Hello all!

My name’s Kirill Klevanski, and I’m a Russian fantasy author.

In honor of the release of CD Projekt Red’s much-awaited game, Cyberpunk 2077, I wanted to share my thoughts on the genre known as cyberpunk. The founders of this genre were authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, whose works like Neuromancer and Schismatrix laid the foundation of this futuristic setting, mainly the “high tech, low life” cannon, and the never-ending war of people versus the cooperation.

I’m inclined to disagree with the opinion that the cyberpunk genre was born solely because of these two authors. In 1982, Tron was released, which presented the vivid colors of the virtual space, as well as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which, too, introduced us to the aesthetics of the cyberpunk world. At the same time, in Japan, Otomo Katsuhiro published his award-winning manga, Akira. In other words, the cyberpunk style seemed to be spreading its roots everywhere.

Writers and artists alike described a future that scared them. The genre’s most iconic images were that of polluted megacities, crime, bio-implants, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence. All this is done in noire aesthetics of rain and neon. In those settings, writers wrote about themes that weighed on them: the limits of humanity, the power and greed of corporations, the vulnerability of society to crime, and the doom of humanity presented against the backdrop of technological progress.

However, the line between cyberpunk and futurism blurred after some five to ten years of the genres existence. Each new book became more contrary to the original canon. In addition, in my opinion, the “punk” part of the cyberpunk seems to have been lost. By the ‘90s, many believed this genre to be dead.

It wasn’t until Neal Stephenson that the genre began to return to its former glory. His novel, Snow Crash, was a breakthrough, and was proclaimed as the forefather of the “post-cyberpunk” genre. Unlike Gibson and Sterling, Stephenson was familiar with computer technology and programming, which gave him a more sober view of the future of technology. His next novel, called The Diamond Age or Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, caused another stir. Stephenson looked further than he did in Snow Crash and described the age of nanotechnology, in which the gap between the “high society” and the rest of humanity is incredibly wide.

Following Stephenson, other authors began to write in this genre, among which are the names of those such as Jeff Noon, Tad Williams, Richard K. Morgan, Michael Swanwick, and many others. As time went one, virtual reality became the central theme of this genre.

Over time, the concept of cyberpunk became even more blurred. “Old-school” cyberpunk now looks like retrofuturism. That which had once plagued the authors of the ‘80s, no longer frightens us, making their problems and apprehensions seem silly in comparison. Then again, if we think about it, we’re living the future that they had once feared. Drones, neural networks, security cameras with facial recognition, hacking, implants, the development of robotics — all of this is our reality. Often, the very word “cyberpunk” has been used to ironically refer to how the imaginary has become the norm.

I believe that cyberpunk never really revolved around technology: William Gibson didn’t understand computers when he wrote Neuromancer, he just saw beyond what others could and wrote about it. He wrote about his time, about his problems, but at the same time, unbeknownst to him, accurately described the trends of the future.

I’d like to believe that modern cyberpunk won’t cling too much to the past, but again, offer plausible scenarios of the future, in which technology is changing our lives too much and too quickly.

Do you like this genre? What modern books of this genre would you recommend?