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Old 09-05-2022, 06:44 PM   #1
Arith Winterfell
 
Join Date: May 2014
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Default Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

So I've been trying to work on creating a sci-fi setting, but could use suggestions and help.

One thing I'm really interested in is Cyberpunk, not necessarily the 70's aesthetic, but rather the whole what makes us human, identity issues, augmented reality, cybernetics, advanced genetic engineering, and so forth. I'm interested in exploring issues of self in the cyberpunk landscape like in the 1995 movie Ghost in the Shell. However, like that movie, I don't want it to be a simple setup of transferring your mind to a brain tape and uploading it to just another body. In other words I don't want to go full fledge Transhuman Space either (I think).

Thing is I get the feel that much of Cyberpunk tends to be tied down to the cityscape in some form and often Earth. I'm much more interested in star travel in the sense of going to strange new worlds like in Star Trek (though not necessarily warp drive and all that).

So part of my trouble is figuring out how to capture the flavor of cyberpunk and it's questions of humanity, while still voyaging out into the universe and exploring new worlds.

I think I want to avoid simply having the transmission of post human consciousness directly sent via laser communication across the stars sorta thing. Instead I know I want starships and so forth with people aboard them, etc.

One option I've been toying with has been replacing the cityscapes of traditional Cyberpunk, with massive interstellar starship/colony ships. Or alternatively worlds that have advanced so much after colonization so as to be new worlds filled with trillions of people. But to do that option you would think tech and science would have advanced way beyond cyberpunk for there to be civilizations with countless super-cities on them. Yet another options is the super-city O'Neil cylinder space station type thing, again this feels like it would lock the game into being centered in a single solar system rather than world-hopping.

Anyway, suggestions welcome. I think my major struggle at this juncture is wanting to have a world-hopping setting, but struggling to figure out how to move cyberpunk from its traditional city-centered Earth-side setting.
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Old 09-05-2022, 08:44 PM   #2
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

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Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell View Post
Anyway, suggestions welcome. I think my major struggle at this juncture is wanting to have a world-hopping setting, but struggling to figure out how to move cyberpunk from its traditional city-centered Earth-side setting.
I suspect you're trying to reconcile a fundamental clash of tone. Cyberpunk is, by definition, dystopian. A lot of its flavor comes from the conflict between the haves and the have-nots in a resource-constrained world. Most world-hopping settings, on the other hand, are open, resource-unconstrained (more or less by definition), and at least tacitly optimistic. In order to bridge the gap, you should consider: what limits your world-hopping setting?

A couple of resources that might help:

You should check out Orion's Arm if you haven't already. I don't know that any of it is playable as-is, but it's a great source to mine for ideas.

diaspora is a FATE-based Traveller clone, but in a setting where any sufficiently advanced technology inevitably leads to collapse. This leads to a fairly dark and claustrophobic interpretation.

Of course, there was the Earth/Cybertech sourcebook for the 2300AD rpg, but it was more an attempt to bolt cyberpunk tropes onto a fairly optimistic multi-world setting.

There are a slew of indie sf rpgs (Star Thugs, Scum & Villainy, Bulldogs, Orbital Blues, etc.) where the player-characters are explicitly punks of one sort or another. They usually don't put much thought into the impact of the technology on society, however.

The Alien movie franchise (and, by extension, the rpg based on it) does touch on issues of humanity and posthumanism, though mostly through the lens of the robotic characters.
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Old 09-05-2022, 08:51 PM   #3
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

Forget human people entirely. Make a setting of sapient machines.
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Old 09-05-2022, 11:01 PM   #4
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

You say you're not bothered about the "70's aesthetic" (more usually 80s, actually) and you don't want it to take place in a city on Earth. And if you're interested in the dystopian, outlaws-fighting-a-corrupt-system element of cyberpunk, you haven't said anything about it. If you're not, you might have more luck looking at straight sci-fi games/settings, and/or things that use the word "transhuman", rather than ones that bill themselves as "cyberpunk". The word "cyberpunk" tends to imply the 80s style and the dystopian city.
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Old 09-06-2022, 03:54 AM   #5
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

One of the works immediately ancestral to cyberpunk was Vernor Vinge's "True Names," a novella published in 1981. It had many of the tropes of cyberpunk, including netrunning, magic as a metaphor for hacking, and conflict with a large oppressive organization (in this case the Great Enemy was the Internal Revenue Service). But it also has a somewhat optimistic ending that looks forward to a version of technological singularity—not as something already attained but as part of the further future. I've wondered at times why it didn't launch the cyberpunk literary movement, as it came out before Neuromancer.

The film Bladerunner doesn't have netrunning, but its vision of a decaying urban future is often thought to be a source for cyberpunk's corrupt societies—in effect, for cyberpunk as science fictional noir. But it does also have space travel in the background.
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Old 09-06-2022, 04:17 AM   #6
johndallman
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

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Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell View Post
Anyway, suggestions welcome. I think my major struggle at this juncture is wanting to have a world-hopping setting, but struggling to figure out how to move cyberpunk from its traditional city-centered Earth-side setting.
Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space setting, which starts with the novel of the same name, may suit you. Wikipedia page here. It has:
  • Not-much-slower-than-light interstellar travel, achieved via ships that can accelerate at 1G indefinitely.
  • A variety of human-upgrade technologies, none of which are perfect.
  • A failed human-uploading project.
  • A variety of inhabited worlds, none of them utopian.
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Old 09-06-2022, 06:20 AM   #7
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

Cyberpunk isn't really compatible with a hopeful setting of exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no man has gone before. Cyberpunk is, rather, all about being a rebel (hence the "punk") in a world controlled by corrupt corporations, for whom money and power are basically all that matter.

Cyberpunk is compatible with a space setting. But it would likely be one where essentially every colony, station, etc are under the control of one or more megacorporations (there's room for "pirate colonies" and the like, but these are going to be the functional equivalent of slums/shantytowns, and in many cases the megacorps will have their claws in the power structure in some way). Habitable-but-not-yet-inhabited planets will have already been claimed by the megacorps. New civilizations would either be primitive and quickly subjugated by the megacorps, or themselves already be cyberpunk-style dystopias that can be readily integrated into the existing society, adding some new megacorps into the mix.

If that doesn't sound like what you want, then I'd say you're probably looking for something of a transhuman setting rather than a cyperpunk one. You don't have to go as all-in as THS - maybe the human mind is too complex - and/or too integrated into its existing hardware - to be able to just do mind transfers, so you can't hop from one shell to another... but you can upgrade the body you're already in.
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Old 09-06-2022, 08:56 AM   #8
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
If that doesn't sound like what you want, then I'd say you're probably looking for something of a transhuman setting rather than a cyperpunk one. You don't have to go as all-in as THS - maybe the human mind is too complex - and/or too integrated into its existing hardware - to be able to just do mind transfers, so you can't hop from one shell to another... but you can upgrade the body you're already in.
In my cyberpunk world, human-level AI (if it is to retain it's sanity) requires the use of some sort of quantum chip. These chips can't be perfectly duplicated (so transferring consciousness from one machine to another is more like hypnotizing someone to act like you) and slowly degrade (so any really old AI is either insane or not really the same entity it started out as). I adopted this feature purely to support the setting I wanted to create.
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Old 09-06-2022, 11:08 AM   #9
Arith Winterfell
 
Join Date: May 2014
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

Wow! What great feedback and replies!

Several of you pointed out (and I think hit the nail on the head) that a key issue I've been having IS conflict in tone.

This made me realize I really do want to keep cyberpunks elements of evil corps and dystopian decay, just on space stations and alien worlds. Perhaps drawing from the Alien franchise is a good idea too in terms of looking at the setting from the "working stiffs" point of view too.

As Johndallman mentioned I've actually read much of the first book of Revelation Space. I do like the idea of the mega city on Earth being replaced by massive space ships and space stations.

Along with that the idea of the evil corps dominating in a post-nation state world with a variety of colonies (all of which reflect the cyberpunk tone of dystopian decay work really well)! Especially the poorer "shanty town" like smaller stations etc. as Varyon pointed out!

Also the RyanW feedback idea was helpful too as that helps maintain uniqueness factors.

Lastly, I welcome continuing suggestions! These are all really helpful and have gotten things rolling for me!

So the general framework so far, is a dystopian corporate controlled distant colonies both in space and on planets. Now this raises some new points. Space and asteroid mining results is enormous resources in terms of both building materials, energy, and rarer earth metals than we have today. This would seem to imply post-scarcity. Now, how to approach creating cyberpunk's dystopia of haves and have-nots in such a setting and what would it look like?
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Old 09-06-2022, 11:31 AM   #10
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Default Re: Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

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Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell View Post

So the general framework so far, is a dystopian corporate controlled distant colonies both in space and on planets. Now this raises some new points. Space and asteroid mining results is enormous resources in terms of both building materials, energy, and rarer earth metals than we have today. This would seem to imply post-scarcity. Now, how to approach creating cyberpunk's dystopia of haves and have-nots in such a setting and what would it look like?
Ugh. "Post-scarcity". I hate that expression. "Abundant" resources that are expensive to extract and transport aren't going to turn the world into a utopia of crystal spires and togas. And no matter how much wealth your civilization has, it's not going to change life on the bottom when control over it is concentrated in the hands of a tiny few at the top.

It's actually hard to make space commerce economic, and even more so interstellar commerce and the development of resource extraction operations in places that have no initial infrastructure or labour force in place. We're talking about huge capital investments that take a long time to pay off.
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