Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction set in a dystopian future. It is characterized by its focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features a range of futuristic technological and scientific achievements, including artificial intelligence and cyberware, which are juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. A significant portion of cyberpunk can be traced back to the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, prominent writers such as Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison explored the impact of technology, drug culture, and the sexual revolution. These authors diverged from the utopian inclinations prevalent in earlier science fiction.
Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Frank Miller's Ronin is an example of a cyberpunk graphic novel. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation (also directed by Otomo) later popularizing the subgenre.
Early films in the genre include Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, one of several of Philip K. Dick's works that have been adapted into films (in this case, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Judge Dredd (1995), and The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) were also successful cyberpunk films. The 1987 show Max Headroom is considered the first cyberpunk television series, taking place in a futuristic dystopia ruled by an oligarchy of television networks, and where computer hacking played a central role in many story lines.
Newer cyberpunk media includes Tron: Ares (2025) and Tron: Legacy (2010), sequels to the original Tron (1982); Blade Runner 2049 (2017), a sequel to the original 1982 film; Dredd (2012), which was not a sequel to the original movie; Ghost in the Shell (2017), a live-action adaptation of the original manga; Alita: Battle Angel (2019), based on the 1990s Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita; the 2018 Netflix TV series Altered Carbon, based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name; and the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and original net animation (ONA) miniseries Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), both based on R. Talsorian Games's 1988 tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk plots often involve conflict between artificial intelligence, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in far-future settings or galactic vistas. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. Over time, cyberpunk has shifted from a literary movement to a subgenre of science fiction.
Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.
Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from crime fiction—particularly hardboiled detective fiction and film noir—and postmodernist prose to describe an often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society. 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. Gibson defined cyberpunk's antipathy towards utopian science fiction in his 1981 short story "The Gernsback Continuum", which pokes fun at and, to a certain extent, condemns utopian science fiction
In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality. A typical trope in such work is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk settings are dystopias with corruption, computers, and computer networks.
The economic and technological state of Japan is a regular theme in the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s. Of Japan's influence on the genre, William Gibson said, "Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk." Cyberpunk is often set in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and "city lights, receding" was used by Gibson as one of the genre's first metaphors for cyberspace and virtual reality.
The cityscapes of Hong Kong has had major influences in the urban backgrounds, ambiance and settings in many cyberpunk works such as Blade Runner and Shadowrun. Ridley Scott envisioned the landscape of cyberpunk Los Angeles in Blade Runner to be "Hong Kong on a very bad day". The streetscapes of the Ghost in the Shell film were based on Hong Kong. Its director Mamoru Oshii felt that Hong Kong's strange and chaotic streets where "old and new exist in confusing relationships" fit the theme of the film well. Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City is particularly notable for its disorganized hyper-urbanization and breakdown in traditional urban planning to be an inspiration to cyberpunk landscapes. During the British rule of Hong Kong, it was an area neglected by both the British and Qing administrations, embodying elements of liberalism in a dystopian context. Portrayals of East Asia and Asians in Western cyberpunk have been criticized as Orientalist and promoting racist tropes playing on American and European fears of East Asian dominance; this has been referred to as "techno-Orientalism". The city Chongqing in mainland China is often referred to as a "cyberpunk city".
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