by-ethan-fox:

It isn’t cyberpunk just because your computer hacker character uses cassettes to store their data as a kind of quirk.

It’s cyberpunk when they started doing this because all other forms of media have draconian copyright protocols enforced by corporate elements that are more powerful than the government.

It isn’t cyberpunk just because your character has a robotic leg.

It’s cyberpunk when your character uses their leg to earn extra cash, because if they don’t pay it off, the person who gave it to them will come after them, take back the leg and take their kidney too.

It isn’t cyberpunk just because your character is gradually replacing their body with augmentations that change their appearance.

It’s cyberpunk when your character has dysphoria in a world where gender can be changed as easily as the tires on your car, and now they’re doing everything they can to change the person they are on the outside to express the person they are on the inside.

It isn’t cyberpunk just because your character has cool sci-fi weapons and lives in a Blade Runner-esque city.

It’s cyberpunk when that neon lit, rainswept urban sprawl persists because humanity’s connection to nature and collective empathy have been utterly forgotten – and the people shuffle through the streets while seeking some kind of meaning, beneath an ashen, ruined sky.

A book needs more than “Cyber” to be Cyberpunk.

It needs a troubled future, using things like virtual reality and prosthetic augmentations to pose questions about commercialism, economics, morality…

As always, genres are malleable; if you want to write a piece of utopian sci-fi fiction and call it “cyberpunk”, you’re free to do that, but if you want to defy genre convention, make sure you really do it.

Strike off in your own direction, tear up the rulebook and just pick and choose what you need to tell your story.

Because giving the finger to the “rules” of sci-fi?

That’s cyberpunk.