My favorite thing about William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic is how it uses genre. It is, in essence, a noir detective story, with its quirky, campy names like Molly Millions, Ralfi Face, and of course the titular Johnny Mnemonic, it just also happens to contain the technological aspects that happen to be found in traditional cyberpunk stories. Johnny Mnemonic reminds me of my favorite cyberpunk noir detective story, the Penumbra Podcast's Juno Steele series. That is a sentence I thought I'd never write, because it seems like such a specific genre mix, it's bound to only happen once, and yet here we are. However, this mix might not be so unlikely. The thing about cyberpunk is that it has a distinctly different vibe to the clean, shiny, brand new chrominess of space operas. Cyberpunk seems to imply some element of being dirty or run-down, cyberpunk is what happens to space operas when you add a lot of colorful neon lights and then leave it to decay without cleaning it up for
Andy Weir’s The Martian has been praised for its excellent humor, commitment to hard science, and general well-told story. I don’t read too many survival narratives, because I’m faint of heart and I can only handle so many suspenseful life or death situations. The Martian ’s humor and constant refusal to take itself too seriously helped to temper all of that suspense. However, as much as I enjoyed The Martian' s wit and entertainment value, there was one thing about it that bugged me beyond belief, and that is how this book treated women. The men in this book seem It’s no secret that there is a general lack of women in the STEM field, this is due to many things, but a big reason is the way that women in STEM get treated by their male coworkers. I can only assume that Weir was aiming for realism when he portrayed the men in this novel generally just treating and talking about the women around them in a way that's just generally pretty icky. An example of this is when Teddy and
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