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Here be dragons

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“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dan­ger­ous or unex­plored ter­rit­or­ies, in imit­a­tion of the medi­eval prac­tice of put­ting sea ser­pents and other myth­o­lo­gical creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wiki­pe­dia, Here be dragons)

As a reac­tion to the Uto­pian sci­ence fic­tion (fre­quently set into a dis­tant glor­i­ous future), cyber­punk pro­jec­ted all our fears into the uncharted ter­rit­ory of the very near future.

What sep­ar­ates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspe­cified, yet immin­ent apo­ca­lypse. Hence, most of the cyber­punk scenes are post-​apocalyptic ones, where the apo­ca­lypse is a given, part of a for­got­ten history:

“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if any­one, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep (Chapter 2)

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Cyberpunk

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Sci­ence fic­tion — before the cyber­punk split — was more or less dif­fer­ent retell­ings of the same arche­types where ali­ens replaced ghosts and mon­sters, space replaced the oceans and tech­no­logy replaced magic. This provided the grounds for sci­entific speculations, — and for a long time that was the main theme — and that was the fuel of the (tech­nical) ima­gin­a­tion of the man­kind. We reached the Moon in a story first in Kepler’s “Som­nium,” then with Jules Verne’s “From Earth to Moon.”

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