Is Cyberpunk dead? What is this post-cyberpunk then?

Well it just goes to show you should do you research into genres - or so I found out.


It's hard, particularly for myself, to go too deep into genres because I find the more genres there are, the more formulaic the writing becomes and the more, well, generic everything becomes. However, other times you start to write a novel, call it cyberpunk and then find out it's something different. A 'Doh!' moment.

This is unfortunately what's happened to me. So the novel I'm working on turns out to be something known as biopunk. This doesn't really change anything for me, well, except maybe my marketing plan. The thing that really rubs is that I've made myself look a layman.

So as it turns out, biopunk is a derivative of another sub-genre called post-cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a post-modernist take on SF and post-cyberpunk is the result of writers who grew up reading William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and others. So rather than being a major change, post-cyberpunk is more of an organic progression that has spread out creating derivatives like biopunk, steampunk, clockpunk and dieselpunk.

So what does that mean to us as writers? Well not much. Write what you want to write, research the market your book will fit into, don't just try and write specifically to fit in a genre. Just make sure you know what it is, so you don't look ignorant like I did. 8' (