Early yarns spun about extraterrestrial travel speculated that there were men on the moon, intelligent life on Mars, sexy women on Venus, and as advances in astronomy debunked all these ridiculous ideas, writers just began to think bigger, beyond our solar system, beyond our star cluster, beyond our galaxy. They provide the opportunity for the writer to tell whatever story they want, and who’s to stop them? Much like other fantastic, fictional technology such as time travel or parallel universe-hopping, there is no way to truly tell what we will be capable of or what we’ll find if we ever manage to get off this miserable, dying rock. Space operas represent the closest analogue to fantasy that you can find in science fiction. Today, we focus on a genre that may even predate cyberpunk’s inception: astropunk. The shape of cyberpunk itself is always in flux, playing with a wide variety of styles that have and may still give way to subgenres that will evolve from it. Likewise, the cultural impact cyberpunk has over modern media is monumental, adding fractal dirt into the corners of a huge portion of what artists create and we consume today.

However, its descendants are no exceptions to this phenomenon, particularly cyberpunk, which draws inspirations from a wide variety of sources, including action movies, postmodern fiction, and punk ideology. These days, science fiction is no longer a genre–it’s a genus, or perhaps even a family within memetic evolution, applied more often as an umbrella term than a true classification. We have fusion genres, which are codified hybrids of two or more genres that inspired them (such as the sci-fi noir) and revival genres, which are modern imitations of genres we once thought dead, but there are telltale signs that they’re not the original ( post-punk revival is my go-to example). However, unlike natural selection, memetic evolution seems to be more representative of what shape evolution will take after we perfect genetic engineering and cloning technology. They either die out (anybody remember grebo or sword and planet fiction? I didn’t think so) or thrive and grow, transforming and turning into new genres and/or giving birth to genres over time (as seen in jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, punk rock). Genres, analogous to species, are born under the conditions of their time and have been spawned from other genres. In many ways, you can compare the transformation of ideas over time to biological evolution. As a fictional revolutionary once said, “Artists use lies to tell the truth.” But that doesn’t stop memetic evolution from occurring, and it results in what we now call genre. In terms of storytelling, we more often than not are aware that what we’re watching is, in some way, unreality. All art (and arguably communication) is simulacra–a representation of our emotions, our worldviews, all the things we can sense vicariously through our nervous systems. But the spread of mass media, from the printing press to our modern system of debunking false information through social media, has all but driven the traditional myth to extinction. However, the concept of the meme (an abbreviation of the Greek word for “imitated thing”– what does that remind you of?) can be traced back all the way to cave paintings and myths. You need look no further than the most obvious example, the internet meme, to see this in action. Before we get in too deep, it should be noted that the school of memetics has received a lot of criticism for apparently viewing ideas as self-replicating organisms from a higher dimension, but it’s based on some pretty solid psychological concepts. See, memetic evolution is the overarching concept that all people are linked through the communication of ideas, and that those ideas develop as they are passed from individual to individual. I can’t determine for sure if the crippling loneliness has been driving me insane, but I’m telling you, there’s a pattern, and it all leads back to one idea: memetic evolution. The countless, sleepless hours I’ve spent scouring cyberspace for any morsel of data concerning media genres and subgenres have all added up to something big, really big, and I won’t be able to rest until I’ve put all forms of visual media that have been infected by cyberpunk under the microscope. Because I have nothing better to do than to illegally connect to the ‘net via brain implant in my iso-cube, I like to spend my time researching obscure subjects.