China Miéville writes that "[w]e need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can't afford [...] we cannot think utopia without hate."

A Near Future post-cyberpunk "Grunge" or "Salvagepunk" Noir: bleak and pessimistic, yet full of hope for all that. A broken world full of our own world's dark truths, dreams, and nightmares. Schizoanalytic psychoscape of tears done up in dark humor and cataleptic laughter. An anti-hero you can hate and love at the same time. A sort of Warren Ellis Spider Jerusalem reject bound to a anti-consumerist / anti-corporate media-scape slippage. It goes against consumerist society and fights for our rights to be free from the ownership of corporations, media and society.

Grunge is about freedom, pure and simple. It's stepping away from self-absorption and starting to care about the people around you. It's protesting against the fixation of beauty and perfection and letting us know that appearance doesn't matter. Ugly is the new beautiful. It's realizing that happiness doesn't come from fortune and fame, rather the opposite: the guttersnipe dreams of fools and madmen, lovers and old hags, children and mothers. The punk of salvagepunk is what makes it revolutionary.

Punk is not the commodified and commercialize image of Mohawked teens with pins through noses. It is certainly not the PVC slick technological wet dream of cyberpunk with its Deleuzian 'intense' nomadic multitudes and immaterial labour. Nor is it the "false dream image" of steampunk, where "its falseness lies in it being the wrong dream image, the ideological blind that is the dream image proper to the liberal escape plan for the contemporary crisis and its envisioned fall-out". Punk is thus the "deep fidelity to its historical moment and the fact it no longer believed in a future - the present is already the hollowed out present of that future".
  • Arizona
  • JoinedAugust 24, 2015




Stories by S.C. Hickman
Quantum Lives: Tales of Undercity by alien_ecologies
Quantum Lives: Tales of Undercity
Set in the Consilience an InfoSpheric Assemblage of data and natural worlds enclosed in the Global System som...
Savage Nights by alien_ecologies
Savage Nights
China Miéville writes that "[w]e need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, w...