The Big Book of Cyberpunk published in the US on 23 September 2023 and in the UK on 2 May 2024 (as two volumes).

In the US, it can be found here:

In the UK, it can be found here:

Or, best of all, your local independent bookshop.

The American edition contains both volumes, with a few minor differences. Both US and UK editions contain all the same stories.

Cyberpunk has a robust legacy in academia, critical studies and science fiction - three fields that love to define things and argue about definitions.

For the purposes of The Big Book of Cyberpunk, the following definition was used: cyberpunk is speculative fiction about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs.

Technology may accelerate, promote, delay, or even oppose these affairs, but humanity remains ultimately, unchangeably, human. It is the fiction of irrationality. Science fiction looks to the stars; cyberpunk stares into a mirror.

The –punk of cyberpunk is critically important: cyberpunk contains a fundamental sense of challenge. Cyberpunk pushes boundaries; it is provocative. It tries to find and break conventions. This need to rebel is intrinsic to the genre, leading to experimentation with both theme and form.

Born out of science fiction’s new wave, literary postmodernism, and a perfect storm of external factors (Reaganism, cheap transistors, networked computing, and MTV), the genre cohered as a tangible, fungible thing in the early 1980s, most famously exemplified by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the themes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The term ‘cyberpunk itself’, as coined by Bruce Bethke, came into being in 1983. The neologism captured the zeitgeist: the potential of, and simultaneous disillusionment with, techno-capitalism on steroids.

Altthough cyberpunk is now seen as a type of science fiction, its origins are as a broader literary and movement. The original cyberpunk authors were weaving between literary and genre outlets, as well as commercial and academic imprints, traditional and experimental presses, and formal and informal modes of publishing. The movement takes its inspirations from William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and David Cronenburg.

Cyberpunk stories need to be fiction.

At least, for the sake of The Big Book of Cyberpunk! There’s actually a wealth of cyberpunk-adjacent nonfiction that fully merits a Big Book of its own. From the reviews of Cheap Truth to the ads in the back of Mondo 2000, there are essays, travelogues, manifestos, articles, and memoirs that are immensely important to cyberpunk. But cyberpunk is speculative, not descriptive. The nonfiction inspires the genre, and is inspired by it, but is not the genre itself.

The protagonist needs to be recognizably human.

Cyberpunk is about human affairs. Protagonists that are aliens, robots, or artificial intelligence (AI) shift the focus from human social relationships to the relationship between humanity and the other. Human/other relationships can be an insightful way of exploring what makes us human (as seen in great science fiction ranging from Mary Doria Russell to Becky Chambers), but cyberpunk eschews that additional layer of metaphor. To be about human affairs, the story needs to be about humans.

The story is set in the present, the near present, or an easily intuited future.

As we project further and further out, deciphering the scale, the pace, or the pattern requires more and more assumptions on the part of the author. Again, this is about the point of focus: the more speculation involved, and the less the manufactured technology is immediately recognizable, the more the story becomes about exploring the wondrous, rather than investigating the real. The “present,” of course, is relative. (Objectively speaking, most of cyberpunk is now, disturbingly, alternate history.)

Given the stagnant state of space exploration, this also excludes virtually all stories that take place off-planet or in deep space. (Again, exceptions could be made for films such as Alien, 1979, that take place in deep space, but with oddly minimal evidence of human scientific or social progress.) Similarly, there are examples of cyberpunk in secondary worlds or of cyberpunk with magic, but role of those worlds or powers needs to be cautiously managed. If the fantastical becomes more and more necessary to the story, the focus shifts away from human affairs.

Cyberpunk is not about technological supremacy.

In fact, the reverse is true: cyberpunk is about the perseverance of humanity.

Cyberpunk accepts that personality cannot be subsumed. This recognition is for good and for ill: techno-utopian outcomes are impossible because of our core, intractable humanness. But nor should those outcomes even be desirable: our irrepressible need for individuality may keep us from paradise but is, ultimately, the most essential part of our nature. In theme, and often in form, cyberpunk embraces chaos and irrationality, perpetually defiant of sweeping solutions, absolutist worldviews, or fixed patterns.

Technology is mediative, not transformative.

A story in which technology fundamentally transforms, replaces, or subsumes human relationships is exciting, intriguing, and wildly imaginative . . . but not cyberpunk. A cyberpunk story is one that examines the way technology changes the way humans relate to other humans but still leaves that relationship fundamentally intact. The underlying resilience of human social relationships, for better or for worse, remains the key theme.

There are a lot of comparisons between cyberpunk and noir, and these are not without merit. Noir, like cyberpunk, is a genre where the aesthetic and themes are often confused.

Noir, like cyberpunk, isabout human relationships, whether the protagonist’s troubled relationship with their own identity (Dark Passage, 1947) or their conflict with a claustrophobic broader society (Chinatown, 1974). There is even a technological change at the center of most noir stories: the modern industrial city and its resultant impact on the pace, the scale, and the pattern of human affairs.

Cyberpunk as science fiction noir can be a fairly apt description, but only when used in the thematic sense. It is, however, often applied in the sense of “two genres that both feature rain and trench coats”. Cyberpunk does not have to be set in a city, or under neon lights, or wearing sunglasses, or in the rain, or in a trench coat. These tropes demonstrate the lingering appeal of the aesthetics, but have little to do with its underpinning themes.

Cyberpunk is often described as dystopian, but dystopia means a final and established system. Cyberpunk is literature about change. Even in its grimmest settings, cyberpunk presents the possibility of dynamism and of change. (And, similarly, even when set in the most scintillating futures, cyberpunk seeds the potential for regression or disruption.)

Change can take the form of progress or regress; evolution or revolution; or even degradation. It is not epic in the sense of a grand and ultimate destination. There are no final and decisive conclusions, only, at most, incremental movement.

In fact, because of its focus on the resilience of human relationships, cyberpunk is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but brutally realistic. If that realism is often read as dystopic, that is more a commentary on the nature of humanity.

The Big Book of Cyberpunk is the definitive collection of the genre, with over a hundred stories from around the world. It includes the stories that inspired the genre, those that first defined it, and many contemporary examples of how it still thrives today.

Also, Neuromancer.

The Big Book of Cyberpunk is intended to be an introduction to the genre.

If you liked Neuromancer, either the book or the TV show, there are lots of great jumping-off points from there.

Other anthologies of short stories:

Comics and manga such as:

Novels like:

And many more. There’s a very extensive reading list in the back of The Big Book of Cyberpunk, or search out books or stories by any of the authors from the table of contents (above).