Cyberpunk: the word evokes images of a neon-washed cityscape, corporations up to no good, cranial ports to access the ‘net, and protagonists who exist in shades of gray. Over the years, the genre has more or less fallen into a kind of rhythm, even as it updates its technology and morés with the times. But falling into a rhythm, ladies and gentlemen, is not very punk. Recently, a new crop of cyberpunk has emerged, a genetic blend of genres and influences, bearing strange new fruits. We’re calling it New Wave Cyberpunk, and here are seven books that made us want to boot up and jack in all over again.

Necrotech, by K.C. Alexander

Alexander’s visceral prose and foulmouthed heroine may show influence from K.W. Jeter and Yoshitoshi ABe (not a typo), but it’s clear from the opening moments of Necrotech, rife with dialogue equal parts hard-boiled action hero and tone poem of vulgarity, that K.C. Alexander is using the tools left by those who came before to fashion something entirely new. This one hits the ground running with the description of what might be the second-worst hangover in history, propelling us directly into Riko’s quest to find out who wiped her mind and experimented on her body. Alexander’s put us right into the thick of things, for good (explosive action scenes with clear through lines) and ill (oh, the body horror).

Escapology, by Ren Warom

Taking its cues from cosmic horror and weird fantasy, Warom’s debut overflows with ideas and world-building that push it well beyond its cyberpunkian premise. With its meme-spouting hivemind savants, AIs who behave more like sealed-away eldritch abominations than computer programs, high-speed monorail chases, and megaship-to-megaship battles, Escapology grabs cyberpunk by the throat and drags it into deeper, stranger waters. The result is something that pays tribute to the subgenre of old, but establishes itself firmly as its own unusual (and original) creation.

Near Enemy, by Adam Sternbergh

While Spademan, Sternbergh’s brutal boxcutter-toting antihero, was introduced going about his trade in the nuke-blasted ruins of Manhattan in Shovel Ready, it is his second outing that finds the book veering into cyberpunk. With Near Enemy, a job to kill a hacker named Lesser puts Spademan at the center of a mystery where people who die in the virtual world inexplicably also die in real life. Sternbergh’s bleak, terse, and gritty noir seems to position itself as a cynical mirror to the more optimistic post-cyberpunk books, but its true appeal is the way it treats its virtual space as a kind of human-created alternate dimension, ending in a rather bizarre finale that will hopefully be further explored in books to come.

The Destructives, by Matthew De Abaitua

While the plot and mind-screwy nature of this book owe more of a debt to the so-called “New Wave” of science fiction (And Philip K. Dick in particular), it’s impossible to ignore the cyberpunk touches of De Abaitua’s apocalyptic tragedy. The plot, about a disturbed antihero trying to unshackle an AI for shadowy interests, bears more than a few similarities to Neuromancer; the mega-mall sequences would fit right along with the ones in Spares; and the apocalyptic Singularity, and the way it births the godlike University of the Sun, seems like a logical (if cynical) answer to the idea of Singularity and “friendly AI” as a kind of “nerd rapture.” Add shadowy corporations and a final argument about how far people will go to justify their ends to the mix, and it’s difficult not to draw immediate parallels.

Company Town, by Madeline Ashby

Ashby’s gritty hybrid of science fiction, western, and detective story kind of inverts a premise of cyberpunk—instead of technology detaching its users from the “real world,” she presents humanity as necessary to check and guide technological growth. The main character’s lack of reliance on cybernetics and her unusual physical defects are actually a plus, as they allow her to operate without pinging on facial recognition software and free from the threat of her body being hacked. In some ways, Company Town resembles When Gravity Fails, as its indictment of reliance on technology, explosive bursts of violence, class structure, and many-layered urban setting wouldn’t feel out of place alongside the Budayeen.

Koko Takes a Holiday, by Kieran Shea

Somewhere on the outer fringes of the genre, where cybernetics are cool, corporations are mustache-twirling villains, and violence is played for the blackest of comedy, lie Kieran Shea’s Koko novels. Koko Martstellar is a hedonistic corporate special operative-turned-saloon owner on the debauched pleasure world of the Sixty Islands. That is, until her best friend Portia her corporation send deranged, cybernetically enhanced bounty hunters to kill her on a trumped-up charge for reasons unclear to any of them. The story is as vivid, violent, and lurid as some of the best comics, B-flicks, and manga and anime (the opening bar fight definitely shares some DNA with Black Lagoon), using cyberpunk trappings and far-future setting to tell an insane, pulse-pounding crime story.

Exploded View, by Sam McPheeters

McPheeters’ second novel sets itself in the LA of the not-too-distant future, a place where the beleaguered and underfunded police department is powerless to stop petty crimes like indecent exposure and overtaxed by a constant flood of refugees and immigrants they protect as best they can. If that weren’t enough, LA is something of a surveillance state, with augmented reality watching your every move, which is, at least, a boon when it comes to catching the serious criminals, if not the petty ones. Add to this a sharp sense of dark humor, mysterious murders, and a entirely too believable depiction of cops trying to do their jobs while hampered by bureaucracy, and you have the makings of the science fiction version of The Wire we all knew we wanted but didn’t know how to ask for.

What’s your favorite cyberpunk novel not by William Gibson?