I write science fiction, draw, paint, photobash, do woodworking, and dabble in 2d videogames design. Big fan of reducing waste, and of building community

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@jacobcoffin@writing.exchange

  • 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I mean, the place is so absurdly big and spans so much time there’s room for variances in procedure and tradition, even inside the same organizations. Especially the inquisition which seems to grant its members an unusual degree of autonomy (from the few books I’ve read that featured them). But even the guard fields a wide variety of regiments with different specializations and ways of doing things. I just sort of assume the mechanicus and administratum and others all see a fair bit of variety, if only because the empire is so huge and poorly coordinated. The variety of tones in different stories is also something I like, for some reason - it seems to help show the scale, I think?









  • I would! It’s early, and I don’t think it was made to be cyberpunk. But the themes are there - the small blue-collar crew contrasted with the absurdly powerful corporation, and the distrust between them. The way the company casually turns their ship against them. And the aesthetics are there - Alien was one of the films that set the standard for used future aesthetics. I’d say cyberpunk for me is a mix of themes and aesthetics, but I’m good with including settings as well - the world of Alien and Aliens is cyberpunk, and I’m okay with calling a story set in it cyberpunk as long as it has some of the other elements. I don’t think I require the characters to be punks, I’d say a lot of cyberpunk characters aren’t.








  • When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger is a kind of complicated recommendation for this. It features I think the most trans characters I’ve ever seen in one book, the main character’s girlfriend and most of their acquaintances are trans, and the story treats them decently as people with jobs and lives outside of that part of their identity. The problem, if it is one, is that they’re all sex workers. I can’t remember any trans character in the book who isn’t. This fits the story decently as they’re all living in the Budayeen, the entertainment and criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle-Eastern city, the only place where they, and small-time criminals like the protagonist, can exist with a minimum of hassle. But there’s some complicated history and pop-cupture entanglements around being trans and being a sex worker (and the limited other roles historically available to them) which might change how audiences read this forty years later. I honestly have no idea. I quite liked the book, it’s weird in places (for other reasons) but that’s what I read cyberpunk for, and it has a bunch of awesome cyberpunk concepts, a unique setting, and some creative misuses of technology.

    I think the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic or Burning Chrome has a pair of guards, one of whom is trans, but it’s clearly been awhile since I read it. Gibson’s Sprawl books all had a kind of fascination with extending cosmetic surgery past sex and race, so it comes up in passing occasionally.




  • I definitely get that, whenever I find a new comic I usually check the latest page to see if it’s from years ago and full of comments wishing it’d come back. Having gotten invested in it, I very much hope this one starts up again; they’ve gone on hiatus before.

    That said, there’s a lot of content here, including several finished prequel comics, and some ideas I think worth seeing. The fake post-soviet hellscape is a comedic take on the setting and I find the 90s retrofuture to be a kind of funny change from the more traditional 80s retrofuture (probably decently thematic, to set a cyberpunk comic with themes of selling out in the time period when corporations latched onto the genre and sold it away before it was really established). Most of the first cyberpunk I encountered, including Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century came from that marketing frenzy.