Carnists:
Vegans:
I always took this as less a “oh no we don’t get to eat meat anymore” and more a “holy shit everything is extinct because of climate disaster” whenever it shows up in cyberpunk stories.
I thought cyberpunk was supposed to be a dystopia, yet they threaten me with a good time?
No, you get literal kibble like the kind they make for dogs and macrobacteria that produce an excess of protein
My favorite parts of cyberpunk books are how some things aren’t as dystopian in retrospect, and how wildly clashing the tech levels can be.
There’s a part in “Trouble and Her Friends” from 1994 where a character on a bus overhears some people talking about a recent congressional bill, so he heads into a bar to watch the news on TV. This is a setting where people have fully cybernetic brains and go into a fully realized VR world and people still have big tube TVs. I’m pretty sure pagers are mentioned a few times as well.
Also that book is great and it was the first time I remember seeing openly queer characters in fiction.
The last time I read Neuromancer was in the 2000s and didn’t even get that flat screen TVs were supposed to be futuristic. Of course the most obviously dated part is the 8 MB of hot RAM at the beginning.
