Journey To A Neon Dystopia

With BLADE RUNNER 2049 soon to hit screens, we look back at a subgenre of fiction that has blossomed since the latter part of the twentieth century: CYBERPUNK.

- Spleeny Dotson

When this writer was in my teens, I started playing an exciting new RPG called Cyberpunk 2020. It all seemed a long way away, a world that might happen only the day after the day after tomorrow. In three years time it will be 2020, so what standing is Cyberpunk in now?

Cyberpunk, as a genre, fizzed up powerfully and energetically in the ‘80s, spreading quickly from the world of purely literary science fiction to films, video games, and RPGs before the decade was out.

The world of Cyberpunk was science fiction but it was close to home, set in dark and rainy megacities filled with jostling humans, with not an alien in sight. These entirely urban worlds were filled with high tech operated by low lives. These low-life punks valued style over substance. They were sardonic, hard-edged and hard-boiled.

It was sci-fi with one bionic eye on the detective fiction of the 1930s and ‘40s and the other very much on the street life of the modern day. The characters were a mix of hackers, couriers, reluctant detectives, street samurai, gang enforcers and slimy corporate types, many with cool ‘handles’ instead of names. Popular culture was, if not celebrated, then seen as important and not derided out of hand. Cyberpunk was cynical, it was savvy, it was funny, it was stylish… or at least, it liked the idea of style. There is way too close an association between Cyberpunk and mullets to ever see it as truly stylish. It was also very human, considering how many humans spent all their time ‘jacked in’ to computers or were filled with electronic gadgets where body parts should be.

Some of the themes and ideas that became typical of Cyberpunk had long been swirling around in the soup of science fiction. Philip K. Dick was all over the noir-ness that informed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and went into the subgenre’s visually defining tabula rasa Blade Runner).