If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. There’s a curated mythic fiction page up on http://www.mythographystudios.
There are delicious pantheons to choose from, and selected series to binge on, full Netflix style. So like, Mythology and Chill.
Here are the best picks to binge on from that page:
We made a Facebook group for all you Mythographers. It still has no identity, just a place for all of you to hang out. We’ll make it work together.
This group is currently beta. Meaning things are about to change at any time.
So what can you do over there? Well, except talk about the God Complex books, we can discuss articles, favorite mythologies, movies like Wonder Woman and Thor, books like Ilium and Percy Jackson, anything you like. Keep it civil, but light swearing is allowed.
Tor Publishing is running a cyberpunk week on their site. The very first post, It’s Not Fiction, It’s Our Lives, really struck a chord with me.
A few decades ago the “cyberpunk” genre was purely fiction. Now, it is a reality that humanity struggles to navigate on a daily basis. Bodyhacking, information networks, megacorps… these concepts, borne from fiction, now shape our lives in very serious ways. And just as reality grows from forward-looking stories, so too does new fiction grow in response to the present day. What is a cyberpunk, or even “post-cyberpunk,” story when that is the world you live in?
That is prevalent in all our works, the idea that the future is now. Many of the things we do daily were considered science-fiction not so long ago. Access to information, anytime, anywhere? Real-time translation with augmented reality? Body-tracking, disposable drones, restaurant recommendations via an accurate algorithm? They’re all here, it’s not even shocking anymore.
In our exploration, three important aspects of cyberpunk become apparent:
Tor’s first point is really spot on (hell, fleek even). Google made it’s billion dollar empire on information alone. If you were to write that twenty years ago, you’d be called excessive. Things don’t work like that. Governments can’t be asking their citizens to vote on every little thing via their mobiles and laptops. Or maybe, in Estonia’s case, they can.
The second point is well explored in science fiction, but I don’t like the political American debate on gender classification. Excuse me, but yes there is a biological reason for gender classification, it’s silly to presume otherwise. On race I agree, we’re all one species. Regarding the appearance, yes, I believe from the data points of body modification up till now, that it will become extreme. I truly believe that there will be people addicted to modifying their bodies, not cosmetically, like they do now, but with technology, horns, extra limbs and more unimaginable things.
Commerce seems to be the king. If something sells, the people behind it are willing to bend laws to their will, ignore morals, slave children to factories, fire family-men and replace them with robots, trademark common everyday words. There is literally no limit. Culture is slowly becoming one sloshy gray goo, with Asians celebrating Christmas (just because they like the holiday), American culture invading every other one with Hollywood and (apparently) superhero movies now. India is a strong counterpoint in this, spreading it’s culture all over the world but in a different light, it’s more of the same.
Anyway, this post isn’t meant to be a manifesto. These are just observations on the current state of things, plus some wishful thinking. Cause it’s not all bad. I recently had a conversation with some people of the earlier generation, and they claim that despite the Greek crisis here, we are still living relatively nice compared to the past. People didn’t used to have employee rights, air-conditioning or even shoes to wear.
There are medicines now for diseases that used to kill thousands. My father keeps a box of the pills that could have saved my grandfather on his desk. Just a stupid, tiny silly pill that if it had existed 50 years ago, my grandfather wouldn’t have to endure a lifetime of sickness and surgeries.
People can re-educate themselves in an open university if they like or through online courses. We have access to most of the books ever written with Project Gutenberg, and for the daily stuff, we have every shop we need just a short walk away. Mostly. Our cars are reliable, our homes are comfortable and travel is becoming faster and faster.
Corporations are making things nicer, easier and cheaper for us. But just because it helps with their sales.
I uploaded my folder for covers on imgur for this post, if someone wants to see it or use it for reference and ideas.
(Yes, the first ones are animated gifs. They are experiments with the digital format ) They are not necessarily books I’ve read or that I suggest, this is just a design thing.
The covers I picked are nice for various reasons, either typography, colors, composition or ideas. Some just work nicely in thumbnail size. They are the ones I browse for brainstorming. You can click the link or browse below:
I’ve happily stumbled upon this article on what Cyberpunk is and what will be. Which I will happily cannibalize for a few quotes on this post.
It gets a bit academic, and I think the subject doesn’t need that much analysis but I like some of the points. I’ve even had a realization:
For all its outward cynicism, cyberpunk is often wilfully naive; conspiracies are unravelled, the lone maverick is redeemed, the lone aberration at the head of the system is taken out and all is well again. For all its gritty imagery, this dissonantly contradicts reality. Indeed it is questionable whether cyberpunk is an entirely dystopian genre. For the oligarch-villains occupying the luxury penthouses and boardrooms in which boss battles occur, this is utopia. The ubiquity of scaffolding in the genre’s platform games suggests there is even a building boom. It is a great time to be an engineer. Even for the average citizen, perhaps things aren’t that bad; there are plenty of exotic street-food outlets and sports to enjoy (you can follow the blood and chrome progress of Brutal Deluxe in the Bitmap Brothers’ 2007 Speedball series). Escape to off-world colonies, as we are told repeatedly by advertising neo-blimps, is an option for the rich and genetically sound. Some of the tyrannies are fairly relative. In X-Kaliber 2097 (1994), the reign of the warlord Raptor means “there are no more jobs to go to,” echoing the current fear that automation might render us all unemployable. “Well,” we might say, “thank god for that.” Even when the apocalypse beckons or has already happened (the release of the planet-decimating biochemical Lucifer-Alpha in 1988’s Snatcher, for example), it is survivable.
I like that. Yes, deep down cyberpunk is wish fulfillment, does have a happy ending, the corporations do lose. Vices are plentiful, humanity has far-out options for life extension and survival, heroes are cool and larger-than-life.
My kind of cyberpunk is rather light. All the tropes are there, but they are a backdrop to character and plot. Mega corporations crush people and effectively become worshiped, but we see the casual interactions and the family issues. Not the sweeping socio-economic ones, which frankly, would make a boring read.
Following the maxim of its baptist William Gibson that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” cyberpunk has always been a scrapyard, with pieces of what is to come scattered through the past and present. Indeed, its saving grace is that it recognizes, as other futurology often fails to, that the future will be a collage and it will be considerably older than the present.
That scrapyard is what I try to put in my own stories. A bit of Greek mythology, a bit of plausible technology, a narrative that draws you in, and some action to keep it exciting. Because, make no mistake, violence is at the cybernetic heart of cyberpunk.
The fear and power of plugging in and losing our humanity in the process, continually evident in cyberpunk, is again not new; we find precedents in Descartes’ Demon and Plato’s Cave. There is also a certain guilty pleasure in immersing yourself in a videogame world that warns you of the dangers of immersing yourself in videogame worlds. The early game Interphase (1989), by The Assembly Line, deftly equates virtual reality with dream-space, a crossover we will no doubt increasingly see with advances in VR, AI and augmented reality. At that time such developments seemed the stuff of dreams, but they are incrementally becoming more real. In Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs (2014), the hacking abilities of the lead character Aiden Pearce suggest that the human brain, the city and cyberspace are now interwoven networks. To accumulate great power in the latter two is to potentially wield power over the first.
My main issue with VR is that one. I too have been brought up with Neuromancer, and Matrix more recently (yes I said recently, shuddup), but I don’t think VR is what we thought it would become in those days. I firmly believe, that instead of diving inside the computer world, we will superimpose the digital word over the physical one. A Shared Augmented Reality, giving us information and allowing us to interact with the digital equivalent of the physical objects. In my works, I call it the veil, a shared overlay of public data. For example, when people look at you with SAR glasses or maybe someday contact lenses, they’ll see your public facebook and twitter profile, all available for interaction.
Anyway, the God Complex takes place in a cyberpunk world, with a few metaphysical elements and a lot of Greek lore. The latest work and the first published novel is “The Girl Who Twisted Fate’s Arm,” and you can find it on Amazon:
When the daughter of Greece’s premier singer fails to sing as expected, she finds out about a biker group of women. But will she manage to find the elusive Orosa, the bikers’ motovlogger, when all she has to go on are random street-sightings of criminal behaviour, when her family is opposed to her following this path and when her dad’s employer wants to keep her as she was for marketing purposes?
Do you want to know what’s next for the voiceless Aura? Do you wanna meet the Amazons? Then read this coming of age story in a world where fate is quite literal.
Read through the page on our site for descriptions and other places where it’s available.
Wattpad has done us the honor of featuring the Muse story on the Science Fiction category.
On the verge of abandoning his life-long project, an obsessive physicist hires the innovative service of an android Muse to help him finish his work. But when things start to go missing from his life, he must learn that not all is worth sacrificing on the altar of science before he has nothing left to live for.
You can read it all below:
We are running a promotion with other indie authors and publishing houses, all in the speculative fiction genre.
So, if you like sci-fi, fantasy and horror signup with your email address and get the March email that will give you an insane amount of books to choose from!
Yes I Want To Get An Email When The Promo Is Up!This particular promo focuses on
a) Spec-fic books on Amazon Kindle Unlimited and
b) On Spec-fic books on Kobo, discounted to free for the time of the promotion.
At that promo you’ll be able to get our own books:
The new release: The Girl Who Twisted Fate’s Arm
And on Kobo: Crying Over Spilt Light
Just signup at the huuuge red button above and you’ll get an email soon.
We are sometimes taken aback by people’s reaction to fiction. A fanbase reaction to a shift in their favourite series, a fan boycott of a new version they don’t approve.
The Greek word for entertainment is psychagogia, which is different from the word for plain “fun.” Psychagogia means leading the soul. The ancient Greeks meant “the mind” when talking about the soul. So simply put, food for the mind.
Just like people have the right to object to a restaurant when their food is trash, they have the same right to demand good entertainment, food for their mind.
When you think of it like that, it’s easy to see why people get so upset about their favourite fiction. Comic book fans (it’s not canon!), book fans (they ruined it!), movie fans (he can’t top Tobey Maquire for Spiderman!) have sometimes insane reactions to changes. I have found myself saying “It’s just a movie, chill out,” and I think we all have at some point. But then we all see something rebooted and regritted and we say, “No! Ghostbusters can’t be women! They’ve ruined it now.”
But we are wrong. And we are right as well.
Sure, over-the-top fans should sometimes get a life. And book fans can go shut their eyes and ears and go “Lalala” to avoid the movie version. The rest are simply voicing their opinion, and they have a right to an opinion about the mind-food they consume.
The kind of fiction we consume changes a bit about ourselves. Yes, you can scoff at someone if he enjoys something you don’t approve of, but only in relation to you. You can’t say, “he’s stupid for liking that action movie,” but you can say, “if all that he likes are dumb action movies then no, I can’t hang around with that person anymore.”
There’s a difference, and keep an open mind for guilty pleasures. There are women who like testosterone-filled chauvinistic action hero flicks and men who enjoy a deep emotional movie every now and then.
When I talk to people about movies, I tell them something that I thought was an unpopular opinion. I say, “I don’t enjoy those car chases, they are boring. I even skip ahead when I’m on the computer.” And to my surprise, they usually reply with, “Yes! I hate them too.”
Now, if people are really saying the truth about that, then what are the car-chase scenes for? For what audience? Hollywood throws millions and millions in dangerous and expensive car chases, but for whom? I’m not talking about the Fast and the Furious franchise, that was their whole point. But the rest, I believe, have them just because someone thinks they sell better.
They simply want you, me, us, to go and spend our money on that movie.
So yes, we can voice our opinion if it’s crap.
