What Is Cyberpunk? Meaning, Origins and the Rules of the Genre

The short definition#

The genre's own shorthand is 'high tech, low life'. Take a technology that exists or nearly does (brain interfaces, artificial intelligence, a global network) and drop it into a society where the rich own everything and the poor get the leftovers. The technology works fine. You just don't get a share.

Plots usually put a hacker, a thief or a mercenary against a megacorporation, in a near-future Earth instead of a galaxy far away. The mood is borrowed from film noir and hardboiled detective fiction, which is why the hero is rarely a hero and usually behind on rent.

Where the word came from#

Bruce Bethke wrote a short story called 'Cyberpunk' in 1980 and it was printed in Amazing Stories in 1983. He built the word by mashing a list of technology words against a list of troublemaker words, hunting for something that held both punk attitude and computers. It worked a little too well.

Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, grabbed it as a label. In a 1984 Washington Post piece he named Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan and Greg Bear as the writers it fit. Bethke got his revenge with a novel, Headcrash (1995), that mocked the genre's clichés.

Before the label#

The groundwork came from the New Wave of the 1960s and 70s: Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and others, who wrote about drugs, media and technology with no flattery at all. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is the book Blade Runner was adapted from.

Samuel R. Delany's Nova (1968) already has neural implants. Gibson's short story 'Burning Chrome' (Omni, 1982) is where the word 'cyberspace' first shows up, along with the line 'the street finds its own uses for things'. Fifty years of tech bros have quoted it without noticing it is a warning.

Neuromancer, Blade Runner and the template#

Neuromancer (1984) gave the genre its working vocabulary: cyberspace, jacking in, and ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics), the security software a hacker has to break. It is the only novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award. The full breakdown is on the Neuromancer page.

Blade Runner (1982) did the same job for the look: dense, rainy, crowded with signs, an Asian-influenced Los Angeles. Ridley Scott described it as Hong Kong on a very bad day. Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades (1986) then tried to pin down what the movement was, from his side of it. The cyberpunk aesthetic page covers how the visuals developed.

Japan and games#

Japanese cyberpunk starts in 1982 with Katsuhiro Otomo's manga Akira, and his 1988 film adaptation spread it worldwide. Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Serial Experiments Lain (1998) followed. The cyberpunk anime page has the full list.

Games grabbed the genre early. Mike Pondsmith's tabletop game Cyberpunk came out from R. Talsorian Games in 1988, and its later editions (Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk RED) are the source material for the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022). Pondsmith has said he built the game from 1980s sci-fi, particularly Walter Jon Williams's Hardwired and Blade Runner, and did not read Neuromancer until later.

Fixer's notes: what people get wrong#

Opinion: neon is not the point. The signature of the genre is the power structure, and a story with glowing signs and no corporate pressure on the main character is just wallpaper. Compare Edgerunners, where David's life is decided by who can pay for his implants, with a game that only uses the skyline.

Starting points: read Neuromancer, watch Blade Runner, then pick your format. Books are on the cyberpunk books page, films on the cyberpunk movies page, and street talk on the cyberpunk slang page. If you want to play, start with Cyberpunk RED.

For the author who started it, see William Gibson. Unfamiliar word? The lore glossary has it.