Near-future science fiction exploring high technology and low life, where corporations rule and hackers fight back.
Cyberpunk imagines futures where technology has advanced dramatically but society has gotten worse. Megacorporations have replaced governments, the gap between rich and poor is a canyon, and the characters navigating this world are hackers, outcasts, and criminals rather than astronauts and scientists. The aesthetic is neon-lit, rain-soaked, and wired. It's technology as dystopia, not utopia.
Cyberpunk's vision of corporate dominance, digital surveillance, and technological inequality turned out to be disturbingly predictive. Understanding the genre helps you write near-future fiction that feels relevant. It also demonstrates how a subgenre can define an entire aesthetic, influencing film, games, fashion, and music alongside literature.
The novel that named and defined the genre, envisioning cyberspace before the internet existed.
Satirical cyberpunk that predicted the metaverse, corporate-owned infrastructure, and gig economy decades early.
A proto-cyberpunk exploration of what it means to be human in a world of artificial beings.
Neon and rain aren't cyberpunk. The genre is about power, inequality, and technology's human cost. Without that core, it's just set dressing.
Classic cyberpunk's predictions came true. Modern cyberpunk needs to extrapolate from where we are now, not where Gibson was in 1984.
Write a scene where a character does something mundane, ordering food, commuting to work, visiting a doctor, but every step is mediated by corporate technology that extracts something from them: data, money, autonomy. Don't editorialize. Let the details speak.