Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a science-fiction genre set in a high-tech, low-life future of corporations, hackers and bodies modified by technology.
Where the word comes from
The word comes from Bruce Bethke's short story "Cyberpunk", written in 1980 and published in 1983, and was popularised as a genre label by the editor Gardner Dozois.
In depth
Cyberpunk took shape in 1980s prose science fiction, with William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) as its landmark, and spread quickly into comics, film and games. Its world is a near future of megacities, networks, artificial intelligence and cybernetic bodies, seen from the street rather than the boardroom.
In manga and comics
Japanese manga made some of the genre's most influential works: Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1982–1990) and Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell (from 1989) shaped how cyberpunk looks on the page and on screen. Western comics have their own tradition of hard-edged near futures.
Common elements
Cyberpunk stories usually share a set of features: corporations more powerful than governments, cities of neon and rain, networks that can be entered or hacked, bodies augmented or replaced by technology, and protagonists on the margins — hackers, mercenaries, criminals. The genre asks what is left of the self when memory, body and mind can be modified.
Related shelves
Mecha overlaps with cyberpunk where the machines are military hardware in a corporate future; post-apocalyptic stories overlap where the cities have fallen. Our cyberpunk shelf focuses on the high-tech, low-life core of the genre.
Where it appears
Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. landmark cyberpunk manga
Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow. cyberpunk manga about identity and machines
What it means today
Readers who love cyberpunk novels should try Ghost in the Shell and Akira first: they are the visual source for much of the genre.
