Comment on Protocyberpunk recommendation: The Space Merchants

• ranoss@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Just finished it, overall thought it was a fun read.

  I liked how it felt like someone just let loose 1950s America to grow without restrictions and that’s what you get. Sort of like fallout without the world ending if you played those games.

  Seeing the big concerns of the time pop up in scifi is also really neat and you can really feel it throughout the book.

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  • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m glad you liked it!

    I read once, in regards to the early cyberpunk stuff that it’s set in the future, but it’s about the 1980s. That’s not hugely profound, I know. Most scifi is examining something from its time. But it gave me a good lens to examine it through, and a way to consider what tropes I was using in my own stories and whether they were built on vestigial 1980s concerns.

    With this book, it’s almost like almost like some kind of convergent evolution, like these guys in the 1950s indepently reached a lot of the same setting ideas that cyberpunk would put together in the 1980s, but from different starting concerns. It really is very much of its time.

    Thanks for reading it!

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