The supposed influence of noir on cyberpunk is
bollocks.
The whole point of noir is hopelessness, *particularly as far
as the protagonist is concerned*. This is almost never the
case with cyberpunk, which usually
(at least, in first-generation, 1984-1990 cyberpunk) takes a
near-future of corporate domination and urban breakdown and
adds to it cyberspace, which still provides freedom and an
outlet for personal triumph to the protagonist. There isn't a
significant or even major cyberpunk novel in which, in truest
noir style, the protagonist is defeated. Cyberpunk is usually
about triumph over an oppositional and usually corrupt
system, not defeat in the face of it. Similarly, the
dystopian view that the wikipedia entry writers ascribe to
noir comes from the darker hardboiled writers.
Cyberpunk took some of the flavor of noir, but the truer
influence on cyberpunk is, first, the dime novels of the 19th
century, which began the down-these-mean
streets-a-lone-hero-must-go trope; then the Western (it's not
a coincidence that hackers call themselves "cowboys"), with
its concept of the wide-open spaces that the protagnoist can
help tame (in cyberpunk, that frontier is cyberspace); then
hardboiled fiction (which is itself influenced by the
aforementioned 19th century dime novels), which gave
cyberpunk many of the specific characteristics of the
traditional cyberpunk protagonist; then science fiction,
which gave cyberpunk the ideas of identity fluidity,
acceptance of alternative sexualities and cultures, and the
fetishization of computers, among other things.
jess
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 05 Oct 2005 EDT