Transmet and Cowboy Bebop (I count this though I know not everyone does) too.

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.

I’ll check it out!

If you’d like another recommendation, No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro is, from what I remember, very lovecraftian and very cyberpunk. Unfortunately I can’t remember if it’s good. I definitely liked parts of it, though I think I found the main character frustrating for the same reasons as the protagonist from Necrotech. Both too tough and proud and spiteful to get out of their own way. Very noir but tiring too. It’s probably better than I remember, been years since I read it

I’m so glad you like it! I can’t believe how quickly he turns out pages for how good the art and writing is

Yeah I’ve seen it listed along with Repo Man as one of the few punk movies.

Six or seven books in and it hasn’t hit it yet. TBH it’s kind of the opposite, you kind of have to hit a certain annoyance threshold before the killing starts.

The Murderbot books feature a pretty diverse spread of characters, gay, nonbinary, and also people in polyamorous relationships, though that stuff usually doesn’t impact the main plot. Murderbot itself is about as asexual as it’s possible to get which probably explains that a bit. Their tone isn’t super cyberpunk but the themes and concepts very much are.

This is awesome

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.

Just wanted to say thanks for the rec - I liked necrotech enough to buy the sequel

That’s a good distinction I think. Like the Nimona movie tried for a fantasy-cyberpunk aesthetic that looked nice, but there really weren’t any cyberpunk themes in it. They could have dropped just about any other aesthetic onto the thing and had a similar film.

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.

I think it was a plot point in Stepfather Bank, which, now that I remembered it exists, I think might be a bit cyberpunk too. I’ll have to reread it at some point.

The books are awesome - I’ll have to do the opposite and see how the show compares.

Getting a lot of good recommendations here! This ones going on the list

A bar with a postapocalyptic theme, complete with survival food feels like something out of the bridge trilogy.

I’ve dabbled in game design a little bit and know the siren’s call of ever-more-thorough simulation. I could definitely just spend all my time setting up little clockwork worlds and tuning them. I was miles away from anything this elaborate but that’s definitely part of the appeal for me

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!

Awesome! Looking forward to hearing what you think of it.