writermag.com • The Writer | 27all started when Greg Shaw
used the term punk in the April
1971 issue of Rolling Stone. The
movement may have been
already building, but now it
was a word, and as all writers
know, words are power.
Less than 10 years later, Bruce Bethke intro-
duced a new version of that word to the literary
scene with his 1980 short story “Cyberpunk.”
Said Bethke in the foreword to his story on the
British website infinity plus, “In calling it that, I
was actively trying to invent a new term that
grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and
high technology. My reasons for doing so were
purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to
give my story a snappy, one-word title that edi-
tors would remember.”History of the original literary punk
Most people think of the Blade Runner movie
from 1982 as an early example of cyberpunk. In
fact, the movie and the novel it was based on, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K.
Dick, was cyberpunk before anyone knew what
cyberpunk was, including Dick himself when the
novel was first published back in 1968. Then in
1983, Bethke’s short story “Cyberpunk” was pub-
lished in Amazing Stories, but it was the editor of
another magazine, Gardner Dozois of Isaac
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (better known
as Asimov’s), who talked about it as a cultural
term in the media. This made way for arguably
the most famous cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer
by William Gibson, in 1984.
Granted, some will note that the Japanese were
first with the Akira manga series by Katsuhiro
Otomo in 1982. (In fact, Asian culture still figuresprominently in many cyberpunk stories, especially
as the setting.) Even more critics and enthusiasts
point to influences by grand masters like Philip K.
Dick, Pat Cadigan, Michael Swanwick, John Brun-
ner, Stanislaw Lem, and Harlan Ellison.
But I’ll save those debates for a panel at the
next World Science Fiction Convention. For our
purposes here, we’re more interested in how those
’80s and early ‘90s novels by Gibson, Bruce Ster-
ling, and Nancy Kress, among others, fueled a
new obsession within science fiction readers and
then went mainstream with hacker punk book
and film protagonists who took their anti-estab-
lishment, anti-social, anti-normal-haircut atti-
tudes into the highly technologized near future.
These plots were familiar enough to be relatable
to non-SF fans but boasted an extra kick of sex,
drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
I know it’s certainly my favorite sub-genre of
science fiction. I own copies of just about every
cyberpunk movie made, including both Blade
Runners, put Neuromancer on my “books I’ve read
twice” list (to date there are only five), fill my Ins-
tagram feed with cyberpunk artists (for examples,
check out @neuromute – Gibson fans will get that
one – @3012015, @steveroe, and @dennisjvi),
and I have watched Altered Carbon on Netflix no
less than 10 times.
Of course, my minor obsession is nothing
compared to the die-hards for whom this cultural
milieu is a lifestyle. They dress the dress, talk the
talk, and sing the songs. Take Janelle Monáe
(whom I listen to least once a day). She propels
cyberpunk into a parallel world, that of Afro-
punk, a 1970s movement still popular today
where Black Americans participate in a counter-
culture of creativity and artistry.
Says K. Ceres Wright, author of the cyberpunk
novel COG (Dog Star Books): “To be Black in
America IS to be marginalized, like the tradi-
tional cyberpunk antihero. The use of the suffix
in ‘Afro-punk’ merely formalizes the concept.
Afro-punk formally refers to the participation of
Black people in alternative subcultures, but I
envision an aesthetic that includes art, music,
fashion, literature, language, math, science, and
more. So I’ll co-opt the word cyblerd to describe
this vision.”
A recent star to rise among the cyberpunk
derivatives is, of course, steampunk, mainly
because it, too, involves lifestyle. And fashion.
Aleksandr Artt/Shutterstock (illustration), Gleb Guralnyk/Shutterstock (typography) Don’t forget about the fashion.