See Cyberpunk Tropes and SoYouWantTo.Write A Cyberpunk Story for Cyberpunk's characteristic tropes and what sets it apart from other dystopias. This was spurred on in part by many older, influential works in the genre getting new releases that brought them back into mainstream attention (such as Shadowrun Returns and Cyberpunk 2077), but also the ever-evolving sociopolitical environment some people feel that a lot of the genre's predictions about how society would change with technological progress have proven to be eerily accurate, and a surprising number of social issues that early cyberpunk stories grappled with are very much still topical in modern times, prompting re-examinations of the movement that questioned whether it was truly outdated and what it still had to say. This being said, cyberpunk has also seen a general increase in popularity and interest in The New '10s and into The New '20s, especially toward the former decade's back half. It's hard to condemn speculative technology when it becomes actual technology and we realize that, hey - it's not all bad. Given that it's a more cynical genre than others, it particularly focuses on the negative impact of technology on society, but with the emergence of Post-Cyberpunk, portrayal of societal impact of technology has become more neutral and sometimes even positive. It certainly has Gadget and Adventure stories within the genre as well, numerous in fact, but Cyberpunk is a genre that focuses heavily on the impact of technology on society itself, possibly more than any other genre of sci-fi. Technology marches on, indeed.Д¬yberpunk is also quite distinctive in its focus on Social stories in Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction. The infamous 'three megabytes of hot RAM' in Neuromancer are laugh-inducing to a modern audience who consider eight gigabytes of RAM cheap and low-end - and even moreso to mid-2010's audiences who've already eschewed outdated MP3 players in lieu of smartphones that now integrate music playback features into their core systems, along with hundreds of gigabytes (of hard storage, with RAM 'merely' in the 32gb range) now considered routine. William Gibson himself, considered the godfather of the Cyberpunk genre, has said that he was massively shortsighted on the advances in technology that would occur over the next three decades. This makes it one of the more realistic genres of sci-fi, but also makes older stories be very prone to Zeerust. The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s, but keep in mind that it is not a term that should be applied to every Speculative Fiction dystopia or Bad Future ever in the history of the genre, and does not need to always have an anvilicious Science Is Bad message to it.Д¬yberpunk tends to be pretty hard science fictions, usually lingering between a 4 and a 5. This leads to a theme of 'loss of distinction between real and artificial' on which philosophical and existential conflicts about transhumanism can arise, such as questions on the nature of identity and ' What Measure Is a Non-Human?' Artificial intelligences and artificial humans (sometimes corrupted) are everywhere, while Everything Is Online. Since the Turn of the Millennium, it's become commonplace to swap out the Japanese influences for Chinese - though, given the impact that this era had on the genre as a whole, a retro-style Japanese aesthetic isn't uncommon even today.Д®xpect the scientific philosophy of transhumanism to be a feature, what with Artificial Limbs and cable jacks in the skull that allow access to artificial realities. If the work dates from The '80s, there's a good chance that there will be a theme of East Asian economic dominance, with the evil corporations being sinister Zaibatsu (possibly collaborating with or even run by the Yakuza) and Asian-sounding advertisements, consumer products, brand-names and anime influences liberally scattered around. On the other hand, major villains are almost inevitably Police States or multinational conglomerates led by powerful businessmen with a number of gun-toting Mooks and corrupt politicians ( or even an entire nation) at their beck and call. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the 'punk' component of cyberpunk. These characters - 'criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits' - call to mind the private eye of detective fiction. Heroes are often computer hackers or rebels, antiheroes almost to a man.

Cyberpunk nexus