What Is Cyberpunk?
The Cyberpunk genre is usually credited to author William Gibson. It's a sub-genre of Science Fiction, which deals with the "Near Future."
Common elements of the genre include Cybernetic augmentation, full-immersion virtual reality, genetic alteration, artificial intelligence, crime, narcotics, and human suffering at the hands of corporations. In most treatments of the genre, humanity's technology is expanding faster than humanity can deal with it. Man can make himself faster and stronger by replacing his obsolete body parts with mechanical limbs or organs, or even have his genetic code re-written for improvements. He can sell his body to the highest bidder to be made into a killing machine.
The cost is the humanity of the individual. Rebelling against the vicious control of an uncaring government and uncaring corporations, individuals striving to forge short but spectacular lives for themselves, "Cyberpunks," seek personal improvement through any means possible, only their personal codes of honor standing between them, and becoming what they fear the most.
Examples of movies in this Genre include "Blade Runner," "Johnny Mneumonic," "The Matrix," (if you stretch it a bit), and others. Many roleplaying games have been produced in this Genre, most notably R. Talsorian Game's "Cyberpunk 2020," and it's later editions.
In effect... Man Isn't Good Enough. Metal is better than Meat, but To Splice is Divine. You solve society's problems by getting Big Guns and wearing an armored trenchcoat and blowing away the scum... well, whoever's the scum this week, anyway. Or, you plug your brain into a Cyberdeck and do a Netrun against the corporate oppressors, battling in Cyberspace with real-life consequences.
As Genres go, it's dark and gritty. The hero and the anti-hero aren't that far apart, life is cheap and short. And humanity is being consumed by it's own techology, slowly but surely.
Cyberpunk is a reflection of current trends in techology and sociology. Life is getting cheaper by the day. Living in Los Angeles, for example, our news is constantly full of gangs who will kill you for your shoes, or for no reason at all. Computer technology advances every day, sometimes every hour, and obsolescense is a way of life. Most science fiction takes a long term view of the future... how advanced will things be in the 25th century, and beyond? Cyberpunk looks at the next ten, twenty, thirty years, and paints a bleak picture of how humanity deals with it's own increased pressures.
Because struggles make literature, this great struggle tends to make great literature.
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