#scifi writer

[carnocus]

WRITERS!!!

my dash is feeling empty, so please reblog/comment if you post about your writing! i want to follow more people and get more taglists to add myself to.

bonus points if you write scifi, horror, and/or are deep into worldbuilding!

[millylouedward]

{ coffees I had last week }

[digital-chance]

writeblr intro

hey i'm chance! i used to be on writeblr under a old username ages ago and i'm excited to be back. i don't know if they do these intros anymore (its been a while lol) but here's mine.

✨ [ about ]

i'm queer and don't usually identify with any gender, though i use they/he pronouns. i also don't identify with any sexuality label most of the time. i like people and i like being whomever the fuck i want.

i'm an adult (born in 03) and to tend to delve into adult-oriented topics and tend to pepper my posts with so much fucking swearing. i also am pretty sure i'm neurodivergent (no diagnose or anything yet though) and tend to delve into hyper-fixations for weeks at a time. if i haven't posted for a while, it's probably because of one of my other hyper-fixations or school.

🌐 [ interests ]

i'm interested in a bunch of genres, but i most often enjoy ::

romance

action

sci-fi

dystopian

heist

cyberpunk.

otherwise i enjoy ::

anime (esp 00s)

movies

history and historical designs

fanfiction (i love you ao3 authors <3)

drawing

y2k / retro futurism / cyberpunk / frutiger aero / weirdcore / 90s-00s tech

graphic design

kpop (esp shinee)

legend of zelda series

spiderman

batman

heist movies

i'm pretty obsessed with researching topics and learning the intricacies of various things, such as cyberpunk's history, movements within art, y2k designing, etc. i would self-describe as a extremely artistic or creative person, often switching between artistic mediums as i feel fit.

my favorite/comfort tropes (yes i pulled up my ao3 for this lol) ::

friends to lovers , enemies to lovers , fake/pretend relationship , college au , coffee shop au , domestic , fluff , angst

[ WIPs ] 📝 

nova futurum [x] | #novafut #originalstory

i'm working on this queer mafia cyberpunk type story i've hesitantly decided to call 'Nova Futurum,' at least for now. i've got the general information down and i'm currently working on fleshing out my main characters. for now it's in the very basic stages, but feel free to ask me about it or give any tips! i'm pretty new to cyberpunk and i'm VERY new to writing, so all advice/tips is appreciated.

you still would've been mine [x] | #yswbm #fanfic

Steven "Steve" Rogers wakes up in the 21st century after crashing into the ice in 1942, leaving behind his life as the mascot of the USA along with his childhood in Brooklyn NYC. The Winter Soldier, a man left behind in the war recovers his memories as the man known as James "Bucky" Buchanen Barnes after meeting Steve in the modern time. Steve and Bucky recall their childhood and their experience in the war as they recover.

probably more in the future

tdlr i'm chance (they/he), a queer adult, i like a lotta shit, and i write cyberpunk, gay characters, & cheesy romcom stuff.

nice to meet everyone! ❤️

[wlofallon]

Because it makes so much more sense to have 3 blogs...fml.

THE OTHER BLOGS:

THE:[ROGUE]:DJ @lokiabsinthe

Hermione X Magneto fanfic @hermagneto

[theoneandonlynightmaresinneon]

Horror of the Void

Enjoy an excerpt from a short story I'm developing. Full story coming out soon-ish.

Jay dreamed he was on a commercial passenger starship. The kind that has theme parks and pools and neighbourhoods, that was more city than starship. He dreamed that he was in a mall, on the second floor, gazing over the balcony to the white tiled ground floor below. There were some people milling about, but the mall was mostly empty and silent. There was a statue on the ground floor. Humanoid but featureless and faceless. It stretched more than three metres up, its limbs extruded and fingerless. Where a nose or mouth or eyes should be, there was a hole, and from it something thick and black dribbled down into a puddle on the floor. Jay could see his scared black eyes reflected and distorted in the gloss of it. The reflection stripped him of his years and bravado, reflecting only the terrified child inside. He was buffeted away by other characters in his dream and the more he saw of them the more empty they looked. Slowly, he was dragged through black fog into the waking world. Terror was not the word. It was dread, a feeling like he was on the Titanic, and the iceberg was coming.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The number of Time to Orbit: Unknown readers who are over 60 years old is astounding to me. Not the audience I was expecting.

[cy-cyborg]

What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:

Tech that can regenerate my old meat legs.

Robot legs that work just like meat legs and are functionally just meat legs but robot

Literally anything that would mean I don't have to use a wheelchair.

If I do need to use a wheelchair, make it fly or able to "walk me" upstairs

What I actually want:

Prosthetic covers that can change colour because I'm too indecisive to pick one colour/pattern for the next 5+ years.

A leg that I can turn off (seriously, my above knee prosthetic has no off switch... just... why?)

A leg that won't have to get refitted every time I gain or loose weight.

A wheelchair that I can teleport to me and legs I can teleport away when I'm too tired to keep walking. And vice versa.

In that same vein, legs I can teleport on instead of having to fiddle around with the sockets for half an hour.

Prosthetic feet that don't require me to wear shoes. F*ck shoes.

Actually accessible architecture, which means when I do want to use my wheelchair, it's not an issue.

Prosthetic legs with dragon-claw feet instead of boring human feet or just digigrade prosthetics that are just as functional as normal human-shaped ones.

A manual wheelchair with the option to lift my seat up like those scissor-lift things so I'm not eye-level with everyone's butt on public transport/so I can reach the top shelf by myself.

A prosthetic foot that lights up when it hits the ground like those children's shoes.

A few additions I remember seeing in the comments on my old account:

holographic prosthetic covers

transformers-style mobility aids that can fold into the shapes of different aids (e.g. a wheelchair that can fold into a cane)

prosthetic covers with pockets/hidden compartments (kind of surprised this isn't a thing already).

find my leg (like find my iphone, but for your legs when you haven't worn them in a while lol)

TLDR: Stop assuming every disabled person would want to be as close to "normal" as possible in your works. Some absolutely would and having options for them if fine, but I rarely see any examples of media showing those of us who don't. start letting amputees in your scifi works have fun with our prosthetics, fix the problems real amputees are already talking about instead of what you think are the issues and make your settings as a whole accessible!

[whereserpentswalk]

Your new roommate is an android. You could tell when you saw them, their skin is pretty obviously artificial material, their eyes glow a little, and they have that voice and those mannerisms that a lot of them have. They're warm to the touch, warmer than any human, most androids are warmer than humans despite the serotypes. This isn't surprising, you've met a lot of androids before, and you know a lot go to this school.

What is surprising is that they don't admit it. They call themself a human, act dismissive towards the idea of androids as part of human society, try to avoid anything that's part of android culture. You adapt pretty quickly to referring to them as a human, but you'll always know they aren't. You assume it's because of bigotry, you know androids still face a lot of social issues, but bigots can still tell they're an android as much as you can. And it's not like things are like they were back in the 21st century, especially in a college in a large city, bigots can't just openly say they hate nonhumans, they're subtle in ways that make pretending to be a human hurt even more. But you are human, so you think it's best not to say anything.

You see how much your roommate sacrifices just to look human. They never show any skin other than their face and hands, which makes overheating even worse. They waste hours trying to fake sleep, when everyone knows they can't sleep, they always make excuses as to why they can't eat any given meal. And you can't even mention nonhumans around them without them being dismissive of anyone openly nonhuman. They don't have solidarity with any other androids, can't participate in any of the things on campus specifically designed for people like them. You want them to be happy, and you know they'd just be happier if they admitted being what everyone knew they were.

There's a lot of nonhumans in your friend group, a lot of clones and cyborgs, and one or two androids. Most of the time you don't think about how they aren't human. But not your roommate, you always think about how they're an android because you have to in order to pretend you think they're human.

And they become so proud of their humanity. Humanity they don't even have. Like they're loving the fact that they can say that they're human, that they can say they're part of the most privileged group in the solar system. It's almost like they're larping as a character, they've mentioned family on Mars at this point, family that you know they physically can't have. It's best to just pretend.

Your roommate knows a lot about certain places, about how certain practices work, places and practices that are horrifying to think even still exist. Places where android suffer in ways that make you feel guilty just to be a human. Places only someone whose been there could know about. It's a miracle this person is in college at all. They don't want to be an android, don't want to be able to be hurt the way only their kind is hurt.

Eventually they cut their face. Cut it deeply enough so that you can see they don't bleed, so that you can see the metal under their plastic skin. They have to walk around like that for a while, they can barely go to class, barely talk to anyone, knowing they can't pass for human. By the time they get the cut fixed everyone knows, well everyone always knew, some people are confused because they didn't even know your roommate wanted to be a human.

When you talk to them again you realize they expected you to want nothing to do with them. They're still uncomfortable around other nonhumans, they don't want to be one of them, but they can still talk to you. They're not even wearing clothing, they don't need it, their only skin is on their head and hands, everything else is raw steel, but they still look themself despite everything. They expected you to see them differently, if anything you see them as an android less now.

When you hug them, it's warmer than any human hug could be.

[mayasynth]

My beautiful unhinged daughter, Mary Elizabeth Frankenstein <3 I know this was not at all how the scene actually went, but humour me

(Pssssst everyone please read Our Hideous Progeny, pleaseee 🙏)

[ravensquotingroses]

here’s why i’m writing a sci-fi book:

- gene

- space is so fucking cool

- anything is possible, everything is possible

- coffee nebulae

- aliens are cool

- spaceships are cool

- galaxies are cool

- etc…

come back for more? idfk

also what’s not cool about a bunch of ppl doing stuff in a space ship?? saving their home?! hmmmm

also: trans characters, gay characters— gay aliens, trans aliens…

multiple cultures to invent?! not to mention the already existing ones to learn about?!

purple aliens, blue aliens, orange and green?!

A SPECIES WHO CAN ONLY SEE THE INFRARED SPECTrum eh?!

glow crystal foreheads

[carnocus]

LAST LINE TAG

Thank you to @fleurtygurl for the tag!!! See her post here.

Rules: post the last sentence you wrote in your WIP and tag as many of your followers as there are words in the sentence.

This is from "God Syndrome", the first book in "The Age of Carnocus" (WIP intro here).

The blood he had rubbed into his feet froze, crusting his legs in red snow.

15 words so 15 tags... no pressure to participate!

@frivolitea-writes @euphoniouspandemonium @theboarsbride @bardicbeetle @albatris @theglitchywriterboi @isabellebissonrouthier @abalonetea @delusionisaplace @sam-glade @pluttskutt @iambecomeabook @peepos-prose @doriandistortion @oliverferrie

[entertainingthewhatifs]

A Conclusion. (Flash fiction) #RDP

A Conclusion. (Flash fiction) #RDP

Photo from https://www.coolgenerator.com/random-image-generator (c) Pamela Schloesser Canepa The doctor unplugged his equipment. “It is apparent to me, that our search is fruitless.” The immaculately dressed gentleman sitting across the room crossed his legs, exuding patience that would soon run out. “Why do you think that?” “Her heart is steady. Her eyes are glazed. Those two things don’t…

[c-e-mcgill]

Hey

Do you like unhinged, angry women?

Do you like mad science?

Do you like the exquisite homoerotic tension of two Victorian ladies just barely brushing hands?

Do you think that Frankenstein would have gone a lot better if only Victor had been less of an absolute weenie?

Do you look at the story of the Loch Ness Monster and think “...but what if a dinosaur got in the lake”

THEN BOY, DO I HAVE THE BOOK FOR YOU!

Move over, chemists, it’s time for mad paleontologists to shine!

Years ago, Mary’s great uncle Victor Frankenstein mysteriously disappeared in the Arctic; now, in 1853, Mary and her reckless husband Henry are struggling to make a name for themselves as paleontologists in the old-boys'-club that is the world of Victorian science. But when Mary discovers her great-uncle's old notes, detailing his gruesome attempts at creating life, she comes up with a plan — one that will finally make them some money, prove Henry's radical paleontological theories right, and get Mary some of the respect she goddamn deserves...

Our Hideous Progeny is out NOW! Available wherever good books are sold, and also at your library if you yell (politely) at your local librarians to acquire it! 🖤💚🧡

Thanks all, byeee!

(P.S. You can find the content warnings for OHP here!)

[silverskye13]

Being the universe's smartest super computer still made for a derpy, non-functional person. It was really easy for people to get caught up in the Cool Sci-Fi Shenanigans of cyborgs and robots and forget how awesome and powerful organic, sentient life was.

For example: Xisuma has a perfect memory. If someone gave him a date and a time, he could scan back through his memory logs, replay recorded data and footage, and tell you the exact recipe he used for those vegan cookies that one time six years ago. He knows the ambient temperature of a froglight that's been submerged underwater for six hours, three minutes and twenty-nine seconds. He can rewind a recorded memory, pause the time lapse, and watch in slow motion as Grian breaks a stone block at spawn with his bare hands because he was bored during their intro-season speech.

However, recorded data takes up a massive amount of memory on a standard hard drive when you record everything you see as a passive function, and all of it has to be purged by hand, regularly, just so Xisuma can maintain the memory needed for daily functions. He's tried writing algorithms to do it for him, but even the best pattern recognition software can't account for his momentary preferences. What differentiates his favorite sunrise from any other? If he were human, he could program some kind of learning software using data from tables tied to the output of different brain chemicals and electrical pulses that most frequently line up with a formative memory -- but if he were human he wouldn't be making a program like that in the first place, now would he?

It's one of those long, long days of trawling through recorded data. It would be shorter if he would just parse through the most recent memories, but he likes keeping long-term memory storage at exactly thirty percent of his total data storage, and he's been resting at thirty-four percent for the past month. Putting off the inevitable. It's just, there's been a lot of stuff to remember the past few weeks, and it's hard to choose what to get rid of sometimes. He's started deep-diving through old data, walking down memory lane. He has to be careful, some of this data is important, tied intricately with the complex spider algorithm that forms his memory data access system.

Click! Click! Click!

"What are you thinking, X?"

The screen that makes up the lion's share of X's face organizes itself into a smile, lights flickering on in the nanoseconds it takes him to process the memory he's watching and attribute happiness to it. Yes, this is a good one.

The playback jolts as he looks down at Tango. Not pictured is a redstone project they are picking away at. Xisuma knows this because this particular memory has a transcript, full of branching tags and keywords that pull up a wealth of information alongside it.

That's another thing about memory that organic life never appreciates. Memory isn't just the memory itself. It's a web of associations built on prior, learned knowledge. A tree isn't just a tree. It's color and texture and symbol and "when was the first time I drew a tree?" and "apples" and "saplings" and a thousand other tiny associations they just arbitrarily have. Xisuma has to synthesize that web. A memory doesn't exist in a vacuum. Unlike the organic mind, however, Xisuma can pull up as much accurate information as he has the processing power for. This memory brings him two more closely associated recordings, associated memories he's kept for context, the transcripts of six more deleted memories, the definition of redstone, a playback of isolated sound he deemed important.

The playback continues.

Click! Click! Click!

"What are you thinking, X?"

"Oh, I'm sorry Tango, I didn't know you'd walked up! I was doing research."

"Yeah? What kind?"

"Oh well, you know the new update. Redstone's always a little finicky after."

"Right, yeah, totally. I've been putting mine off, honestly. I don't feel like fixing broken stuff right now -- oh but, I guess you can't wait, huh?"

Xisuma parses through the data brought up with the memory. He knows the date this was recorded, the recent change to redstone mechanics brought on by the server update. He'd had three farms break. There was a linked document to a transcript of Doc's rant on redstone as it relates to radiation. There was a script note document typed the day after this recording was created: Clicking Good. There was a preliminary version of what he'd nicknamed "The Tick Script.Exe".

"Yeah, I've got a lot of bugs to fix."

"Are you going to get rid of the clicking?"

"Clicking?"

The clicking was an ambient noise made when Xisuma's system was a bit bulkier, his algorithms and scripts that handled memory and data access crude and unperfected. It caused a disc in a driver somewhere to click when he did searches. At the time, the clicking had been the closest thing to an annoying habit Xisuma could manage.

Computers don't have habits. Habits are repetitive motions that become subliminal, that take effort to break, and are oftentimes formed subconsciously. Xisuma doesn't have a discernable difference between conscious thought and subconscious. He has background processes, he has backburnered data, and he has executive commands.

Xisuma queries the memory, pulling up related tags and searches, letting the algorithm reach. This memory had been the start of a, for lack of a better term, humanification process for him. There was his observation table on organic ticks, habits, and movements. It had taken a lot of uncomfortable staring, but back then, staring was all he'd known how to do. One of the first entries on the table was blinking. Organic things blinked, clearing away dust and debris from lenses and membranes. Xisuma didn't have eyes, didn't blink. But the screen that managed his facial expression animations could be programmed to blink.

Xisuma queries blinking. He pulls up a transcript of an interaction with Stressmonster, where she mentioned he blinked every thirty seconds. She knew this because when she first noticed him blinking, she'd noticed it's regularity. That was when Xisuma learned that, to convincingly blink, time variation was necessary.

Coding randomization into redstone circuitry had always been difficult.

Xisuma returns to the Tango memory recording, replays the question about the clicking, the unintentional habit. Xisuma still clicked when he thought. The others probably still thought it had to do with bulky drivers. In reality, it had been a test in trial and error.

How many clicks was acceptable for a thinking pattern? The three dot ellipses was common in writing, and a two dot pattern was too reminiscent of a heartbeat. When he'd temporarily switched to a four dot pattern, he'd noticed people getting impatient, or worrying if his mechanics were stalling. (Stalling and slow loading does sometimes happen, but it manifests in freezes and long pauses, not in repeating clicks). He invented a three click pattern, tested a variety of click sounds, settled on something similar to a rotary phone click when a number is dialed. It was a good sound. Heavy and sharp. It sounded like something falling into place with intention. Click! Click! Click!

Xisuma doesn't actually need a sound to think. But it's a clever replacement for harder to code things, like remembering to two a surface or fidget.

Click! Click! Click!

Shifting weight had been a harder thing to code. Standing stationary, legs an equal width apart, was the most steady way to stand. It also made him look like a statue, made his unblinking stares eerie and uncomfortable. Organic things read it as unnatural, borderline on predatory. Large predators often froze and stared right before pouncing.

Looking back through old memories, Xisuma could tell if they were from before or after his algorithmic programming because of how still they were. Made for clearer visuals, and he knows in high-stress situations that focus on accuracy, he can cycle them off, but they're comfortable for people to watch.

Xisuma rocks back on his heels away from the screen he's watching. If someone else were in the room, it would be a sign of thoughtfulness. For him, it's the execution from a random table of acceptable fidgets while standing still. He should turn it off. He's alone right now. But sometimes the movements still catch him off-guard and the longer they run, the more he gets used to them.

Xisuma queries: rocking on heals

He gets a handful of save recording bits. Doc rocks onto his back legs and stretches his forelegs. Gem rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet, her arms crossed behind her back, mischievous and excited. Scar rocks back on his heels and crosses his arms, thoughtfully examining some terraforming. Xisuma isolates the last recording and mimics it, feeling how the weight of his crossed arms counterbalances the lean back.

Xisuma queries his habits table and adds the motion to the list.

He never quite figured out how to program what to do with his hands. They spent a lot of time at his sides, or in pockets. Objectively he knew that was bad. Hiding the hands was often a sign of hiding something, and he liked being transparent.

Xisuma queries: Hands

Xisuma blinks at the long list of results.

Xisuma queries: Hands behind back

He gets several animations of Gem, Grian, and Scar, all with some variation of hands behind their backs and mischievous grins. Most of them are snippets made for studying purposes. Two are attached to longer videos, catalogued memories he's kept. His query returns almost four hundred memory transcripts.

Xisuma likes making transcripts. He feels it's similar to the hazy, distant memories people have when time and distance transform them. When someone else remembers something falteringly, he remembers the way he described it to himself. The older transcripts were rougher. He's gotten better at writing them over the years. His learning and pattern recognition softwares are still pretty good, even if they aren't perfect enough to manage the full range of expression on their own.

Xisuma queries: Do my friends know how hard it is to look organic?

This returns no direct results. He receives a directory of the people he's flagged as "friends" over the years, an article on the recent organics additions to the world in the latest update, and a handful of unrelated memory documents where he'd asked this question before and similarly pulled up no response.

Xisuma queries: Do I care?

This pulls up more entries. Xisuma glances across them and clears them.

Xisuma queries: Do I care today?

This pulls up only slightly fewer entries. He smiles. Asking subjective questions to a computer never gleans intended results. Computers aren't subjective. Or, well, they're not supposed to be. Of course, if he were merely a computer, he wouldn't be doing this, would he? If he were merely a computer, he would be sitting on a shelf, or a desk, running prewritten programs and searches for someone else, letting someone else build his code, rules by the guidances and intentions of someone who ultimately viewed him as a tool, if nothing else.

Xisuma queries: Who's flying this thing, if not me?

He pulls up a list of song lyrics and chords, a clip from a movie he'd watched once, an IMDB rating off some database somewhere.

Xisuma clears the data. He pulls up the last memory he was watching, rocks back on his heels and crosses his arms thoughtfully. He presses play.

Click! Click! Click!

"Are you going to get rid of the clicking?"

"Clicking? Oh, I guess I am clicking, aren't I? It's just an inefficiency. I'll fix it at some point, I guess."

Tango smirked at him. One of his hands plucked at his sleeve. Xisuma clips the motion, tags it with hands, nervous, thoughtful, fidget.

"You sure it needs fixed? I kinda like it."

Click! Click! Click!

[amberfoxerotica]

So here I sat, staring at the console screen in front of me, watching digital gauges, temperatures and other statistics, making sure everything was within safe operational zones.

There were no prying eyes or bosses looking over my shoulder. All I had to do was keep the hangar’s cooling system functional. No one ever came down here as long as I kept things running smoothly. And I needed to keep it that way in order to keep my job.

Having all these hours to myself meant that I could get on with whatever I wanted. So I used my time in a questionable manner, usually watching a wide assortment of alien porn. The options were endless too, it being an industry that spanned across galaxies. There were scenes with Threnthrals pounding their thick, bulbous appendages into the many soft, oozing holes along a Worbolol’s throbbing abdomen. Or a scaly Lijjandok stuffing its ribbed cock into the fertile slits along a Moloog’s back. A genre that I’d recently discovered, which had fast become my favorite, featured Zeggoreths getting it on with human females.

Sitting at the console, I searched for a scene with one hand as my other hand slipped under my panties. I tapped the play button. On screen, a Zeggoreth stomped into view. Its sleek, dark blue, brutish form loomed over a gorgeous brunette, who lay fully clothed on a hover-bed. She looked up at the alien with seductive longing. Two muscular arms rested at the alien’s side, and from its chest writhed a mass of tentacles.

The alien leapt onto the bed, pinning the girl down with its powerful forearms. The girl put up a playful struggle, all with a delighted grin on her face. The grin turned to an aroused stare as the Zeggoreth’s tentacles slid under her clothes, straining the fabric as they wrapped around her breasts, spread down her belly and snaked down her legs. In one motion, her clothes were ripped from her body, leaving her completely naked on the bed. This primal display set her cheeks ablaze, and from her gently parted lips spilled heavy breaths. As I watched, I felt my pussy moisten around my exploring fingers.

The Zeggoreth flipped the woman onto her belly and anchored her legs with its strong hands. Tentacles spread apart her legs, giving a glorious display of her dripping wet cunt. The alien moved in closer, its shadowy blue tentacles wriggling towards her open holes. I imagined tentacles grabbing hold of me, swirling over my body, squirming into my willing pussy. My body went hot all at once as I watched what came next. The tentacles inched nearer. Slime dripped onto her butt cheeks and slid down her juicy cunt. She pleaded to be filled as the alien held her in place and toyed with her, driving her wild. Tentacles licked around her holes, about to enter her.

-----

This is an excerpt. Get the full story here

🌐 www.amberfoxerotica.com

[cy-cyborg]

It will never not be frustrating to me that amputees appear in fiction ALL. THE. TIME. and yet they're almost never acknowledged as such. The Cyberpunk genre is especially guilty of this: amputees and prosthetics becoming a normalised part of life are a defining part of the genre/aesthetic and yet no one even consults with any amputees about how we get represented there. Most writers in those genres don't even consider that giving your characters cybernetic arms and legs means they're an amputee.

CW: Ableism, dehumanisation

This makes it REALLY uncomfortable to engage with stories in the genre because another common aspect of cyberpunk is the idea of losing yourself and becoming something distinctly not-human anymore because you have too many cybernetic augmentations/implants. Shadowrun even has mechanics for this, which state if you get too many prosthetics, which is what cybernetics are 9 times out of 10, your character becomes a monster. These mechanics and discussions surrounding "how many robot bits make you not human anymore" are really, really uncomfortable when you remember this isn't something that's unique to a far-off future setting. Those people you're discussing the humanity of already exist. They're called amputees. If you reframe the question as "how many amputations can you have before you stop being a person" I hope you can see why an amputee like myself is not going to feel safe around you or in your fandoms.

And it's a shame, because I REALLY want to like Cyberpunk. I really, honestly do. I love the aesthetics, I love the idea of big corporations being the villains and the anti-capitalism at the heart of the genre, and I love the idea of prosthetics being not only destigmatised, but desirable. When written from a disability-inclusive lense, it honestly has the potential to be an incredibly uplifting and empowering genre. but as the genre stands right now, it's actively hostile to the very folks who are usually the stars of its stories: amputees, all because people just refuse to acknowledge us.

Cyberpunk isn't the only genre guilty of this, it's common all throughout sci-fi as a whole, but Cyberpunk is the only one where it starts becoming a serious issue due to its rampant dehumanisation of a real group of people. In other sci-fi settings, it's just kind of annoying and while it can be a form of erasure, it's not usually harmful, just...frustrating. Fantasy does it on occasion too, think pirates with a hook and a peg leg, but nowhere near as much.

If you, as an author or creator, use any of these words to describe a character or their tech in a sci-fi setting:

cybernetics/cybernetic enhancements

bionics

robot limbs

cyborgs

augmentations

You are probably writing an amputee. Please, at the very least, acknowledge it, and be mindful that those are real people who actually exist, not just a fantasy group you can speculate about.

edit:

I originally posted this article on my old Tumblr account and lot of people commented/reblogged to tell me that originally in cyberpunk, the "less human the more robot bits you have" only applied to people who opted for their limbs to be replaced by cybernetics, because it was seen as "renting out your body to corporations for money" but people who had to get cybernetics out of necessity weren't impacted. The thing is though, I really don't think that makes it better, for a few reasons. For one, where do you draw the line at "opting" to get a cybernetic prosthetic? This isn't a black and white thing, even in real life. Most amputations are done out of necessity, but there are situations where it's not the only option, just the best one. Talking from personal experience, I lost both my legs below the knee as a baby, that was a pretty clear cut case, I had a blood infection and gangrene and they had to act fast. But the infection caused lasting side effects and impacted my physical body's development and growth. By the time I got to my early 20's it was causing a lot of pain in my right leg, in my knee specifically, and when I got a bone infection in the end of that stump, I chose to have the whole thing amputated up to the knee. They only needed to take a few inches off the end of my stump, but I asked them to go higher, because of the ongoing issues in that knee, issues that would have been made worse by the shortening of the leg. I choose to remove the whole thing, knowing the joint was degrading and I probably would have lost it later in life anyway. Even if it was salvageable, it would mean much more surgery, and I've had enough of those. A boy I played wheelchair basketball with was born with a partially formed leg, it was half the size of his other leg and he wasn't able to use it al all, it was just dead weight, so he opted to get it amputated too for convenience and so he could use a prosthetic on that side. I worked with a girl who's hand didn't form properly in the womb, resulting in a normal palm, but tiny "finger nubs" (her words) with no bones inside. They weren't actively harming her usually, but she opted to get them and the top of her palm amputated after an incident at work where we were tying balloons and one of her nubs got stuck in the knot. She decided to get them amputated because it meant accidents like that would be less likely, and she could use a prosthetic more comfortably. All 3 of these are considered "optional" amputations, so would people like us be penalised in your setting? does it make sense that the technology in your setting can tell the difference, or that corporations would care about the how and why? Even stepping away from medical grey areas, if your character opts for a cybernetic arm because the corporations will financially reward her, and she's struggling to put food on the table without that help, is that really optional?

Don't get me wrong, I do think that idea could work but it would take a lot of work to do well, and most works I've seen don't do the work. Even if they did though, it doesn't change the fact that most modern uses of this trope don't mention that bit or actively ignore it. It doesn't matter in most cyberpunk works I've seen if the amputation was optional or out of necessity, they still are more prone to being seen as "less human" and in most of the sci-fi writing communities I've been part of, the authors are genuinely shocked when I ask them to remember "people with cybernetics are real people already, they're not some far-off-distant future fantasy group, they're just called amputees". Like it didn't even cross their minds. These are the people creating the works in this genre. Even if it wasn't the original intention of the genre, it's still an issue in the modern version of it. Edit 2: Elaborated a little more on why I don't think the "only people who choose it" argument works in the edit. Also, please stop telling me that old cyberpunk doesn't have this issue, I literally address that in the post lol.