{"id":2774,"date":"2011-08-13T02:31:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-12T23:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=2774"},"modified":"2011-08-13T02:31:19","modified_gmt":"2011-08-12T23:31:19","slug":"why-did-1990s-cthulhupunk-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2011\/08\/13\/why-did-1990s-cthulhupunk-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did 1990s Cthulhupunk fail?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ross. E. Lockhart, over at Night Shade blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nightshadebooks.com\/2011\/07\/30\/countdown-to-cthulhu-cthulhupunk\/\">muses on Cthulhupunk<\/a>, in which a short-lived attempt was seemingly made to fuse SF cyberpunk with Lovecraftian tabletop RPG games in the 1990s.  <\/p>\n<p>I can see the many points of connection with Lovecraft&#8217;s original fiction: isolated alienated semi-powerless not-really-heroes with a mystery to solve; underground routes in the cultural landscape that lead to forbidden knowledge when hacked; blurring at the boundary of the real\/unreal; a &#8216;reality&#8217; that is outside the code of language; alternate\/multiple planes of existence; flying around through weird multi-coloured glowing geometries; a degraded contemporary society stratified by class and race; mind transfer and personality augmentation; unknowable artificial intelligences pulling the strings behind the scenes and projecting their avatars into the real world.  Throw in some bio-engineering and gene-splicing &#8216;gone wrong&#8217; for sea-dwelling humans&#8230; could be awesome.  Lots of literary potential for crossovers and mash-ups there, I&#8217;d say. <\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the failure was more of a market failure on the side of the RPG game marketeers in their rather constricted &#8220;durh, Lovcraft iz black magik?&#8221; market, than a failure of the imagination on the part of writers? Correct me if I&#8217;m wrong (I&#8217;ve been away from literary SF for a while) but literary writers have never really had a go at such a melding?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ross. E. Lockhart, over at Night Shade blog, muses on Cthulhupunk, in which a short-lived attempt was seemingly made to &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2011\/08\/13\/why-did-1990s-cthulhupunk-fail\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lovecraftian-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}