I've been thinking today about Bedtime Stories from New Cyberia and how I landed on that name for the project. I've had a handful of folks excitedly ask me more about it, as if it's a specific place and I always wax poetic about it briefly before I tell them it's an idea, not a place... but that it could be, if we wanted. So, I thought I'd share some of how I landed on the title with you fine folk!

But yeah, It's kinda hard to put your finger on New Cyberia, a aspiring notion about the nature of the reclaimed ephemera of our shared experience of cyberspace. You know?

Cyberia itself has been written about and explored ad nauseam for almost half a century, a hopeful celebration of "the new" that would surely emerge from our collaborative cultural experiment in cyberspace. One that would ultimately be doomed to the Neo Colonialism of globalists and hyper-capitalist ideologues. I was there for a lot of it. I saw it and even I don't always understand it. The mechanical, sure, but the ideological... that's a beast I've yet to best in any meaningful way.

But New Cyberia? Honestly, NCB is different for everyone. For me, at its core, it is the reclamation of the hopefulness and the aspiration of that seemingly ancient idea. Hyper-progressive and not culturally regressive. A celebration of The Strange Oneness of humanity as it careens through space on our Pale Blue Dot. The promise and empowerment of the old internet, without the cruft thrust upon it by entrepreneurs and tycoons.

The term was dropped in my lap a couple of years (and identities) ago, here on hackers.town, by our admin @thegibson , someone not shy about late-night, fire-side pontification. He dropped the idea with a smattering of borderline psychedelic imagery, like an abstract poem existing only in the ephemera of imagery, a rumination on the internet of old -- an experience we share, despite being separated by time and space. It turned those conversations, that sometimes feel like a wake, into a goal. A trajectory. An aspiration.

Bedtime Stories from New Cyberia was originally going to be from The Void or The Abyss, but those lacked the resolute hopefulness that I personally feel when I write speculative fiction -- including the moments that lean heavily into horror. I realized that NCB was the right word for the premise behind my stories and vignettes. So that was it: they're bedtime stories, inspiring the dreams of a reclaimed and empowered, yet shared future.

So, yeah. welcome to the my little slice of the dreamscape of something better, if not occasionally melancholic: something specifically ours.

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