Cyberpunk Books

This year there’s been a lot of hype around the cyberpunk genre, mainly because of the highly anticipated release of CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077. With all the time in the world thanks to the pandemic lockdown, I thought it was a good time to jump into one of the cyberpunk’s earliest and most beloved novels, Neuromancer by William Gibson. 

Count Zero is the sequel which many thought would not come. Gibson himself admitted he had no plans to return to the world of the Sprawl; the closing sentence of Neuromancer was intended to be a severing of ties. As iconic as Neuromancer is, Count Zero exhibits the maturing of Gibson’s worldbuilding and even that of the cyberpunk genre itself.

Neil Postman laid it all out in 1992’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

A technopoly is a society that accepts data as fact, science as God and sees national progress measured by the rate of technological expansion. Satiated with technophiles, shielded by the benefits of innovation and ignorantly unaware of the threats. The harm in a technophilic culture does not arise from the technology itself.

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.

What Is Cyberpunk? Where Do We Even Begin? The intention of this article is not to rehash the origins of cyberpunk or to wrestle amongst ourselves to define what the word “cyberpunk” means. Instead, we at CyberPunks.com were eager to create a “beginner’s guide” to help newcomers figure out what cyberculture to consume first. 

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.

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.

Who is Johnny Silverhand? More people have been asking this question since the figure was seen in the popular Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, played by internet treasure Keanu Reeves. This newfound curiosity calls for a revisiting of this enigmatic character’s roots. 

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.

The opening line to Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson sets the tone for a dark and gritty cyberpunk world that’s progressively looking more like the world of today. An uninformed reader would be hard-pressed to imagine the book being written during the 1980s, seeing as much of the once-speculative technology has been realized.