The Bones Are Showing

 

"The Bone Season" by Samantha Shannon,  is a brilliant read but a big book, It is a near future dystopia with elements of Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast", Philip Pulman's "His Dark Materials" and "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. While it is easy to read it is not an easy read and cyberpunk elements are reminding me of the work of Willam Gibson.

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not on others. C'est La Vie.

The music is "International Robots" by The Saints

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
5. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
6. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
7. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
8. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer and this is her Instagram

What Happened To Cyberpunk?

Reading 2023 it definitely falls into the Cyberpunk genre. The Amazon series "Mr Robot" (with Rami Malek and Christian Slater)  was a classic TV example of the genre. I first became aware of it with William Gibson's "Neuromancer" although the film of "Blade Runner" is a possible starting point, although this then harks back to Philip K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"..

The reason I ask is that Steampunk seems to be ubiquitous and also seemingly easily defines, although putting cogs on something DOES NOT make it Steampunk. Steampunk is an analogue , non digital world often accompanied by Victoriana and has it's origins in many of the Disney takes on HG Wells stories, but I digress.

How often is Cyberpunk mentioned, or seen as a genre, it's certainly passing me by. It's not that I miss it as such but it seems to be lost under the general science fiction banner. I would love to be pointed in the direction of recent Cyberpunk, and no doubt people will ask me why I haven't noticed "XXXX" or whatever.

So music wise we go with "Love Missile F1-11" by Sigue Sigue Sputnik which fits snugly with the genre.