Pretty Terrible: Archive

Published: January 16, 2022

CGNPCWSW: A Manifesto

After doing a significant amount of market research (via a Twitter poll and subsequent comments--thank you friends, especially Francesca for revealing my movement's final name!), I have come here, to my blog--which is full of very good writing indeed--to declaim my manifesto for my new speculative fiction movement, CGNPCWSW.

What the heckin' heck is CGNPCWSW? Easy, it's:

CyberGolden New PunkCore Weird SqueeWave

And what is it exactly?

CGNPCWSW is a trend that coheres around a few key concepts in the current state of speculative fiction:

And most importantly: You can't write anything that's CGNPCWSW if I personally think you're an asshole. Especially if you're an asshole who likes to score cheap points off people at the slightest provocation and organizes outright abuse and brigading of people on Twitter as a fun little hobby.

I even made a cool AI-generated piece of "art" to represent my movement! Isn't it great?

A pink, purple, and blue science fictional image generated by an AI

And if you're wondering what the heckin' heck I'm going on about, you can get caught up with either Camestros Felapton's post, Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction? or Cora Buhlert's Science Fiction is Never Evenly Distributed. Me, I'm being entirely sincere and earnest over here and reading books I like that, as far as I know, are not written by assholes. Don't mind me.

Have a great week, everyone! Go forth and spread the gospel of CGNPCWSW far and wide!