Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a story genre. Specifically, it's a dystopian subgenre of science fiction. It's often film noir for the information age, or as the nightclub in The Terminator was named, TechNoir.
Themes tend to include: corporations and zaibatsu with too much power essentially being above the law; low-level criminals exploiting their security vulnerabilities through hacking and social engineering; disabled people augmenting their bodies and brains, to the point even abled people benefit from such upgrades; virtual reality and the Internet, both of which were en vogue in the 1990s; and philisophical pondering about who is human, what is reality, and whether artificial intelligence is truly alive. Much like Hidden Fortress, it can show epic power struggles between titans, through the eyes of regular people who get swept up in their path to become key players.
The genre arguably extends even to non-fiction, such as the essay A Cyborg Manifesto.
Notable works in the genre include "The Long Tomorrow", Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Akira, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Snow Crash, Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and Inception.
Quotes
So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's Escape From New York, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and all other original artifacts of the style sometimes dubbed "cyberpunk." Those French guys, they got their end in early.
— William Gibson, 1989[1]
References
- Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel Tom de Haven & Bruce Jensen, 1989
Story genres: Cyberpunk | Masked vigilante | Superhero
Cyberpunk: Blade Runner
