Best Cyberpunk Books: 16 Reads in Order, With a Start-Here Pick

Start here: Neuromancer (1984)#

Neuromancer is the pick, and it isn't close. It's short, it set the vocabulary every other book on this list either copies or fights, and it has a heist, a ghost in the machine and a woman with blades under her nails inside 270-odd pages. Skip the reputation and read the first chapter: a bar in Chiba City, a man who wants to die, a rain-colored sky. Either you're in or you aren't. The Neuromancer page has the plot and background.

If it bounces off, don't blame the genre. Try True Names or Snow Crash next, which have a lighter touch.

Before the label#

These came before 'cyberpunk' was a word, and the genre inherited from them.

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Philip K. Dick: The source of Blade Runner, and the better-kept secret of the two. Rick Deckard hunts androids in a San Francisco damaged by nuclear war. Quieter and stranger than the film, and sadder.
• True Names (1981), Vernor Vinge: A novella with a fully developed idea of cyberspace before Gibson used the word. Read it to see how little of the genre was actually new in 1984.
• Software (1982), Rudy Rucker: Won the first Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. First of Rucker's Ware tetralogy; its sequel Wetware (1988) shared the 1989 award. Weirder and funnier than anything Gibson wrote.
• 'Burning Chrome' (Omni, July 1982), William Gibson: The story where 'cyberspace' first appears, and the best proof Gibson was already good. Short enough to read on a bus.

The 1980s core#

The years after Neuromancer are where the movement defined itself, loudly and in public.

• Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson: Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award. The template, and still the one to beat.
• Schismatrix (1985), Bruce Sterling: Sterling's only novel-length story in his Shaper/Mechanist universe. Opinion: all ideas, no noir. Great if you wanted the science fiction half of the genre.
• Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), ed. Bruce Sterling: A short-story collection built to define the movement from the inside. The best sampler here: if a story bores you, the next one is a few pages away.
• Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), William Gibson: Books two and three of the Sprawl trilogy. Mona Lisa Overdrive takes place eight years after Count Zero and was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards. Read in order or you'll spend the third book lost.
• Hardwired (1986), Walter Jon Williams: Cowboy and Sarah, two heavily modified outlaws, fight the Orbital Corporations. The tabletop game Cyberpunk drew on it (Williams playtested it), and R. Talsorian published a Hardwired sourcebook in 1989. The book Night City's creators were actually reading.
• Islands in the Net (1988), Bruce Sterling: Won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1989. Its early-21st-century world looks peaceful and networked on the surface. Our read: less punk, more politics, and a good antidote to leather-coat cosplay.

The 1990s on#

Once the formula was settled, the better writers started bending it.

• Synners (1991), Pat Cadigan: Won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992. Cadigan treats the human mind as a real, explorable place. Our read: the strongest proof on this list that the genre was never only about lone male hackers.
• Snow Crash (1992), Neal Stephenson: Stephenson says the title is his term for a software failure on early Macintosh computers. It reads as the satirical extreme of Gibson's motifs. Opinion: the funniest book on this list, and the loudest.
• The Diamond Age (1995), Neal Stephenson: Nanotechnology instead of cyberspace: a coming-of-age story about a girl named Nell, in a world where nanotech touches everything. The full title is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Pick it when you're tired of hackers.
• Idoru (1996), William Gibson: Second book of Gibson's Bridge trilogy, set mainly in a near-future Tokyo rebuilt after a major earthquake. Our read: Gibson tearing up his own template, and the better for it.
• Altered Carbon (2002), Richard K. Morgan: Consciousness can be moved between bodies ('sleeves'). The story follows Takeshi Kovacs, a former UN soldier turned private investigator. It was adapted as a Netflix series in 2018. Read the book: it's meaner.

Fixer's notes: how to read this list#

Opinion: you don't need to read the whole list in order. Read Neuromancer, then Mirrorshades to find which writer you like, then follow that writer. Gibson fans go on to Count Zero. Anyone who wants to laugh goes to Snow Crash. Anyone who wants the human side goes to Synners.

For tabletop players, Hardwired is the one with a direct connection to Cyberpunk. For Night City itself, the Cyberpunk RED and Cyberpunk 2020 pages cover the games, and the cyberpunk slang page covers where the words come from. Prefer screens? The cyberpunk movies list is next, and what is cyberpunk has the definition.