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New Wave science fiction movement
The New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s, where New Worlds, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, began inviting and encouraging stories that examined new writing styles, techniques, and archetypes, and became the birth of the cyberpunk genre. -
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (novel)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was one of the first novels to give off the general feeling of a dystopian post-economic-apocalyptic future as Gibson and Sterling later deliver, it examines ethical and moral problems with cybernetic, artificial intelligence in a way more "realist" than, other novels that laid its philosophical foundation. -
Release of Blade Runner
The novel, do androids dream of electric sheep was made into the seminal movie with a new title "Blade Runner", which was released in 1982. Which paved the way for so many more cyberpunk movies in many years to come. -
Birth of the cyberpunk name
In 1983 a short story written by "Bruce Bethke", called Cyberpunk, was published in Amazing Stories. The term was picked up by "Gardner Dozois", editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and popularised in his editorials. Bethke says he was made two lists of words, one for technology, one for troublemakers, and experimented with combining them variously into compound words, consciously attempting to coin a term that encompassed both punk attitudes and high technology. -
Neuromancer (novel) and the birth of VR
After seeing Blade runner in 1982 William Gibson's was inspired to write the novel Neuromancer was published on the 1st of July 1984, delivering the glimpse of a future encompassed by what became an archetype of Cyberpunk "virtual reality", with the human mind being fed light-based worlds through a computer interface, and thus the idea/birth virtual reality had begun creating countless -
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
In 1986 he edited a volume of cyberpunk stories called Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, an attempt to establish what cyberpunk was, from Sterling's perspective. -
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The Rise of Film
Due to the overwhelming popularity of film in the late 1990's the Cyberpunk genre decided to take its vision to film releasing more than 50 cyberpunk films in the past decade alone. -
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
In the subsequent decade, the archetypes so perfectly framed in Gibson's Neuromancer became increasingly used as tropes in the genre, climaxing in the satirical extremes of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in 1992. -
Headcrash
Bookending the Cyberpunk era, Bethke himself published a novel in 1995 called Headcrash: like Snow Crash a satirical attack on the genre's excesses. It won the key cyberpunk honour named after its spiritual founder, the Philip K. Dick Award. It satirised the genre in this way:
“...full of young guys with no social lives, no sex lives and no hope of ever moving out of their mothers' basements" -
Present Day
The impact of Cyberpunk, though, has been long-lasting. Elements of both the setting and storytelling have become normal in science fiction in general, and a slew of sub-genres now have -punk tacked onto their names, most obviously Steampunk, but also a host of other Cyberpunk derivatives.
