Cyberpunk

The word comes from Bruce Bethke’s 1983 short story literally titled “Cyberpunk,” but it became a genre label through editor Gardner Dozois, who used it in 1984 to group a cluster of writers working in a similar register: high tech, low life. William Gibson coined the related term cyberspace a year earlier, in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome.

Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) is the book that made the label stick — a heist plot run through a world of hackers, black-market cybernetics, and artificial intelligences with their own agendas. Bruce Sterling’s 1986 anthology Mirrorshades collected the movement’s other core writers and gave it a manifesto.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) pushed the style toward satire and speed, and coined the modern sense of metaverse. By the 2000s the visual and thematic vocabulary — neon, megacorporations, augmented bodies — had migrated well past prose into film, games, and design, even as new novels in the subgenre kept being written.

Expect a near-future setting, usually urban, where the internet (or its equivalent) has become as physical and dangerous a space as the street. Protagonists tend to be freelancers operating outside institutions — hackers, couriers, mercenaries — rather than people with any formal power.

Style matters as much as plot: dense slang, brand names used as scenery, and a fast, hard-boiled narrative voice borrowed from crime fiction. The genre has kept evolving past its 1980s roots — more recent cyberpunk engages directly with surveillance, automation, and algorithmic control rather than treating hacking as pure spectacle.