Comment by cubefox

Comment by cubefox a day ago

Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bother to phrase things in a way that is digestible for people from the past.

I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.

johngossman 17 hours ago

Ada Palmer makes this point. She teaches Renaissance history and tries to write her sci-fi as if she was trying to describe today to someone from the 15th century. Stanislaw Lem was also brilliant in describing his future worlds in ways that were hard to understand, as alien as he guessed they would actually be.

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cubefox 13 hours ago

In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the Bathtub".
In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when they are obvious for the characters. Similar to how books set in the present don't try to be science fiction for people in the past, even though they would be, and therefore don't avoid or explain modern terminology.

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kstrauser 17 hours ago

Exactly. I imagine something like “he glanced at his phone and saw he didn’t even have LTE”. The author wouldn’t be trying to make you think about the details of modern communication systems. They’d want you to infer that the subject of the sentence was barely on the edge of communications.

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