http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CyberPunk

won't." — Stephen Lea Sheppard of RPG.Net, on the relation between transhumanism and cyberpunk "Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology."

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The originator of the "Punk" genres, Cyberpunk is a Speculative Fiction genre centered around the transformative effects of advanced science, information technology, computers and networks ("cyber") coupled with a breakdown or radical change in the social order ("punk"). A genre that is dark and cynical in tone, it borrows elements from Film Noir, hard-boiled Detective Fiction and postmodern deconstruction to describe the Dystopian side of an electronic society. It is often used as a synonym to the related trope "Techno Dystopia".

The plot will more than likely take place 20 Minutes into the Future in some City Noir, Industrial Ghetto or Crapsack World that tends to be marked by crime, cultural nihilism and bad weather, where cutting-edge technology is abused by everyone for the sake of selfish profit and pleasure. ("The street finds its own uses for things.")

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Heroes are often computer hackers or rebels, antiheroes almost to a man. These characters — "criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" — call to mind the private eye of detective fiction. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. On the other hand, major villains are almost inevitably Police States or multinational conglomerates led by powerful businessmen with a number of gun-toting Mooks and corrupt politicians (or even an entire nation) at their beck and call.

If the work dates from The '80s, there's a good chance that there will be a theme of East Asian economic dominance, with the evil corporations being sinister zaibatsu (possibly masterminded behind the scenes by yakuza) and Asian-sounding brand-names liberally scattered around. Examples from the Turn of the Millennium and beyond are likely to swap Japan out for China.

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Expect the scientific philosophy of transhumanism to be a feature, what with Artificial Limbs and cable jacks in the skull that allow access to artificial realities. Artificial intelligences and artificial humans (sometimes corrupted) are everywhere, while Everything Is Online. This leads to a theme of "loss of distinction between real and artificial" on which philosophical and existential conflicts about transhumanism can arise, such as questions on the nature of identity and "What Measure Is a Non-Human?"

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, but keep in mind that it is not a term that should be applied to every Speculative Fiction dystopia or Bad Future ever in the history of the genre, and does not need to always have an anvilicious Science Is Bad message to it.

Cyberpunk tends to be pretty hard on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, usually lingering between a 4 and a 5. This makes it one of the more realistic genres of sci-fi, but also makes older stories be very prone to Zeerust. William Gibson himself, considered the godfather of the Cyberpunk genre, has said that he was massively shortsighted on the advances in technology that would occur over the next three decades. The infamous "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer are laugh-inducing to a modern audience who consider eight gigabytes of RAM cheap and low-end — and even moreso to mid-2010's audiences who've already eschewed outdated MP3 players in lieu of smartphones that now integrate music playback features into their core systems, along with hundreds of gigabytes now considered routine. Technology marches on, indeed.

Cyberpunk is also quite distinctive in its focus on Social stories in Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction. It certainly has Gadget and Adventure stories within the genre as well, numerous in fact, but Cyberpunk is a genre that focuses heavily on the impact of technology on society itself, possibly more than any other genre of sci-fi. Given that it's a more cynical genre than others, it particularly focuses on the negative impact of technology on society, but with the emergence of Post-Cyberpunk, portrayal of societal impact of technology has become more neutral and sometimes even positive. It's hard to condemn speculative technology when it becomes actual technology and we realize that, hey, it's not so bad.

See Cyberpunk Tropes and SoYouWantTo.Write A Cyberpunk Story for Cyberpunk's characteristic tropes and what sets it apart from other dystopias. The story may fall on the Romanticism end of the Romanticism Versus Enlightenment scale.

As a movement, it was the successor in some sense to the New Wave Science Fiction movement of the sixties and seventies. Related to Post-Cyberpunk and Cybergoth. Of course, several works fit on a continuum between the two tropes. See also Cyberspace, Dungeon Punk, Punk Punk. Compare also with Steampunk, which shares some similarities with cyberpunk, and Techno Dystopia, which can have overlap on the futurism side. See also Afrofuturism.

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Clear-Cut Examples

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Killtopia is one set in a MegaCity in future Japan where a whole sector of the city is swimming in Killer Robots called "Mechs", which are hunted by soldiers for hire called "Wreckers".

Tokyo Ghost by Rick Remender is so Cyberpunk that it hurts. It's all about how technology combined with humanity's worst impulses only leads to societal decay and disaster. Old City Blues is about a special police force in the futuristic Greek city of New Athens. A TV adaptation is currently in the works.

O.M.A.C. is one of the more eccentric examples, being written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, but it hits just about every element of cyberpunk but cyberspace (which didn't exist as a concept in 1974). All-powerful corporations dabbling in criminal activity? Check. Sketchy world government using spy satellites and transhumanist super-soldiers to do their dirty work? Check. Nuclear threat looming in the distance? Decadent middle class unaware of what goes on beneath their feet? Plots dealing with memory and identity in a world where those things can be removed or reprogrammed? Check, check, and check.

Also in 1974, over at Marvel, Rich Buckler and Doug Moench were covering all the cyberpunk tropes that O.M.A.C. missed in Deathlok The Demolisher: Including transhumanism and something akin to cyberspace. Moench would revisit these topics ten years later at DC in the brilliant but obscure comic Electric Warrior.

in Deathlok The Demolisher: Including transhumanism and something akin to cyberspace. Batman: Year 100 places Batman in a dingy sci-fi Gotham against corrupt government agents utilizing Big Brother-esque tech and psychic powers to keep their shady dealings under wraps.

Transmetropolitan features a number of cyberpunk elements, featuring a dystopian future society where transhumanism is rampant, technology is rapidly outpacing society's ability to assess its moral applications, and the government is thoroughly corrupt.

Fan Works

Alternative Gods is a Death Note cyberpunk AU. It has a strong emphasis on hacking and technology. You've got an evil corporation (Yotsuba) doing unethical experimentation, a noirish tone, colliding conspiracies, and "heroes" that are hackers, misfits, antiheroes, criminals, and visionaries (sometimes all at the same time; exhibit A—Light Yagami.)

The SpongeBob darkfic Cyberpunk: An underwater dystopia , as its name may suggest, has many elements of this genre due the setting takes place 4014 and thanks to humans using their location as nuclear testing site.

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Pinball

Like the movie itself, Johnny Mnemonic is about surviving in a cyberpunk world with uplifted dolphins and cyberspace.

Centaur has a predominant Heavy Metal/Cyberpunk feel, with its half-human half-motorcycle creature and bleak black-and-white artwork.

The "X-ile Zone" table in Obsession Pinball is based on a female hacker fighting against a dystopian future.

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Visual Novels

Snatcher, by Hideo Kojima. Everything, down to the main character's design, screams "I wanna be Blade Runner." It even has the Gibson Shout-Out used by Centurions, in the form of a second Deckard-a-like who even sort of looks like Harrison Ford. Too bad this one dies a rather painful death early on, setting the game's events in motion. The game also borrows cyberpunk themes from AKIRA.

The game also borrows cyberpunk themes from AKIRA. VA-11 HALL-A is a retro-style, cyberpunk-themed Slice of Life story about a bartender just trying to make her way through life and the colorful characters who find their way into her dingy establishment from day to day.

Web Comics

Web Original

Western Animation

Other

A web-ported version of the seminal Cyberpunk HyperCard work from the early 1990s is Beyond Cyberpunk!

The United Federation of Charles discusses the genre and its trappings here .

Having Some Elements

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Visual Novels

Web Comics

Web Original

The last about thirty years of the Chaos Timeline definitely have this vibe going on, courtesy of the Logos (hackers) and the more earlier achieved advanced state of computer technology and networks than in our history.

Something Awful parodied this in their "Great Authors Series", imagining what classic authors would write if they stepped wildly outside their comfort zone, with a piece imagining what it would look like if William Gibson wrote about a present-day (2013) kid looking for doujinshi. The omnipresence of Japanese otaku culture, the "electric cigarettes" and five-hour energy drinks, the information traveling in from far-flung Shinjuku, Toronto, and Dallas in the blink of an eye, a Dell laptop running the fancy-sounding Chrome operating system, and social media are described in terms straight out of cyberpunk... with only the last sentence ruining the illusion: A comedian had just made a rape joke. " "What Vektor discovered in his Twitter feed caused him to hesitate. Something unbelievable was unfolding around the world in real time, bouncing from server to server and metastasizing as a constant chorus of Tweets scrolling through his overloaded feed. It was even worse than he feared.

Western Animation