Just wondering what 2020ish or later cyberpunk books/authors you’ve read and would recommend. Every list I find is either the same handful of admittedly quintessential 1970/80s stuff (Gibson, Stephenson, Dick, etc), mega compilations that aren’t deliniated by year/quality (and haven’t been updated in years), or wildly irrelevant bot slop.
Human authors only… nothing AI/LLM-generated, please.
Why do you only want something written in the last five years?
Because I’m curious how our current reality has influenced the genre and how major world events, societal shifts, etc. have been potentially incorporated or reimagined. So much of the classic cyberpunk concepts are based on 40+ year old pre/early-internet ideas and I’d like to see how that has changed as our society and technology has. Maybe the answer to that is “it’s niche fiction, so not at all”, but that’s why I’m curious.
As for the specificity to five: It’s a fairly arbitrary choice on my part, though I have been finding that stuff created post-covid often has a very different energy to it even if that isn’t part of the fiction itself.
I’m am/was a fan of the cyberpunk genre 15 years ago, but reality is faster moving and more subversive now. I have to watch ads to pump my gas man. I think what you are looking for exists under a different name. The fiction that is a reaction to our current environment is stuff like solar-punk.
I guess I didn’t think of solar-punk as a book genre to explore. The context I’ve always seen it is very much in-life non-fiction (ala the various solar-punk communities on the threadiverse). Somehow it didn’t occur to me that there would be literature as well.
I’ll have to poke around. Thanks for the info!
Gotcha. I’m the kind of person that lets art percolate for sometimes years or decades before I’ll get interested. Hope you find some quality writing.
I get the feeling that the idea of cyberpunk is more about a time period than it is an ever long genre. I’d liken it to more akin to New Wave in sci-fi. Maybe it has more legs than I’m giving it credit for but I remain unconvinced.
You may very well be right, and it’d make sense if so. Some would probably consider what I’m asking for “post-cyberpunk” (or whatever), but that gets bogged down in semantics that I’m not familiar enough with to navigate.
But that’s all part of my curiosity and why the specificity of the ask. What does it even mean to write cyberpunk nowadays? If it’s a particular past vision of the future and we’re in that future (or some vaguely similar situation), then what is today’s vision? Is it even possible for it to resemble classical “cyberpunk” enough to be considered the same genre? Would it just be the same-but-more tropes? More/less grounded in existing tech? Or is it the path to creative entropy? I have no idea. And thus: the ask.