Cyberpunk has been literary Science Fictions best sub-genre ever to me and that is why we are here. To nut out it's significance*.

*Not related to signifier, semiotic, appropriation or any other post-m. B.S

The big failures of traditonal SF in my view have been space travel and robots because neither have been realised to the extent that SF writers such as A.C.Clarke and Asimov speculated.

Cyber-Punk as written originally by Gibson and Sterling writes about a near future where technological advances take place either on earth or in near orbit.

The good areas of speculation in cyberpunk are networked computers (gaming and the net) nanotechnology and biotechnology/gene technology.

The dud areas are that old bugbear of AI* which is just robots warmed up and which I reckon is very sus.

Now who spotted the allusion to Gibson's "Burning Chrome" in my header?

Jump forward 4 spaces if you did.

Gibson
Sterling
Egan
Bear
Benford
Stephenson

stonecoldcyber.com
WHAT ?

Robots

I watched Bicentennial man on TV recently and god I hate the way Asimov has to have robots that have/want human emotions. This is not going to happen.

It's the same as Star Trek's problem with its Spock/Data/7of9 and the new Vulcan female in Enterprise - T'Pau - the problem being that they fixate on the aliens/robots with no emotions and how they supposedly want/need them and that's an angle sure but why can't they leave them emotionless and accept that - they just can't.

Space Travel

Big problems are time, money and distance and we are dealing with some big numbers in those critical areas.

I worked out and I may be wrong but if we could send a space ship as fast as we could send it at todays technology it would take 70 000 years to get to the nearest star.

It would cost all the money in the world.