Cyberpunk
Science fiction about high technology and low life: hackers, corporations and street crime in a near future where machines have changed the body and the city, as in Blade Runner.
In practice
Cyberpunk is a kind of science fiction set in a near future of advanced technology and social breakdown. Its stories follow hackers, mercenaries, outcasts and criminals in vast cities run by corporations, where computers, networks and implants have changed both society and the human body. Its shortest summary is high tech, low life.
The word comes from the title of a 1983 short story by Bruce Bethke, and the genre took shape in the fiction of William Gibson, whose Neuromancer (1984) imagined cyberspace, and of writers such as Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan. On screen, Blade Runner (1982) gave it its look: neon, rain, crowded streets and giant advertisements.
Japanese anime and manga such as Akira (1988) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) carried the genre forward, and The Matrix (1999) brought it to a mass audience. Its questions remain current: who owns technology, what makes a person human when the body can be rebuilt, and what happens to people a system no longer needs.
A cyberpunk scene in screenplay form
EXT. NIGHT MARKET - LOWER CITY - NIGHT
Rain under neon. Noodle stalls beneath a hundred-story tower whose ads speak to each passerby by name. KAI (19), a data courier, pushes through the crowd, one hand on the port behind her ear.
KAI
(into her collar)
Package is warm. Why is it warm?
Every screen in the market goes dark at once. Then each one shows her face.
Opens as a new Plot project once you sign in or create a free account. Inkwell keeps this copy for 24 hours.
The action lines do the world-building in passing: the tower, the personalized ads, the implant. The technology is ordinary to the characters, which is what makes the setting feel lived in. The turn comes when the city's own machinery notices one small person.
Cyberpunk movies and series
Blade Runner (1982): a detective in a rainy, overcrowded Los Angeles hunts artificial humans who want more life. Its design defined the genre's look.
Akira (1988): in Neo-Tokyo after a world war, a member of a biker gang gains psychic powers he cannot control. A landmark of Japanese animation.
Ghost in the Shell (1995): a cyborg police officer hunts a hacker who can take over people's minds, and wonders what is left of her own.
The Matrix (1999): a hacker learns that the world he lives in is a simulation built by machines. It mixed cyberpunk ideas with martial arts action.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022): the anime series set in the world of the Cyberpunk role-playing game follows a street kid who becomes a mercenary in Night City.
Cyberpunk and its offshoots
Cyberpunk gave its suffix to a family of genres. Steampunk imagines Victorian-era technology driven by steam, often in an alternate history. Dieselpunk draws on the machines and style of the 1920s to 1940s. Biopunk replaces computers with genetic engineering.
Solarpunk is the hopeful counterpart: futures built around renewable energy, community and nature. Post-cyberpunk keeps the technology but trades the bleak tone for societies that have adapted to it.
How to write cyberpunk
Start from a question about technology and power, not from gadgets. Who controls the network, the implants or the data, and what does it cost the people at the bottom?
Build the world through action lines, not explanation. Show the technology being used casually and badly worn, and let characters use slang for it.
Make the city a pressure on every scene: crowds, surveillance, advertising, weather. Your hero should be someone the system ignores until they become a problem.
Keep a world bible. In Plot, worldbuilding notes for factions, technology and places can sit beside the script, so names and rules stay consistent across every scene.
Common questions
What is cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is science fiction about a near future of advanced technology and social decay, with hackers, corporations and body implants, summed up as high tech, low life.
Where does the word cyberpunk come from?
It comes from Cyberpunk, a 1983 short story by Bruce Bethke. The editor Gardner Dozois then used it for the fiction of William Gibson and writers like him.
What are the classic cyberpunk movies?
Blade Runner (1982), Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Matrix (1999) are the films most often named as defining cyberpunk on screen.
What is the difference between cyberpunk and steampunk?
Cyberpunk imagines a near future of computers and implants. Steampunk imagines an alternate past where Victorian steam technology took a different path.
Is Blade Runner cyberpunk?
Yes. Blade Runner (1982) is one of the founding cyberpunk films, and its neon, rain-soaked city became the genre's standard look on screen.