This movie is only two years old so maybe everyone here already knows about it, but definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it. As far as I know, it’s only available on Netflix.
This movie is only two years old so maybe everyone here already knows about it, but definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it. As far as I know, it’s only available on Netflix.
I also highly recommend Space Sweepers as a fun time.
Tangential: I sometimes feel an inexplicable urge to categorise how space is used in cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent stories:
Space played a big role in Frontera, by Lewis Shiner, which would count as Protocyberpunk if not cyberpunk. A desperate corporation in a post-government world scrapes together the last bits and pieces of the space program to send some agents to a struggling colony on Mars because they want something from the Martians. It’s pretty gritty in space travel details as far as I remember, and uses that to really drive home that this is a collapsing society surrounded by a deadly void.
Same for Count Zero as for Necromancer - The scenes in the Japan Airlines Terminal and the floating wreck of the Tessier-Ashpool core where Wigan Ludgate lived were all in Earth Orbits.
Cowboy Bebop takes place all over the solar system in a mix of space habitats and planets, but treats it pretty casually.
Hostile Takeover by Susan Shwartz takes place on a space colony I think in the Asteroid belt. Space travel is pretty rough but not as crude as in Frontera, which was aiming for basically realistic. The ships in Hostile Takeover are better but they still freeze the indentured people as cargo because keeping people healthy all the way out is difficult and they devote those resources to the ‘important’ passengers. Freezing doesn’t give great odds of surviving the trip.
Do the Murderbot books count as Cyberpunk? They’ve got plenty of the elements. All of them after the first involve space travel. In fact, space travel is what allowed the Corporation Rim to form.
Transmetropolitan mentions space travel, their society has it and has even encountered extraterrestrial life, but they don’t go to space in the story.
The two Alien movies are often counted as cyberpunk and space plays a big role in their plots, the isolation of their settings, the aesthetic of the sets. I think these and Murderbot are the only examples I can think of that leave our solar system.
I’m not sure if Outland with Sean Connery counts as cyberpunk. Alien and Aliens seem to, and Outland has many of the same awesome visual aesthetics, but it’s admittedly light on cyber stuff. A colonial martial assigned to a mining colony discovers a conspiracy using eventually-fatal drugs to drive the workers to be more productive. He pisses off the conspirators and it’s basically High Noon in space from there on. Space is a factor in the isolation of the setting and the awesome sets and miniatures.
When Gravity Fails ironically features no space travel.