Super Glossary

Cyberpunk Movement

Entertainment / Literature / Cyberpunk Movement: (1) A loose school of science fiction authors including William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson who rose in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. (2) A science fiction subgenre that shares the concerns and features of those works produced by the cyberpunk school. Common themes include the dehumanization, commodification, and mechanization of the individual, the negative effects of commercialization upon society, and implicit philosophical questions regarding consciousness and sensory reality. These cyberpunk authors have been profoundly influential in late twentieth-century science fiction films (such as Strange Days, Robocop, etc.) And Japanese anime, where cyberpunk elements have become so common as to be almost clich???©. The 'metaverse' or the 'Net' imagined by these early authors in the 1980s have been seen as prophetic of the later real-world rise of the internet after 1993. Examples of novels, anthologies, short stories, and other literary works from the cyberpunk movement include Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Islands in the Net, and 'Johnny Mnemonic.' (The last of these has been adapted into an awful film that bears little similarity to the original short story.) More recently, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has put a more satirical spin on the genre.
Search Google for Cyberpunk Movement: