Cyberpunk

     This is cyberpunk.

      Then again, maybe not. 

     That's a very good question. And bloody hard to answer too. You know how photons are both particles and waves at the same time? Well the Chatsubo is more complicated, but fortunately it's not as complicated as defining cyberpunk.

      The Chatsubo is a bar that appears early in the novel "Neuromancer", by William Gibson. There it is a bar for "professional expatriates", run by Ratz it exists in some particularly dingy corner of Night City, in Chiba, Japan.

    On the Net, the Chatsubo is a consensual hallucination, a meeting place for authors and their avatars. A common ground were disparate futures and alternate histories may meet. Online, the where and when of the bar changes constantly, depending on author, story, thread, or even which part of a conversation you look at. In fact the Chatsubo has existed in more times and places than the TARDIS, The Flying Dutchman, The Heart of Gold, Atari Force and your average Cowboys-and-Dinosaurs-in-a-fantasy-setting-Illuminated-cross-time-hight-tech-traveling-circus across-the-multiverse-meets-Star Trek-meets-The Three Stooges-meet-Godzilla-at-a-tea-party GURPS game, all put together. So it's a bit of a mystery why the founders of the alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo newsgroup felt they would need a bit of common ground, that was known to everyone, in the first place.
 
 

     You just had to ask. Didn't you?  Bastard.  sigh.  Do you want the long answer or the short one?
 
 

     The short answer could very well be: "Cyberpunk is a Hello Kitty claymore mine."
 
 

     I did say it was complicated, no? Defining cyberpunk is quite quantum apparently. The actual definition encompasses all possible definitions; everything from 'there isn't one' to 'there's an infinity of them, all correct', and everything in between. How the wave functions collapse depend on who's doing the defining, what their applying the definition to, the context in which the defining is being carried out in, the makeup of the audience for which cyberpunk is being defined, and possibly such sundries as the lunar phases, astrological conditions and the belief in the definability of cyberpunk that the people involved may hold.

     A few of the possible definitions are:

• Cyberpunk is the eighties only more so.
• It was a marketing label attached to a bunch of disparate author, who now, for the most part, refute the label.
• It was the near future as something to look forward too, emulate, and try to bring about.
• It was the near future as a warning of dark times. Something to try and avoid.
• It was a literary rebellion against the long stagnant status quo of science fiction.
• It's dead.
• It lives.
• It never was.
• It always will be.

I have tried my hand at writing the stuff, and I think these are just barely good enough to inflict them on an unsuspecting web. So check these out if you're feeling masochistic. 
 

• Psychich Spam - first stor I posted to the Chatsubo

• Travelogue X.X - The story that started the Travelogue series. (actually happens well into the story)

• Travelogue 0.0 - Driver's first big job.

• Travelogue 0.1 - Just an ordinary lunch break.

• Travelogue 0.2 - A steam car race at the Temple of the Piston.

• Travelogue 0.3 - working on it. coming soon. (been saying that since Ocober 26, 1997, so don't hold your breath.) (hmm that makes it 4 years and 4 months!)

• Myrmidon of Paradise - my bar persona's "secret origin"! gasp! coming soon to a book near you!