The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture collects original entries that engage cyberpunk’s diverse ‘angles’ and its proliferation in our life worlds. The Companion traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary sf subgenre to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion also provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, so the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, or empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking as much as differentiating our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world. 

© Routledge, 2020

This collection follows contemporary research trends by re-placing cyberpunk within the history of the genre, but also charting the ways in which the idea of cyberpunk moved across media and into cultural practice more generally.

Reviewer 2 (anonymous)

If Ellison ever read a book like this one, he’d react in fizzing proletarian rage and urge me to sue everybody involved, but he’d also grumble: “Well, maybe it’s not too bad for some hopelessly non-Jewish Texan kid who doesn’t even write for  television.” I sort of enjoy it when academics really get into the trenches with 1980s cyberpunk novels, like: “Hmm, this drug-addled dystopian rock star from a John Shirley novel seems to lack coping skills and also makes poor life-choices.” There’s something endearing about it.

Bruce Sterling on Twitter, Cyberpunk Legend

Table of Contents

I: Cultural Texts

  1. Cyberpunk as Cultural Formation
    Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink

I: Cultural Texts

  1. Literary Precursors
    Rob Latham
  2. The Mirrorshades Collective
    Graham J. Murphy
  3. Bruce Sterling: Schismatrix Plus (Case Study)
    Maria Goicoechea
  4. Feminist Cyberpunk
    Lisa Yaszek 
  5. Pat Cadigan: Synners (Case Study)
    Ritch Calvin
  6. Post-Cyberpunk
    Christopher D. Kilgore
  7. Charles Stross: Accelerando (Case Study)
    Gerry Canavan
  8. Steampunk
    Jess Nevins
  9. Biopunk
    Lars Schmeink
  10. Non-SF Cyberpunk
    Jaak Tomberg
  11. Comic Books
    David M Higgins / Matthew Iung
  12. American Flagg! (Case Study)
    Corey K. Creekmur
  13. Manga
    Shige (CJ) Suzuki
  14. Early Cyberpunk Film
    Andrew M. Butler
  15. Strange Days (Case Study)
    Anna McFarlane
  16. Digital Effects in Cinema
    Lars Schmeink
  17. Blade Runner 2049 (Case Study)
    Matthew Flisfeder
  18. Anime
    Kumiko Saito
  19. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (Case Study)
    Martin de la Iglesia and Lars Schmeink
  20. Television
    Sherryl Vint
  21. Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes into the Future (Case Study)
    Scott Rogers
  22. Video Games
    Pawel Frelik
  23. Deus Ex (Case Study)
    Christian Knöppler
  24. Tabletop Role-Playing Games
    Curtis Carbonell
  25.  Shadowrun (Case Study)
    Hamish Cameron
  26. Photography and Digital Art
    Grace Halden
  27. Fashion
    Stina Attebery
  28. Music
    Nicholas C. Laudadio
  29. Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer (Case Study)
    Christine Capetola

II: Cultural Theory

  1. Simulation and Simulacra
    Rebecca Haar and Anna McFarlane
  2. Gothicism
    Anya Heise-von der Lippe
  3. Posthumanism(s)
    Julia Grillmayr
  4. Marxism
    Hugh Charles O’Connell
  5. Cyborg Feminism
    Patricia Melzer
  6. Queer Theory
    Wendy Gay Pearson
  7. Critical Race Theory
    Isiah Lavender III
  8. Animality
    Seán McCorry
  9. Ecology in the Anthropocene
    Veronica Hollinger
  10. Empire
    John Rieder
  11. Indigenous Futurisms
    Corinna Lenhardt
  12. Afrofuturism
    Isiah Lavender III and Graham J. Murphy
  13. Veillance Society
    Chris Hables Gray
  14. Activism
    Colin Milburn

III: Cultural Locales

  1. Latin America
    M. Elizabeth Ginway
  2. Cuba’s Cyberpunk Histories
    Juan C. Toledano Redondo
  3. Japan as Cyberpunk Exoticism
    Brian Ruh
  4. India
    Suparno Banerjee
  5. Germany
    Evan Torner
  6. France and Québéc
    Amy J. Ransom