The Surprisingly Brief History of Cyberpunk

But what makes Neuromancer powerful isn't just its ideas, it's its unlovable protagonist, Case, a broken hacker, addicted, desperate, locked out of cyberspace.

By the early 1990s, it had already begun to fade, to descend into cliche, perhaps most notably in the form of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a knowing pastiche, a send-up of the excesses of cyberpunk.

One of the most important precursor cyberpunk texts is John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, a novel that imagines a network society, digital identities, corporate control of information, and it even predicts something remarkably close to the internet. But more importantly, it introduces a key cyberpunk idea. Technology doesn't liberate people equally.