Ever wonder how Cyberpunk’s digital aesthetic took form? You’d be forgiven for turning your attention to film or manga when questioning its origins. Blade Runner encapsulated the noir tone and neon-fuelled aesthetic of which Cyberpunk has become synonymous, whilst Akira and Ghost in the Shell popularised techno-obsessed artistry with ground-breaking magnitude.
Whilst these are inarguably watershed moments for the genre in graphic novels and on screen, what is quintessentially Cyberpunk lies with literature. But how, you might ask, can a book shape something so intrinsically informed by tech?
By cutting burgeoning hopes and fears for computerisation with a raw-edged coolness, as authors such as Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams and William Gibson figured out.
Each of these trailblazers cultivated the mood and defined the tropes of Cyberpunk – think wires-in-brain, robotic augmentations, leather jackets and drug binges. Yet it’s the work of the latter whose text remains a benchmark of Cyberpunk reference, with American/Canadian author Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer seminal to the genre as we know it.
When Gibson penned his opening line ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ he merged reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic today, as online footprints grow exponentially and internet universes creep into reality. Instead of two separate realms, there’s a ripple and blur.
Such an emphasis led Gibson to worry about his book post Blade Runner, with fears that readers woul
