Cyberpunk Books

Well… we made it. 2020 is in the past. There was a pandemic, the virus. It is convenient to smirk and disengage, checking out into mind-numbing spaces of withdrawal. Let me click into a new void of internet exploration. Let me drift away into a new season. Three days become three months becomes a year. Do I still pay rent?

Reading Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a deceptively fun experience for lovers of science fiction. From walls embedded with bioluminescent bacterial colonies that can light dark passages to cyborgs that feel touch so acutely that they can detect the distinct ridges of a fingerprint, the world of Autonomous is packed with fantastical biotechnology.

When CyberPunks.com launched in 2018, it wasn’t long until we were approached by dozens of earnest writers with short stories, novels and series filled with worldbuilding. It’s hard to keep up! When someone says that “cyberpunk is dead,” you don’t have to point at Cyberpunk 2077, you can just look at the creatives working in this genre — cyberpunk is thriving!

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.

Solarpunk flies upon simultaneous internet currents, growing in separate biospheres and concocting a lush new movement. Part fictional literary scene, large part aesthetical fantasy hashtag and also a DIY home and garden blogging niche, the genre unifies in a reblogged hope for the near future. 

If within a grain of sand lies the gate of the universe, then Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths emerges from the center of that grain as a twirling pinwheel. 

Inasmuch as I know a bit of Philip K. Dick and his works, the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch displays a character I recognize. It’s that of an outsider fully ingratiate with fringe topics and weird culture trying to make sense of spiritual experiences he’s personally inhabited while trying to bring them back down to terra firma. 

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.