Thank you, my friend, I agree. Besides, most wiki articles on pop culture are written by fans and seldom fact checked beyond one or two sources. Philly's content does use genre tropes but is 100% original content and doesn't plagiarize any source. The only part on which I don't agree is that cyberpunk as a concept and genre existed well before 1984. That one by Gibson is new to me. The majority of my experience with science fiction comes from film rather than books. David Cronenberg's Videodrome, starring James Woods released in 1983 and Ridley Scott's infamous Blade Runner released in 1982. The concepts found in cyberpunk have been around since the 60's and 70's but as far as I can tell the first mention of the actual term cyberpunk is currently credited to Bruce Bethke who released a novel of the same title, "Cyberpunk" in 1982. I don't mean to argue, just curious as I had not previously heard of Neuromancer by William Gibson. I'm sure that we can all agree that our love of and fascination with cyberpunk is very much alive and well.
Again, I do not wish to argue, just enjoying this discussion on a subject that has fascinated me since I first saw Blade Runner back in 1982. I was a sophomore in high school that year. Blade Runner opened my eyes to a whole new world of sci-fi that extended far beyond the TV and films I had seen before taking me much deeper than Star Trek and Star Wars ever could and made a great deal more sense to me than Kubrick's Space Oddity (yes, I am indulging in parody here... I've enjoyed many of Kubrick's films but 2001 and the follow up 2010 just left me scratching my head, not because I did not understand the concepts, just didn't like the direction they went.) Anyway... Thanks for indulging this wonderful subject, my friends. Let us not quarrel over specifics but rather simply enjoy the complex and intriguing nature of our shared passion for this exceptional genre called cyberpunk.
Adventure ever on, Phat
No need to argue at all, as is often the case it's hard to decide when Cyberpunk really took off, parts of the settings and tropes had been around for a long time, a lot of it is also extrapolation of what had been shown in SF way before as you point out and fe. Blade Runner is definitely just as important for the genre as the novels are, and that in turn was inspired by the work of Jodorowsky and Moebius in the Graphic Novel format, especially Moebius art in "The Long Tomorrow."
Those two also inspired the descriptions of the cities in Gibson's novel.
Then you have fe., films like Rollerball and Soylent Green with their dystopian futures which are foreshadowing parts of the core concepts of Cyberpunk, as is every SF story that has a large megacorp in it which is more powerful than governments, or basically any story where we have some form of connection between the human mind and body and artificial, constructed elements like machines or computer.
All I know is that many credit Bethke with the coining of the term Cyberpunk in the short story of the same name, I never even knew a novel existed as well.
Bruce Sterling and William Gibson are at least seen as the two writers who popularized the genre, if not as the fathers of it in general.
In Neuromancer and his early short stories Gibson coined (in several cases) or at least introduced terms like
cyberspace,
net surfing,
ICE,
jacking in, and
neural implants to a wider audience.
Especially, his term Cyberspace become so popular that it was used as the unofficial name for the then emerging WWW.
I admit, and I mean no disrespect with that, I am a bit surprised that someone who likes the genre has never heard of Neuromancer, a novel which not only won the Nebula, Philip K. Dick and Hugo Award (which is about as big as SF novels can get), but is also widely recognized for revitalizing the SF genre in the 80s and making it literally relevant again.
I would absolutely advise you to seek the novel out, of course a lot of it will feel familiar, almost 40 years later, but if you like Cyberpunk, there should be plenty for you to enjoy in the book, and it's direct sequels.
The book really influenced my tastes and interests a lot, when I first read it, and I soaked up everything connected to it for years after.
In my opinion, Gibson is also one of the best writers in SF in terms of style and language.
