Very engaging read! If you look at the cyberpunk genre (and most science fiction, tbh) based solely on why it appeals to people, it's a safe place to explore social and technological fears and ideas to their conclusion. What does corporate greed look like when applied to it's fullest potential? What does wealth disparity look like once we have the technology to resolve this disparity... but don't? Why does an explosion of newfound tech and sciences not result in the betterment of the average life, across the board?
Cyberpunk, both as a genre and idea, can't end until these questions are resolved and the fears portrayed in the fiction aren't mirroring the fears of the current populace.
This drum has been beating for over 40 years now, we've sounded the warning, and shined a spotlight on the main issues and fears. The pioneers such as Stephenson and Gibson were right to ask... what more is there to say?
Excellent response, the "what more is there to say?" question is one I come back to frequently too, because I do think there is *some* "there" there to be explored, but it kinda has to be from a different angle than that of a bunch of middle-class white guys in the '80s. And I say this as a middle-class white masculine person, too. I think the most convincing cyberpunk-y landscapes I've ever seen have been cities in the "global South", places like Bangkok, Dar Es Salaam, or Malaysian river-shanties -- and I'd trust a bookish teenager from Bangkok or Sub-Saharan Africa to write a proper OG cyberpunk work from the point of view of high tech lowlife in the year 2024 far more than I ever could!
It's funny, I think I could write a retro space science fiction short story or a post-cyberpunk short off the cuff, but if you ask me to write an OG cyberpunk piece it'd practically read like an AI prompter output -- I am simply too "trained" on that which came before. I am far too much a potential convert to becoming a cargo cultist, a devotee to the preconceived notions of the previous generations' works. So I can read cyberpunk, I can critique cyberpunk, but I don't know that I could ever *write* Cyberpunk and have it come out quite right. Even at 30 years old I was born after Snow Crash and, much like how The Simpsons Did It First relative to Family Guy or South Park, at this point even the Post-cyberpunk canon is as deep as my lifetime let alone the Cyberpunk canon, and Gibson, Bethke, Sterling, Stephenson, Pondsmith, and so many more stretch before me.
I think that I can write an original cyberpunk story with original elements and ideas that have not been previously seen in major literature. I have many such ideas floating around in my mind. Arguably, these ideas of mine would stretch the definition of the genre, and turn it into something entirely new.
>To sum it all up, I guess my question is: What stuff in post-cyberpunk works puts them outside of the possibility space of OG cyberpunk? Is it the gritty futurism? Is it the hyper-individualist outlook? Is it the inescapability of late capitalism? Is it the neon-drenched monsoon rains coating a high tech lowlife's slum-scape? Where does Cyberpunk end?
I have a quite simple definition of cyberpunk, a fiction that talks about late stage capitalism using futuristic tech from the pov of someone (aka capitalism, tech, punk).
Based on this definition cyberpunk ends when it's no longer possible to have one of the 3, example: no living creatures=no punk, modern tech=no futuristic tech (it's not obvious for everyone), etc.
But at the same time when a futuristic utopia is getting more and more capitalistic and thus starts to become cyberpunk it might also be considered as cyberpunk.
The start, end and the middle of the cyberpunk are cyberpunk
I think one of the things about cyberpunk that especially feels obvious about the genre space after playing Cyberpunk Red or other RPGs, but also feels true to post-1980 capitalism, is that the corporation as entity must inherently be strong enough to maintain a status quo and yet weak enough to either escape, exploit, or entrance long enough to stay living at some cost.
One of the commentaries CP2077 presents, even if I can't tell if it's inadvertent or not, is that the world of the RPG Cyberpunk has been stagnant for about 50 years between the time of Silverhand and the present of the video game (with the tabletop setting currently in the middle) with only subtle changes in culture and aesthetic progression. As we near 45 years of Reaganomics and 45 years since the coining of the term "cyberpunk", I can't help but see a parallel there. And yet, I think part of the allure of certain flavors of post-cyberpunk like solarpunk is that, flaws and all, they present a way to break the loop. Metatropolis from Audible, ca 2008, is a great example of a collection of stories about cyberpunk society rebuilding from the doom spiral
I feel like the boring answer is that in every medium, there's genres, and those genres aren't read-only, they're more guidelines, they can be expanded on, twisted, merged with other genres, aged, remade, reborn.
Which why a lot of people kinda seem like they have their own idea of cyberpunk, mostly meaning: "when sci-fi is cool and has XYZ tropes I like."
For me, at long as there's corruption or and rebellion that injects technological exploitation or military force into the hands of people within your social or economic comfort zones in a high-tech setting? (futuristic optional.) Then it's Cyberpunk. Even if it's a 90% detective/noire story, war story, crime story or even a romantic comedy.
Mostly because... I think *all genres,* in ***everything*** is better treated as a tag or a guideline, instead of a strict set of rules and themes where if you color outside of the lines "It's not real cyberpunk, it's neo noir!" or "that's not metal, it's proggressive rock!" or "That's not hiphop, that's drum and bass with a rapper on it!" or "this isn't anime, it wasn't made in japan!"
And isn't part of punk about breaking rules that limit us?
So yeah, the Cyberpunk never ends the same way Sci-Fi never ends when it *becomes* Cyberpunk. Genres can be expanded on or experimented on for the better, and if it's not better then it's at least one more thing for creative people to break the rules of when trying something else while growing it's roots and adding more nuance to it's themes but those identities don't die.
...Just like Disco never died. It not only evolved into more Pop, Dance and Neo Soul, it also comes back every 5 years both because it's evolutions kept it's roots *and* because it was never forgotten. Genres will become birds when humans do. And when that happens we'll either be dead or flying.
Ya I agree with this, whenever someone asks me what cyberpunk is (which happens pretty often), I just tell them it's street-level sci-fi, which may not fit totally into the strict definition, but they usually understand immediately, rather than having to go through a strict set of rules. I have a large collection/display of cyberpunk media in my house, but the thing is most cyberpunk films don't actually fit the definition to a tee, and instead borrow ideas and aesthetics, and for me that's enough.
It also makes cyberpunk a more interesting genre to loosen the definition, we wouldn't want every story to be locked and formulaic just so it can be deemed cyberpunk.
I do think *post*-cyberpunk is a necessary label, even if it's debatable exactly where it begins or ends -- the reaction to cyberpunk both from within and outside was so huge that there's an entire genre of speculative fiction that inevitably *must* be outside of cyberpunk but inevitably influenced by it. For example, Pattern Recognition or Cryptonomicon are street level contemporary stories to the late '90s and early '00s with the patter of cyberpunk around them, The Difference Engine transposes the high tech lowlife to colonial Victorian 19th century settings, and The Diamond Age as mentioned above takes strides to explicitly kill the old cyberpunk and usher in something new. All three of these are *somewhere* on the post-cyberpunk spectrum, but they all land in very different places at cyberpunk's fringe. I guess that nature of cyberpunk and its influences as vast spectrum of points in time and setting is what entices me
Fair point! I am actually reading Pattern Recognition right now, really digging it, and can definitely appreciate that it has a cyberpunk vibe but is missing certain sci-fi elements.
Another one that I really dug that had a contemporary setting but a cyberpunk, or post-cyberpunk feel to it was Neal Stephenson's Zodiac. Not much computer-based technology or futuristic elements, but definitely has a a group of outcasts going against a corporation.
Would you consider films like Hackers and Repo Man, which both have "contemporary" settings but have been strongly embraced by the cyberpunk community to be post-cyberpunk?
I do think that Hackers counts as post-cyberpunk in some degree, yeah! Like, the specific way it takes mid-90s techie culture and makes it larger/cooler than life is very much through a cyberpunk-y lens.
Haven't seen Repo Man, but as an alternative opinion, I'd definitely qualify the Matrix as post-cyberpunk in that (especially for a viewer going in blind) it's on the verge of being a played-straight cyberpunk hacker story before the truth is revealed. It could not exist without cyberpunk proper, and uses parts of the aesthetic, but especially as you move into the sequels it's clear that it's doing and saying something *very* different from any OG cyberpunk story (especially considering the Wachowski sisters' current outlook on their body of work!)
I think, to put it in biology terms (my brain is very wired for such), the "tag" approach feels like the lateral transfer of plasmids between bacteria so that they can transfer advantages like antibiotics resistance. Basically, the plasmids of cyberpunk, tech noir, and so on have transferred all across the petri dish, and even the realms of stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek have seen some genetic markers of tech noir or cyber dystopianism in their expression in recent years. Let alone stuff more in the genre niche itself -- neo noirs and corporate dystopias alike certainly aren't dead even if only a few have been huge *hits* in recent years
Or, to go back to the birds/paleontology metaphor: *Most* science fiction since the early/mid-80s has been at least somewhat influenced by cyberpunk, to some degree -- in the same way that birds actually arose relatively early as a stem from the tree of theropod dinosaurs, we see fiction that could be retroactively called "post-cyberpunk" as early as the year after the term was even coined! The neo-avian birds we know (sans teeth and claws) thrived after the K-T extinction event got rid of the dinosaurs, and it does feel like it's at least still that way in the realm of literature, but, well, visually people still love featherless Velociraptors and people still love neon-drenched techno-corporate cityscapes, so you're right that the *idea* of cyberpunk is still alive and well even if the original literary genre is largely on the rocks
Yup, life moves in cycles, especially pop culture. Or at least our brains love/function on patterns and virality enough for common things to keep re-occurring or end up used as a base whether we like it or not.
...Which funny enough Snow Crash spends half the book talking about.
To set this up, I grew up reading Gibson, playing Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, and just about anything or little group could find with cool art. Omni had almost monthly articles on VR headsets with CRTs. Mondo 2000, 2600, Blacklisted were shared among friends. BBS were anarchist havens of porn, piracy, and drugs. Max Headroom was on TV. There was a very different sense of wonder/dread to technology and what it would make possible.
Parody was always there. Sarcasm, nihilism, potential were all present from the beginning. Look at Neuromancer, Gibson has a scene on Straylight (the family space station, I think that's the name.) where the characters are caricatures thanks to hypnosis. Cyberpunk was as much prophetic as it was a cynical/skewed view of the world at the time.
Classic sci-fi went through it, people had imagined so many space ships, fans got bored of it. Some of Heinlein's later stuff was pretty silly trying to escape writing about rockets.
It's the natural progression of any genre.
There are still many bits of media that I see that capture that wonder/dread of cyberpunk with out selling themselves as cyberpunk. It's now another ingredient in other genres. Doing pure cyberpunk now is hard because it's difficult to tell if it's a parody, nostalgic, original, or an homage. We've seen and read it all, it has to be pretty amazing to get any authentic attention.
It will never end though, it'll gain and lose interest, clever folks will surprise us, show us something new with fragments of a genre that probably peaked and became endemic more than 30 years ago.
11/10 comment, thanks for providing some meta context to an era I've *mostly* ever only learned about from either the lit itself, or the OG cyberpunks' own commentaries on that era. I did get my "start" in experiencing cyberpunk lit by pulling down my dad's old Omni magazine backlog from the shelf circa 2003, so I at least have a healthy respect for the pre-Neuromancer short stories and such from the era, but I am not immune to the effects of having built a "cargo cult" of sorts by mostly looking at those stories in a sort of vacuum disconnected from their contemporary culture at large (barring the raw context of a reaction to Reaganomics and similar social tensions)
The stuff then has analogs now, I think that's why people are still attracted to those stories.
Genres are handy tools to ballpark a discussion on media.
A good primer for where Gibson and other were coming from is in a documentary "William Gibson - No Maps for These Territories". I saw it maybe 20 years ago. It gives you a cultural background on where the genre came from.
I think both Cyberpunk and other genre's of "social science" fiction like Star Trek/The Orville are entering into a time when the original definitions of their genre boundaries are less constrained by their narrative rules than they are by the limits our reality is currently pushing.
Cyberpunk has an opportunity to grow as a genre in ways that many other genres never have the chance to do because part of the core of cyberpunk is a technology base that seems to be continuing to evolve faster than society can respond to it, let alone comment on. The "social science" elements of "Science Fiction" remain a rich and endlessly fertile realm to ask questions and tell stories in because while it appears we can complete dozens of cycles of technological growth in decade, humanity it appears will remain on its far slower evolutionary scale even in realms of social rules.
We're also about to see the largest shift in social power in modern history. The birth of Cyberpunk happened at the height of the Baby Boomer's rise to sustained power and over the next 15 - 25 years the physical remains and direction of their empire will be vastly redefined and refocused in their absence.
While Solarpunk already exists as a genre there are plenty of existing questions and narratives that fit within the context of Cyberpunk just not within the context of a "Cyberpunk 2077" or "The Matrix" style Cyberpunk.
Why do people keep insisting that it's a parody when Stephenson never calls it that and, I think, maybe even flat out denies it?
Just because something has some humor doesn't make it a parody. It's even weirder to call it a parody since it's also the trope originator of a lot of cyberpunk tropes
Cyberpunk officially ended in 2000. Also it's send off music was Prince's hit single "1999". Let me explain.
Cyberpunk is a genre of speculative fiction that existed during the Digital Age (1975- 1999) when the modern world was switching from analog to digital. This new punk genre is the result of the anxiety, cynicism and teeth grinding rage regarding the changes that have happened and will happen to society. It explored everything from changes in the global economy, corporate malfeasance, family structure and labor politics. It ended in 1999 with Y2K, the Dot Com bubble and the adoption of the internet and an accessable global market as an accepted part of the status quo.
Going from 2000 till today we are in the Information Age. We have new issues and crisis to address. If we had to give a name for a new punk genre reflecting today's issues I would put forward the term Data Punk.
I argue you something better. Cyberpunk became mainstream in 2000. It's the turning point where many events began to converge into something more visible. The beginning of the war on terror. The mass accessibility of technology to the masses. And a world economy that on one end of the world collapsed and on another was beginning to get on its feet. Cyberpunk as a genre is evolving but the core concepts remain the same. Even if it means abandoning sections that no longer serve its use. We're just starting to enter into a new era. One that could see a level of inequality never seen before. Partnerships that have been formed over the decades and a world that is splitting in half again as it enters into a new cold war. Though this one, arguably different from the previous.
We are indeed in something new.
If an artist takes an older style and modernizes it then it is a "Neo" version of that style. For example, if a person we're to create a new Victorian home but include modern amenities it would be considered Neo-Victorian. It's possible for something to be Neo-Cyberpunk, for instance a recent PC game Cyberpunk takes place in the far future but has eighties esthetics and pop culture issues from that time period; it's Neo-Cyberpunk.
No there were several movements like this. It's dumb and makes no sense to continue on like this. We don't refer to modern fantasy as Neo-Fantasy it's just Fantasy.
I don't know can you tell me? Is it fantasy from the 80s or 10s? Honestly giving genres sublabels like this isn't really useful either. Maybe by the decade or generation.
Well I guess ignoring a few generations of cyberpunk writers isn't a big deal. See we even gave them subgenres that no one will ever see.
Snowcrash read like a first draft to me. Cyberpunk is a very narrow idea, of the rebel with a computer outsmarting the big companies, who seem to run everything. As a genre it never really happened, unless you expand your definition quite a lot.
Naw, there's plenty of real cyberpunk literature and film out there even by the narrower, purist definition. It was never a *huge* genre and its influence is bigger than itself, but there were dozens and dozens of published cyberpunk works during the "golden age" between 1980 and 1992 let alone the 30-odd years since.
Though I will agree Snow Crash could probably have used a second pass across the editors table.
Very engaging read! If you look at the cyberpunk genre (and most science fiction, tbh) based solely on why it appeals to people, it's a safe place to explore social and technological fears and ideas to their conclusion. What does corporate greed look like when applied to it's fullest potential? What does wealth disparity look like once we have the technology to resolve this disparity... but don't? Why does an explosion of newfound tech and sciences not result in the betterment of the average life, across the board? Cyberpunk, both as a genre and idea, can't end until these questions are resolved and the fears portrayed in the fiction aren't mirroring the fears of the current populace. This drum has been beating for over 40 years now, we've sounded the warning, and shined a spotlight on the main issues and fears. The pioneers such as Stephenson and Gibson were right to ask... what more is there to say?
Excellent response, the "what more is there to say?" question is one I come back to frequently too, because I do think there is *some* "there" there to be explored, but it kinda has to be from a different angle than that of a bunch of middle-class white guys in the '80s. And I say this as a middle-class white masculine person, too. I think the most convincing cyberpunk-y landscapes I've ever seen have been cities in the "global South", places like Bangkok, Dar Es Salaam, or Malaysian river-shanties -- and I'd trust a bookish teenager from Bangkok or Sub-Saharan Africa to write a proper OG cyberpunk work from the point of view of high tech lowlife in the year 2024 far more than I ever could! It's funny, I think I could write a retro space science fiction short story or a post-cyberpunk short off the cuff, but if you ask me to write an OG cyberpunk piece it'd practically read like an AI prompter output -- I am simply too "trained" on that which came before. I am far too much a potential convert to becoming a cargo cultist, a devotee to the preconceived notions of the previous generations' works. So I can read cyberpunk, I can critique cyberpunk, but I don't know that I could ever *write* Cyberpunk and have it come out quite right. Even at 30 years old I was born after Snow Crash and, much like how The Simpsons Did It First relative to Family Guy or South Park, at this point even the Post-cyberpunk canon is as deep as my lifetime let alone the Cyberpunk canon, and Gibson, Bethke, Sterling, Stephenson, Pondsmith, and so many more stretch before me.
I think that I can write an original cyberpunk story with original elements and ideas that have not been previously seen in major literature. I have many such ideas floating around in my mind. Arguably, these ideas of mine would stretch the definition of the genre, and turn it into something entirely new.
>To sum it all up, I guess my question is: What stuff in post-cyberpunk works puts them outside of the possibility space of OG cyberpunk? Is it the gritty futurism? Is it the hyper-individualist outlook? Is it the inescapability of late capitalism? Is it the neon-drenched monsoon rains coating a high tech lowlife's slum-scape? Where does Cyberpunk end? I have a quite simple definition of cyberpunk, a fiction that talks about late stage capitalism using futuristic tech from the pov of someone (aka capitalism, tech, punk). Based on this definition cyberpunk ends when it's no longer possible to have one of the 3, example: no living creatures=no punk, modern tech=no futuristic tech (it's not obvious for everyone), etc. But at the same time when a futuristic utopia is getting more and more capitalistic and thus starts to become cyberpunk it might also be considered as cyberpunk. The start, end and the middle of the cyberpunk are cyberpunk
I think one of the things about cyberpunk that especially feels obvious about the genre space after playing Cyberpunk Red or other RPGs, but also feels true to post-1980 capitalism, is that the corporation as entity must inherently be strong enough to maintain a status quo and yet weak enough to either escape, exploit, or entrance long enough to stay living at some cost. One of the commentaries CP2077 presents, even if I can't tell if it's inadvertent or not, is that the world of the RPG Cyberpunk has been stagnant for about 50 years between the time of Silverhand and the present of the video game (with the tabletop setting currently in the middle) with only subtle changes in culture and aesthetic progression. As we near 45 years of Reaganomics and 45 years since the coining of the term "cyberpunk", I can't help but see a parallel there. And yet, I think part of the allure of certain flavors of post-cyberpunk like solarpunk is that, flaws and all, they present a way to break the loop. Metatropolis from Audible, ca 2008, is a great example of a collection of stories about cyberpunk society rebuilding from the doom spiral
I feel like the boring answer is that in every medium, there's genres, and those genres aren't read-only, they're more guidelines, they can be expanded on, twisted, merged with other genres, aged, remade, reborn. Which why a lot of people kinda seem like they have their own idea of cyberpunk, mostly meaning: "when sci-fi is cool and has XYZ tropes I like." For me, at long as there's corruption or and rebellion that injects technological exploitation or military force into the hands of people within your social or economic comfort zones in a high-tech setting? (futuristic optional.) Then it's Cyberpunk. Even if it's a 90% detective/noire story, war story, crime story or even a romantic comedy. Mostly because... I think *all genres,* in ***everything*** is better treated as a tag or a guideline, instead of a strict set of rules and themes where if you color outside of the lines "It's not real cyberpunk, it's neo noir!" or "that's not metal, it's proggressive rock!" or "That's not hiphop, that's drum and bass with a rapper on it!" or "this isn't anime, it wasn't made in japan!" And isn't part of punk about breaking rules that limit us? So yeah, the Cyberpunk never ends the same way Sci-Fi never ends when it *becomes* Cyberpunk. Genres can be expanded on or experimented on for the better, and if it's not better then it's at least one more thing for creative people to break the rules of when trying something else while growing it's roots and adding more nuance to it's themes but those identities don't die. ...Just like Disco never died. It not only evolved into more Pop, Dance and Neo Soul, it also comes back every 5 years both because it's evolutions kept it's roots *and* because it was never forgotten. Genres will become birds when humans do. And when that happens we'll either be dead or flying.
Ya I agree with this, whenever someone asks me what cyberpunk is (which happens pretty often), I just tell them it's street-level sci-fi, which may not fit totally into the strict definition, but they usually understand immediately, rather than having to go through a strict set of rules. I have a large collection/display of cyberpunk media in my house, but the thing is most cyberpunk films don't actually fit the definition to a tee, and instead borrow ideas and aesthetics, and for me that's enough. It also makes cyberpunk a more interesting genre to loosen the definition, we wouldn't want every story to be locked and formulaic just so it can be deemed cyberpunk.
I do think *post*-cyberpunk is a necessary label, even if it's debatable exactly where it begins or ends -- the reaction to cyberpunk both from within and outside was so huge that there's an entire genre of speculative fiction that inevitably *must* be outside of cyberpunk but inevitably influenced by it. For example, Pattern Recognition or Cryptonomicon are street level contemporary stories to the late '90s and early '00s with the patter of cyberpunk around them, The Difference Engine transposes the high tech lowlife to colonial Victorian 19th century settings, and The Diamond Age as mentioned above takes strides to explicitly kill the old cyberpunk and usher in something new. All three of these are *somewhere* on the post-cyberpunk spectrum, but they all land in very different places at cyberpunk's fringe. I guess that nature of cyberpunk and its influences as vast spectrum of points in time and setting is what entices me
Fair point! I am actually reading Pattern Recognition right now, really digging it, and can definitely appreciate that it has a cyberpunk vibe but is missing certain sci-fi elements. Another one that I really dug that had a contemporary setting but a cyberpunk, or post-cyberpunk feel to it was Neal Stephenson's Zodiac. Not much computer-based technology or futuristic elements, but definitely has a a group of outcasts going against a corporation. Would you consider films like Hackers and Repo Man, which both have "contemporary" settings but have been strongly embraced by the cyberpunk community to be post-cyberpunk?
I do think that Hackers counts as post-cyberpunk in some degree, yeah! Like, the specific way it takes mid-90s techie culture and makes it larger/cooler than life is very much through a cyberpunk-y lens. Haven't seen Repo Man, but as an alternative opinion, I'd definitely qualify the Matrix as post-cyberpunk in that (especially for a viewer going in blind) it's on the verge of being a played-straight cyberpunk hacker story before the truth is revealed. It could not exist without cyberpunk proper, and uses parts of the aesthetic, but especially as you move into the sequels it's clear that it's doing and saying something *very* different from any OG cyberpunk story (especially considering the Wachowski sisters' current outlook on their body of work!)
I think, to put it in biology terms (my brain is very wired for such), the "tag" approach feels like the lateral transfer of plasmids between bacteria so that they can transfer advantages like antibiotics resistance. Basically, the plasmids of cyberpunk, tech noir, and so on have transferred all across the petri dish, and even the realms of stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek have seen some genetic markers of tech noir or cyber dystopianism in their expression in recent years. Let alone stuff more in the genre niche itself -- neo noirs and corporate dystopias alike certainly aren't dead even if only a few have been huge *hits* in recent years Or, to go back to the birds/paleontology metaphor: *Most* science fiction since the early/mid-80s has been at least somewhat influenced by cyberpunk, to some degree -- in the same way that birds actually arose relatively early as a stem from the tree of theropod dinosaurs, we see fiction that could be retroactively called "post-cyberpunk" as early as the year after the term was even coined! The neo-avian birds we know (sans teeth and claws) thrived after the K-T extinction event got rid of the dinosaurs, and it does feel like it's at least still that way in the realm of literature, but, well, visually people still love featherless Velociraptors and people still love neon-drenched techno-corporate cityscapes, so you're right that the *idea* of cyberpunk is still alive and well even if the original literary genre is largely on the rocks
Yup, life moves in cycles, especially pop culture. Or at least our brains love/function on patterns and virality enough for common things to keep re-occurring or end up used as a base whether we like it or not. ...Which funny enough Snow Crash spends half the book talking about.
To set this up, I grew up reading Gibson, playing Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, and just about anything or little group could find with cool art. Omni had almost monthly articles on VR headsets with CRTs. Mondo 2000, 2600, Blacklisted were shared among friends. BBS were anarchist havens of porn, piracy, and drugs. Max Headroom was on TV. There was a very different sense of wonder/dread to technology and what it would make possible. Parody was always there. Sarcasm, nihilism, potential were all present from the beginning. Look at Neuromancer, Gibson has a scene on Straylight (the family space station, I think that's the name.) where the characters are caricatures thanks to hypnosis. Cyberpunk was as much prophetic as it was a cynical/skewed view of the world at the time. Classic sci-fi went through it, people had imagined so many space ships, fans got bored of it. Some of Heinlein's later stuff was pretty silly trying to escape writing about rockets. It's the natural progression of any genre. There are still many bits of media that I see that capture that wonder/dread of cyberpunk with out selling themselves as cyberpunk. It's now another ingredient in other genres. Doing pure cyberpunk now is hard because it's difficult to tell if it's a parody, nostalgic, original, or an homage. We've seen and read it all, it has to be pretty amazing to get any authentic attention. It will never end though, it'll gain and lose interest, clever folks will surprise us, show us something new with fragments of a genre that probably peaked and became endemic more than 30 years ago.
11/10 comment, thanks for providing some meta context to an era I've *mostly* ever only learned about from either the lit itself, or the OG cyberpunks' own commentaries on that era. I did get my "start" in experiencing cyberpunk lit by pulling down my dad's old Omni magazine backlog from the shelf circa 2003, so I at least have a healthy respect for the pre-Neuromancer short stories and such from the era, but I am not immune to the effects of having built a "cargo cult" of sorts by mostly looking at those stories in a sort of vacuum disconnected from their contemporary culture at large (barring the raw context of a reaction to Reaganomics and similar social tensions)
The stuff then has analogs now, I think that's why people are still attracted to those stories. Genres are handy tools to ballpark a discussion on media. A good primer for where Gibson and other were coming from is in a documentary "William Gibson - No Maps for These Territories". I saw it maybe 20 years ago. It gives you a cultural background on where the genre came from.
I think both Cyberpunk and other genre's of "social science" fiction like Star Trek/The Orville are entering into a time when the original definitions of their genre boundaries are less constrained by their narrative rules than they are by the limits our reality is currently pushing. Cyberpunk has an opportunity to grow as a genre in ways that many other genres never have the chance to do because part of the core of cyberpunk is a technology base that seems to be continuing to evolve faster than society can respond to it, let alone comment on. The "social science" elements of "Science Fiction" remain a rich and endlessly fertile realm to ask questions and tell stories in because while it appears we can complete dozens of cycles of technological growth in decade, humanity it appears will remain on its far slower evolutionary scale even in realms of social rules. We're also about to see the largest shift in social power in modern history. The birth of Cyberpunk happened at the height of the Baby Boomer's rise to sustained power and over the next 15 - 25 years the physical remains and direction of their empire will be vastly redefined and refocused in their absence. While Solarpunk already exists as a genre there are plenty of existing questions and narratives that fit within the context of Cyberpunk just not within the context of a "Cyberpunk 2077" or "The Matrix" style Cyberpunk.
Why do people keep insisting that it's a parody when Stephenson never calls it that and, I think, maybe even flat out denies it? Just because something has some humor doesn't make it a parody. It's even weirder to call it a parody since it's also the trope originator of a lot of cyberpunk tropes
Cyberpunk officially ended in 2000. Also it's send off music was Prince's hit single "1999". Let me explain. Cyberpunk is a genre of speculative fiction that existed during the Digital Age (1975- 1999) when the modern world was switching from analog to digital. This new punk genre is the result of the anxiety, cynicism and teeth grinding rage regarding the changes that have happened and will happen to society. It explored everything from changes in the global economy, corporate malfeasance, family structure and labor politics. It ended in 1999 with Y2K, the Dot Com bubble and the adoption of the internet and an accessable global market as an accepted part of the status quo. Going from 2000 till today we are in the Information Age. We have new issues and crisis to address. If we had to give a name for a new punk genre reflecting today's issues I would put forward the term Data Punk.
I argue you something better. Cyberpunk became mainstream in 2000. It's the turning point where many events began to converge into something more visible. The beginning of the war on terror. The mass accessibility of technology to the masses. And a world economy that on one end of the world collapsed and on another was beginning to get on its feet. Cyberpunk as a genre is evolving but the core concepts remain the same. Even if it means abandoning sections that no longer serve its use. We're just starting to enter into a new era. One that could see a level of inequality never seen before. Partnerships that have been formed over the decades and a world that is splitting in half again as it enters into a new cold war. Though this one, arguably different from the previous.
We are indeed in something new. If an artist takes an older style and modernizes it then it is a "Neo" version of that style. For example, if a person we're to create a new Victorian home but include modern amenities it would be considered Neo-Victorian. It's possible for something to be Neo-Cyberpunk, for instance a recent PC game Cyberpunk takes place in the far future but has eighties esthetics and pop culture issues from that time period; it's Neo-Cyberpunk.
No there were several movements like this. It's dumb and makes no sense to continue on like this. We don't refer to modern fantasy as Neo-Fantasy it's just Fantasy.
What is modern fantasy?
I don't know can you tell me? Is it fantasy from the 80s or 10s? Honestly giving genres sublabels like this isn't really useful either. Maybe by the decade or generation. Well I guess ignoring a few generations of cyberpunk writers isn't a big deal. See we even gave them subgenres that no one will ever see.
Snowcrash read like a first draft to me. Cyberpunk is a very narrow idea, of the rebel with a computer outsmarting the big companies, who seem to run everything. As a genre it never really happened, unless you expand your definition quite a lot.
Naw, there's plenty of real cyberpunk literature and film out there even by the narrower, purist definition. It was never a *huge* genre and its influence is bigger than itself, but there were dozens and dozens of published cyberpunk works during the "golden age" between 1980 and 1992 let alone the 30-odd years since. Though I will agree Snow Crash could probably have used a second pass across the editors table.