I assume you're already aware of them (even if you haven't watched/read them).
This is all second-hand knowledge (I'm not involved with nor personally know anyone involved) but I also had an account on dataterm.digital so I at least saw part of it. One thing I saw was the admin made a post on the local community saying he would be de-federating from one of the NSFW instances because dataterm.digital was hosted in Germany and he wasn't sure of the legality of the content under German laws. Seems like a perfectly fair thing to do in my opinion. But, for whatever reason, a bunch of people from totally unrelated instances started flooding that post with horrible content that he had to moderate away. I don't know why someone unrelated to dataterm.digital or that NSFW instance would have any stake in the issue, but there were a bunch of toxic comments.
I don't think this was the worst thing that happened to the instance, but I do believe it was the last straw. The admin was so irritated by the whole thing that he just outright deleted the entire dataterm.digital VM without any warning and is basically done with Lemmy now. I personally don't blame him in any way, but I would've at least liked a heads-up that he was doing this. I only know about it because I found his mastodon post shortly after he deleted the VM.
The people behind dataterm.digital also run the mastodon instance corteximplant.com and a couple other fediverse applications like pixelfed and misskey, but I don't think they're coming back to Lemmy.