Knowra Cyberpunk Cyberpunk Cyberpunk is a science-fiction subgenre that places advanced technologies such as cybernetics and artificial intelligence amid social disorder, corporate power, or dense urban life.
Cybernetics : The interdisciplinary study and engineering of control and communication in animals and machines. Cyberpunk often imagines bodies and machines joined through implants, prostheses, and neural interfaces.
New Wave science fiction : A science-fiction movement that emphasized literary experimentation and social concerns, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Its stylistic experimentation and focus on contemporary society helped prepare the ground for cyberpunk.
Ghost in the Shell : A Japanese media franchise about a cybernetic agent investigating crime and political threats in a technologically advanced society. Its explorations of cyborg identity and networked consciousness extend cyberpunk into Japanese animation and manga.
Solarpunk : A speculative movement that imagines sustainable societies organized around renewable energy and ecological repair. Its hopeful, ecological futures contrast with cyberpunk’s recurring urban decay and concentrated power.
Artificial intelligence : The design of computer systems that perform tasks associated with human intelligence. Autonomous machines and software raise questions about agency and control in cyberpunk worlds.
Philip K. Dick : An American science-fiction writer known for works questioning reality, identity, and authority. His unstable realities and distrust of powerful institutions anticipate central cyberpunk concerns.
Akira : A 1988 Japanese animated film set in a turbulent, futuristic Tokyo and centered on a teenager with immense psychic power. Its urban unrest and spectacular technological imagery became influential in global cyberpunk.
Postcyberpunk : A science-fiction mode that retains cyberpunk technologies while often depicting more integrated protagonists and institutions. It revises cyberpunk’s outsider perspective without discarding its technological concerns.
Dystopia : An imagined society marked by oppression, deprivation, or severe social dysfunction. Cyberpunk frequently uses dystopian conditions to make technological progress coexist with human hardship.
William Gibson : A Canadian-American writer whose fiction helped define cyberpunk, especially through the novel Neuromancer. His writing established influential imagery of cyberspace, corporate power, and street-level life.
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