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Apr 6, 2023 · Often in the best cyberpunk novels, the world is ruled by massive corporations, leaving the regular people to fight over the scraps. While cyberpunk spun out of the drug culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it gained traction and meaning in the 1980s.
Jun 12, 2022 · Cyberpunk is a science-fiction sub-genre dealing with the integration of society and technology in dystopian settings. Often referred to as “low-life and high tech,” Cyberpunk stories deal with outsiders (punks) who fight against the oppressors in society (usually mega corporations that control everything) via technological means (cyber).
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Cyberpunk, a science-fiction subgenre characterized by countercultural antiheroes trapped in a dehumanized, high-tech future. The word cyberpunk was coined by writer Bruce Bethke, who wrote a story with that title in 1982. He derived the term from the words cybernetics, the science of replacing
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. This 1956 novel, originally serialized in four parts in Galaxy magazine, predates the cyberpunk movement by more than twenty years, but nonetheless serves as one of its more important ancestors.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , by Philip K. Dick. The source material for Blade Runner, which has been inspiring cyberpunk movies and visuals for more than three decades, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in a near future (a near future that’s changed, actually, since the book’s publication: originally 1992, later editions set it in 2021) where bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts fugitive androids.
- The Girl Who Was Plugged In, by James Tiptree, Jr. In this Hugo-award winning 1973 novella, corporations are king and computers allow people to control artificially grown bodies.
- Software, by Rudy Rucker. The first book in the Ware Tetralogy, this 1982 novel is part of the first wave of the actual cyberpunk movement. Cobb Anderson is a poor, aging, ex-computer scientist who, many years ago, tried to give robots free will.
Sep 29, 2023 · Technology and Society. One of the central themes in Cyberpunk literature is the impact of technology on society. This is often depicted through the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and virtual reality, which have profound implications for individuals and society.
May 15, 2024 · The book's other main themes are the effects of drug use and alternate personality technologies, as well as the personal interactions and increasing isolation of a flawed protagonist. It is the first book in Effinger's Marîd Audran series, named after the protagonist, and was followed by A Fire in the Sun in 1989 and The Exile Kiss in 1991.
In claiming cyberpunk as the “literary incarnation” (ibid: xii) of an “overlapping of worlds […] the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground” (xi) he maps out the two main elements of the term, which also define many of cyberpunk’s common themes.
