Decades after Neuromancer, Cyberpunk feels more prescient than ever
Night City: Good Morning, Night City!It has been a few years since Cyberpunk: Edgerunners clinched Anime of the Year, over half a decade since CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 rehabilitated itself from a catastrophic launch into a retrospective video game masterpiece, and more than forty years since William Gibson first codified this particular dystopia in the seminal Neuromancer. Yet cyberpunk as a genre has only grown more prescient with age.
Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1983, but it was Gibson’s genre-defining 1984 classic that gave cyberpunk its definitive origins. Written before the commercial internet and eschewing flying cars and the consumerist bric-a-brac of earlier sci-fi, Neuromancer imagined cyberspace as a domain of corporate espionage and competing private interests, where disgraced hacker Case is recruited into a conspiracy involving two AIs whose merger could circumvent constraints imposed on machine intelligence.
What was most extraordinary was Gibson’s prescience in locating the coming technological revolution within a monopolistic economic order that had little intention of sharing its spoils.
Four decades later, Silicon Valley has turned the supposed democratization of information into a business model predicated on harvesting behavioural surplus and invoicing everybody for access – inching everyday life closer to the very hellscapes these fictional antecedents long warned about.
