Quotes About Cyberpunk

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

The Rat Thing has them now," Hiro says.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

'Altered Carbon' is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there - a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.

I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.

The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.

Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. "Glitch systems," the voice said.

Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle

carbon ribbon. There were

El cielo sobre el puerto era del color de un canal desintonizado en la pantalla de una televisión.

Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there's been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don't they, Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of 'em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don't they, Lucas?

The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores;

Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.

He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay.

Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Arleigh's van smelled like long-chain monomers and warm electronics.

the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.

And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy's, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he'd been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would.

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.