Cyberpunk.

I chose to look at the Cyberpunk sub-genre for a number of reasons. The most important one to me is the idea that Gregor is something alien like, unexplainable and shocking. These things to me can be easily placed into the Sci-fi genre. Choosing Cyberpunk from this was purely for contrast against the English Gothic. The high technology aspect of the sub-genre will help me show the difference between the family and Gregor. He is trying to understand this futuristic, unrealised being he has become and his family are set in their ways, stubborn and unwilling to accept the fact that although he has changed on the outside, he is still the same person within.

Lawrence Person, editor of Nova Express –a science fiction fanzine- describes a classic cyberpunk character as ‘marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society’, traits I feel Gregor beholds.

The example of Cyberpunk I looked into was the film The Matrix. To summarise this film....

‘Thomas A. Anderson is a man living two lives. By day he is an average computer programmer and by night a malevolent hacker known as Neo. Neo has always questioned his reality but the truth is far beyond his imagination. Neo finds himself targeted by the police when he is contacted by Morpheus, a legendary computer hacker branded a terrorist by the government. Morpheus awakens Neo to the real world, a ravaged wasteland where most of humanity have been captured by a race of machines which live off of their body heat and imprison their minds within an artificial reality known as the Matrix. As a rebel against the machines, Neo must return to the Matrix and confront the agents, super powerful computer programs devoted to snuffing out Neo and the entire human rebellion.’

Taken from www.IMDB.com

The link below explains the ideas of imprisonment within the matrix, and how Neo becomes ‘re-born’ in the real world. I chose this example to show the idea of imprisonment in the mind, and how it is shown. There is a vast difference between the sets of the Matrix world and the Real world, with the matrix seeming to be a wash of colours with no real depth or brightness and the real world delivering a stark contrast of light and dark, brightness and gloominess.

I want to use the idea of differences in The Matrix to explain the difference between Gregor and his family. Gregors family are in the dark about this new world that Gregor has entered into, whilst Gregor is experiencing something new and hidden from the other people in his world – his family – and no one understands, including him.