Rachel Beck’s The Glitch Logs are tapping into the same vein as K.C Alexander’s cyberpunk action thrillers. Glitch is a hacker of some notoriety. She’s a famous yet retired gamer girl and a veteran runner. She pulls off jobs against ‘corps that others only hear about in hushed tones.
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Bone Dance is also filled with some of the best prose I’ve read. At its heart is a character that is unique and intersectional. It feels like the handling around gender identity is done well, though I can’t speak to that much. I’m not one for fantasy usually, but this, as with other genre mashups I’ve read lately, features some of the very best work in cyberpunk I’ve consumed.
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As one of the formative novels of cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker’s Software takes a somewhat surprisingly nuanced approach to technology. Another surprise is the way this novel equates freedom with psychotropic drugs, more reminiscent of a mid-60’s hedonistic hippie mindset than a punk aesthetic. This, for me, ends up being the most interesting aspect of this novel, and also the worst.
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Often in cyberpunk, choice is but an illusion presented by an omnipresence like AI, an authority figure, or society at large. This is only one reason why All Systems Red makes an important contribution to the subgenre, and also what makes it slightly difficult to classify.
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Upgrade Blends Genres to Make it Ultimately Cyberpunk — When a mysterious benefactor offers to help him walk again by implanting an experimental technology called STEM, Grey gets the opportunity to regain a normal life. However, STEM ends up being a lot more than a piece of tech that enables of Grey’s body again. The tech is actually semi-autonomous evolving program.
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In Neon Leviathan, twelve cyberpunk short stories ricochet off one another. They center around marginalized perspectives in Australia after a futuristic war entangled that country, Vietnam, and China. The stratification of class has been exacerbated. Each story focuses on one or more individuals who are just trying to get by in a world where the corporations dominate. Expect tales of criminals, gamblers, medics, and soldiers.
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Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage says “Society is a Carnivorous Flower.” Written in 1988, Metrophage is a first wave cyberpunk novel with most of the usual trappings. There is no middle class anymore, just the super-rich and the dirt poor.
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In a near future Los Angeles stands the Hotel Artemis, a sanctuary for criminals with a full-service nurse . . . for members only, of course. Things go unexpectedly wrong for a group of crooks when riots break out during a heist. Packing futuristic tech, they make their way to the Artemis and to sanctuary, or so they think.
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Released in 1992, Sneakers flew (and continues to fly) under the radar cyberpunk fans. Cyberpunk 2020, the popular tabletop roleplaying game was published just one year prior to the movie’s release. Snow Crash, often regarded by fans as the point in which cyberpunk literature officially “died”, dropped the very same year as Sneakers.
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Although published in 1991, the world of Pat Cadigan’s Synners and L.A in the late 1980’s still feels relevant today. In fact, it’s more relevant than a lot of cyberpunk, especially among fellow first-wave texts. Unlike many of the books’ peers, it doesn’t feel archaic after thirty years, perhaps because it’s a hard, purposeful look at nostalgia itself.