We’ll be featuring one of the great new courses being offered at P2PU every day this week, and what better to start with than the Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature course. This was an incredibly popular course in the last cycle at P2PU, and promises to be just as fascinating this time round:
Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre noted for its focus on “high tech and low life”. The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk … It features advanced science, such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk
The course aim to illustrate the contrast between “space opera”/pulp science fiction and cyberpunk. The studied texts will cover from a glorious far future to a darker near future, and then it will investigate the present in both fictional (Little Brother) and real settings (The Hacker Crackdown). Orthogonal with this temporal perspective the course will bring into discussion the cruel relation between humans and androids, the human drive to create idealised copies of themselves and the disposability of such creations.
Sign up for this courses closes on February 28th, so scoot over to the new p2pu site and join.
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