The verdict
Not a prediction that came true. A mood about the 1980s, written while the decade was happening.
Quick facts
- The term
- Cyberpunk
- Coined
- Bruce Bethke, early 1980s, as a short story title
- Popularised by
- Gardner Dozois, 1984, as a label for a group of writers
- The novel that defined it
- Neuromancer by William Gibson, 1984
- Key names
- William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan
- Status
- Its aesthetic is everywhere, though the specific 1980s arrangement is now period fiction
Cyberpunk is the branch of science fiction that put computers, corporations and street level crime in the same frame, and made the result look like a rainy city at night. The word is almost fifty years old, the aesthetic is everywhere, and a great deal of what people call cyberpunk today is not the thing the word was invented for.
Where the word comes from
The term was coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of a short story, and it was popularised in 1984 by the editor Gardner Dozois, who used it in a newspaper article to describe a group of young writers: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner and Greg Bear. The half of the word that comes from punk matters. These were writers who had grown up with counterculture and were writing about people with no institutional power, in a world run by companies.
The book that fixed the genre’s vocabulary was William Gibson’s Neuromancer, published the same year. It gave the world cyberspace, jacking in, the matrix and ice, and almost every story in the field since has borrowed from that list.
What the genre actually looks like on the page
Stripped of its styling, cyberpunk is a crime story in a near future where the state has been largely replaced by corporations and the network is a place people go. The protagonists are usually contract workers, criminals or both, and they are not trying to overthrow the system. They are trying to get paid and stay alive inside it.
That is the part people forget. Gibson’s characters do not resist the world; they work in it, badly and on the margins. The genre’s politics are pessimistic about collective action and fascinated by competence, which is why it appealed so strongly to people who wrote software for a living.
The look, and why it stuck
The visual signature is a dense, wet, vertical city: neon, rain, black glass, and advertisement in every direction. It arrived in film almost immediately, and it has proved unusually portable. Films adopted it in the 1980s, games adopted it in the 1990s, and fashion has never really left it.
It stuck because it is a genuinely good picture of inequality. High technology and social decay in the same shot is an immediately legible image, and it does not require the audience to be told anything.
What cyberpunk is not
It is not a synonym for any story with computers in it, and it is not a synonym for a bleak future. A great deal of science fiction that uses the aesthetic has none of the politics: if the corporations are the good guys, or if the hero is an agent of the state, it is not cyberpunk, however many neon signs are in the background.
It is also worth separating the genre from the present day it predicted. Cyberpunk assumed the network would be a place you entered. It turned out to be a place you carry, and the difference has made a lot of the older fiction read as period rather than prophecy.
Cyberpunk in science fiction
Four starting points, and they are all on this site. Neuromancer is the founding document, and still the best writing in the field. Snow Crash is the same territory played for laughs, and the friendlier door of the two.
On screen, The Matrix is the mainstream version, and it keeps more of the politics than it is usually given credit for. Ex Machina is the small, cold end of the same tradition, about a machine built by a company with no oversight at all.
Common misunderstandings
Cyberpunk is often described as a prediction that came true. It is closer to a mood about the 1980s, written while the decade was happening, and its most accurate observations were about work rather than hardware.
It is also frequently confused with dystopia. A dystopia is a story about a society that has gone wrong and could be fixed; cyberpunk generally assumes the arrangement is settled and the question is how to survive it.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the word cyberpunk?
Bruce Bethke used it as a short story title in the early 1980s, and the editor Gardner Dozois popularised it in 1984 as a label for a group of writers including William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
What is the first cyberpunk novel?
Neuromancer, published in 1984, is the book that defined the genre, though Gibson had already published the short story Burning Chrome two years earlier.
Is cyberpunk still being written?
Its aesthetic is everywhere but the specific 1980s arrangement is largely period now. Modern work in the same space tends to be called by other names, which is usually a sign that a subgenre has won.
Is it the same as steampunk?
No. Both are retrofutures, but steampunk looks back to Victorian technology and is generally warmer and more playful. Cyberpunk looks sideways at the decade it was written in.
Where should I start with cyberpunk?
With Neuromancer if you want the source, or Snow Crash if you want the jokes. The Matrix is the easiest way in if you would rather watch than read.