Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in '80s and they break down its themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today!

RoboCop, Judge Dredd, Rick Deckard, Motoko Kusanagi...for a genre nominally about the "lowlife" of future society, cyberpunk sure has a lot of cop protagonists. Law enforcement officers, detectives, and soldiers populate the TV and film fare of major distributors, and even counter-cultural authors like Philip K. Dick produced story after story of characters working for The Man.  What's behind the plethora of cyberpunk cop protagonists and what effect is produced from looking at a dystopia from the top down?

In this episode, we discuss the reason behind the popularity of cop heroes in modern SF, the rise in crime that inspired the trend and creation of the cyberpunk genre as a reaction, the way that Hollywood shapes our view of the police, cop characters being caught between two worlds, the "future" versions of our surveillance society and predictive policing, the way that book marketing affects book publishing and creation, how much fascism an audience will take, the mutable rules of justice, how cyberpunk pulls back the curtain of our society, and whether fiction is ready to evolve to meet our brave new world. We also talk about saving Jesse Ventura's web page, drones in your neighborhood, steampunk cops, "Is Judge Dredd the bad guy?", gull-wing doors, not being on Reddit all day, smuggling bread flour, boring anarchists, Hillary Clinton's Sci-Fi Dystopia, trying to fix things with a gun, jet boots, friendjitsu, The Wire, and...Captain America?!

TRON is a cop!

Here's a link to the WIRED story in the ep
https://www.wired.com/story/the-age-of-the-drone-police-is-here/

The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now!
https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/

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