SETH W. JAMES

What is cyberpunk?

October 19, 2024

By Seth W. James

Since the beginning of The Cain Series, a question that I often receive is, what is cyberpunk?  The short answer is that cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction, which developed throughout the 1970s and officially began in July of 1980 with the seminal publication of John Shirley’s novel City Come A-Walkin’.  William Gibson—the author of Neuromancer, cyberpunk’s most renown work—famously said of John Shirley, “he is cyberpunk’s patient zero.”

Though definitions of the subgenre abound, many—sadly, most—unfortunately focus upon the aesthetic so often found in the first, golden-age cyberpunk novels of the 1980s: rainy cityscapes with neon signs—in Japanese—punk-rock clothes and handheld computers, and maybe a tough cookie in an alleyway lighting a cigarette with a cybernetic arm.  The style, however, was simply a facet of the time in which the first cyberpunk novels were written, combined with their tendency to be set in the near future.  There are many other, non-cyberpunk books that employ the same style, even books that are not science fiction.

So then, what is cyberpunk and how does it differ from traditional science fiction?

Cyberpunk differs from traditional science fiction in its core conceit, the central idea around which the worlds and plots and characters are built.

In traditional science fiction, going all the way back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—which was not only the first novel, but the first horror novel and the first science fiction novel—all the way through Verne and Wells, to Asimov and Herbert and, yes, to Phillip K. Dick, traditional science fiction’s core conceit is that all technological progress, regardless of any ill purposes to which antagonists might put it in the short term, is of net benefit to humanity.  To say it more simply, in traditional science fiction, all technological innovation is good, even if the bad guys use it for their own selfish needs for a while: Death Stars don’t kill people, Darth Vader does.

This all-innovation-is-good-for-humanity approach is, in fact, the central idea behind Asimov’s extraordinary Foundation Series, which has gone on to inspire generation after generation of science fiction writers.  From Herbert and Dick to Roddenberry and Lucas, even if technological innovation is used by bad peopled for bad purposes, the good guys will eventually recapture the innovation and use it for good.

Cyberpunk takes a different, more nuanced approach to the subject of innovation: cyberpunk’s core conceit is that all innovation—technological, social, governmental, criminal—regardless of its intended or actual benefits to humanity, will, ultimately, be exploited by the powerful to take advantage of everyone else.

The classic example of cyberpunk’s core conceit is found in the ubiquitous cyborg.  The benefit to humanity of cybernetic replacement of damaged or missing limbs and organs is obvious: imagine the benefit—the joy—that such technology would bring to someone injured in a car accident or a war, to have their ability to walk returned to them.  Now imagine what advantages an unscrupulous mega-corporation or criminal syndicate or fascist government could take if they used the same technology to replace the limbs and organs of their operatives, creating cyborgs so fast, strong, and heavily armored that no mere human could resist them—and then imagine a battalion of such soldiers air-dropped onto a rival’s corporate headquarters or national capitol.  That’s cyberpunk.

And so, in cyberpunk—not the rainy, neon, Japanese alleyway stuff, but real cyberpunk—the novels explore the many potential innovations that the powerful might exploit.  From the super-powerful AIs of Neuromancer, to the genetically engineered NuMen of Streetlethal, to the personality coding of Mindplayers, cyberpunk explores the wonders of tomorrow—and brings with them a warning.

Some readers may see a similarity between cyberpunk and Luddism: they are not, in fact, similar.  Luddites reject technological innovation, where cyberpunk accepts the benefits, while acknowledging the dangers.  It is one of the reasons that cyberpunk protagonists are so often masters of some tech or other: it’s how they acquired the power to challenge the antagonists.

More can be said about the obligations of the subgenre, of the frequently recurring tropes and themes, and certainly any science fiction might warn us of the dangers inherent in a burgeoning technology (which happens often, only in trad sci-fi, the blame is placed on bad humans).  But the core conceit of cyberpunk—that all innovation, regardless of its benefits, will be used by the powerful to exploit the rest of us—guides the writers who explore cyberpunk’s possibilities.

Ever since an irate librarian denied my request to order a copy of Neuromancer (I was a ten-year-old with an attitude, admittedly, but I think she was under the impression that cyberpunk novels were somehow manuals for computer crime), I have been fascinated by the possibilities inherent to cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction that delves deeply into not only innovation, but into the human condition.  Cyberpunk fascinates me as much today, all these decades later, as it ever did, and exploring the innovations of the next century, through the novels of The Cain Series, is every bit as artistically satisfying and thought-provoking as reading those forbidden novels of the 1980s.  It has been a long road and a hard one, to develop the skills and experience to create the cyberpunk novels that I had always aspired to write.  And it was worth every step.

Seth W. James