In my mind, the “Big Three” cyberpunk novels are Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Altered Carbon. If someone is new to the genre and asks what they need to read, these are the three I recommend. But I realized the other day that each book also comes from a different decade.
1980s: Neuromancer
1990s: Snow Crash
2000s: Altered Carbon
This got me thinking about what defining cyberpunk work I would pick for the 2010s. And… I’m not sure. I think the best-selling book from the 2010s that would be considered cyberpunk is probably Ready Player One. I don’t think the book aged well, but it sold like crazy at the time. On Amazon, it has almost 150k reviews.
But ignoring books, what would be the defining cyberpunk movie from each decade?
1980s: Blade Runner
1990s: Ghost in the Shell? The Matrix?
2000s: ???
2010s: ???
What do you think? What would you say defined cyberpunk in the 2010s?
Ready player one as symbolic of the ethos of nostalgia fart-huffing and monopolistic capitalist cash-ins of the 2010s is more like living in a cyberpunk nightmare than defining a genre, but fuck it.
For novels
1960s: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 1970s: A Scanner Darkly
I’d argue that without PKD we wouldn’t have Neuromancer or Snow Crash.
I’m also having a hard time with the 2010s though. I wouldn’t nominate Ready Player One because it was just so awful.
Not sure it fits exactly but Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Especially the Ultras.
2000’s but I agree that Altered Carbon is a better fit for the same time period
2049 for 2010s
Oh, good call!
Find which one of the amazing movies in the best in the 80’s and 90’s, is much different that trying to find a cyberpunk movie good enough in the 00’s and later. the 80’s and 90’s were both pretty stacked, and the decades afterwards just kinda exist.
In the '00’s, we had what, Redline? Minority report? Some sequels of movies from the 80’s and 90’s?
In the 10’s we had, Hotel Artemis? Anon?Totally agree. When looking at the 80s and 90s it’s just trying to narrow down from the list of amazing cyberpunk movies that came out at the time. But by the 00s and 10s it’s more of “this movie was cyberpunk, but was it good?” and “this movie was good, but was it cyberpunk?”
The Matrix trilogy ended in 2003, so maybe that could be 2000s? idk, it’s hard to bucket influence by decade, but interesting to think about 👍
