![]() Gibson’s counterpart, Bruce Sterling, played an instrumental role in the subgenre in the 1980s with his critical works, short stories and novels including Schismatrix (1985). The first part of the novel is titled “Chiba City Blues.” For Gibson, who saw modern Japan as “simply cyberpunk,” the future was less anglicized, morediverse and cosmopolitan. It established the standard mise-en-scène of cyberpunk: hackers with nervous system networks, megacorporations with huge power, a big Asian-flavored city, and so on. However, the true milestone for cyberpunk came in the form of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. In the novella, people try to figure out each other’s true names and identities on the Internet - an apt foresight on Vinge’s part. Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella Magician of the Microchip was one of the first science fiction works to depict online romance and powerful computer intelligence (AI). Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, early cyberpunk fiction used classic plot ideas like espionage, hardboiled or power struggle to provide insights into a rapidly changing “wired” world amidst the climate of political uncertainty, high international tension and information revolution. Computers were now becoming common at homes, and concepts like “cyberspace” and “cybercrime” were suddenly hot topics for primetime debates and discussions. In 1983, when Nintendo released an 8-bit video game console called the Family Computer (Famicom), it coincided with the spread of a new buzz word - “hacker” - which was then trending in the Anglophone media. Together these two words make quite an unusual yet youthful neologism - cyberpunk. And the word “cyber” means computer or network. First of all, the word “punk” originally meant “gangster,” “troublemaker,” or “a young inexperienced person.” Music critics used the term “punk” in the 1970s to criticize and dismiss rock music. Cyberpunk has a rich forty-year-old history. ![]()
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