Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Jay Goes Cyberpunk

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 12, 2016

Last spring, I decided to write a cyberpunk story. I was actually experimenting with a few things all at once… a particular story structure, an old-school plot/idea generator from the early 1900s, and my love of cyberpunk. I wrote the story fully realizing that cyberpunk wasn’t “the thing” anymore (but maybe with the release of the Cyberpunk 2077 in a year or two, maybe it will be once again), and that the chances of finding a home for the story were slim.

It turns out that there was a cyberpunk anthology currently taking submissions, and they accepted my story, “Double Blind.” It sounds like they are finally finishing up the editing, and Altered States Volume II: A Cyberpunk Sci-Fi Anthology should be hitting the digital store shelves fairly soon. I don’t have an exact release date yet.

The fun part of writing this story, since its been such a long time since I was really into the genre, was reviewing some of the old assumptions in light of new technology and current events.  Now we live in a world where we are willingly the “product” that Facebook and other social media sell. Our personal technology is often laden with processes that “phone home” to tell our secrets, or to try and influence our choices. We often don’t even “own” much of our technology — or at least not the software that drives it: we license it, with all kinds of caveats and changes that can take place after we’ve made it part of our lives or livelihoods. What does that mean something like neural augmentation comes around?

There are a ton of ideas that I had while while experimenting with this one, so I’d love to write more stories along those lines. But in the meantime, I’ve got one weird, paranoid, action-packed story coming out soon in this anthology, alongside other strange cyberpunked visions of the future by other authors!


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