Week 5 – New Punks

In a genre where the imagined future is just a few years from realised reality, contemporary cyberpunk writing sits in an interesting space. This week, we’ll be examining Cory Doctorow’s I, Robot and Neal Stephenson’s  Snow Crash.  I, Robot is significantly shorter that Snow Crash, but it would be interesting to look at similarities and differences in the imagery, themes and narrative arc of the two stories. Do they have any factors in common that the earlier works do not? Are the worlds that they imagine any different to the worlds that writers like Gibson and Sterling imagine? Do they share moral imperatives? Are there any distinguishing characteristics to more recent cyberpunk that may not feature as strongly in the older, more classic cyberpunk?

If you could upload your pieces as a blog post by the end of Monday the 12th October, then we’ll have a day to read and comment before Wednesday the 14th’s discussion. Please tag your work with the tags Week 5, Doctorow, Stephenson and any other tags you might feel are appropriate.

Image: A Cup of Robots by striatic on Flickr, CC BY 2.0