Summer of Sci-Fi is coming to an end. Over the last few months, Arkhelian has been deep in science fiction. Default State continued pushing further into ChromaSpyke, new genre articles explored where science fiction and cyberpunk are going next, and more stories, lore, and strange corners of our universes made their way onto the site. …
Cyberpunk did not lose its edge. Its ideas became influential enough to split into subgenres, including post-cyberpunk and solarpunk, that answer its questions differently.
Default State Episode 7 sends Niko beneath Ogikubo and deeper into the Ikari Line, where navigation, communications, and even the dead become less reliable.
Hope is not optimism, and dystopia is not hopelessness. Cyberpunk and speculative fiction reveal how participation, agency, and local action turn imagined futures into something more useful.
Cyberpunk was never about a lone hero defeating the machine. It predicted a future where agency became distributed across corporations, networks, algorithms, and fragmented identities, making the system itself the true protagonist.
(This is the fifth article in our What is Cyberpunk? series, in which we’re examining the various perspectives and arguments that influence the definition of the Cyberpunk genre. If you’d like to start with the first article, click here.) For years, people have argued over whether cyberpunk is optimistic or pessimistic. It isn’t. And that …
Cyberpunk has a branding problem. We think it is about rebellion against corporations. But resistance is what cyberpunk characters do. Entrapment is what cyberpunk is about.
