Cimorene

"What you are fighting is huge and powerful and hostile, but if you are talented and lucky, you can defeat it and improve the world" is also the core of Harry Potter, which is not normally considered even an offshoot of the cyberpunk genre.

Hahaha, that's a really good point! I actually had a couple of points in mind about how incredibly generic that particular description was and how it could apply to a million adventure stories, but I forgot it when I got caught up in the other stuff.

Looking at it now, though, I think he actually understands *punk as involving that 'huge and powerful' hostile force being the structure of society itself, or at least embedded in or inherent to the social order, analogous to the way the corporation is in cyberpunk... I mean, sort of by squinting at the rest of his article I think that. He's just kind of failed to articulate it in this paragraph and accidentally invoked half of all adventure fantasies instead.

And you know, I wonder if he has also complained about space opera, or utopian far-future sf, for example? He doesn't really touch on them in this article, even though he seems to be aware that *punk isn't ALL of sff. On the surface, though, I'd think they seem to be doing what he claims in this article is the correct moral thing by envisioning a better future... which then makes me wonder why he wasn't just reading them instead.