Your Tale Awaits You Down the Road

The thing about cyberpunk as a subgenre is that it’s very rarely properly dystopian in the pure sense. It’s too interested in evoking a cathartic response. Too invested in creating a specific human experience.

When we think about dystopian fiction as a genre, we think about warnings. Cautionary tales. This isn’t strictly true, but it’s an association made for good reason. Dystopian stories have good vs evil conflicts at the core of their interests and structure. They’re comedic in the traditional sense. The ending has a moral, so they can’t be tragic. Big brother is a bogeyman and the Capitol is a dragon that you slay only to find out it was a hydra after all. Win or lose, warning and criticism are the point.

Cyberpunk often has too much noir in its veins, too much fatalism to be truly dystopian. It’s invested in the world and fate and choice and the ties that bind everything together. It’s philosophical and even critical, but not didactic. Its goal is to mimic something real and something unrealized at the same time. A dream or nightmare projection of a present and future that may as well be past in its totality. It is, at its best, classically tragic, pushing us past narrative into the realm of cathartic experience.

We use the word ‘tragic’ all the time.

A hurricane is a tragedy. It is an act of god after all.

Cancer is tragic too. Like a hurricane. Like a betrayal.

And oil companies may as well be acts of god for all they’re made of human beings and run on an amalgam of choices and liquified corpses and faith-based economics and for their place as the source of endless disease and war. They aren’t acts of god of course. Human beings did this, chose this.

Mutation that isn’t alive and cannot die, a mimetic avatar of the great birds that form the storm, connect the over and under worlds, give their lives to feed and defend the people, carry messages. Thunderbirds or eagles or ducks or cardinals or pterosaurs? All bursting from the ground as the First People did, like trees do, like oil does. Disease devours past present future. Cancerous and Material and Mesozoic and Mythic. Virtual intelligence as cryptid sludge.

All attempts at fighting disaster are acts of hubris. We know this really. That’s why we use the word tragic when we encounter the fight that was never really a fight and certainly never going to be fair. And because Norco is properly cyberpunk, it knows what to do with this conflict beyond the simplicity of good vs evil. You survive or you don’t. You find a way to stay human or you don’t. If you’re very lucky you discover what that means to you, being human.