PICK YOUR PUNK

IT all started when Greg Shaw used the term punk in the April 1971 issue of Rolling Stone. The movement may have been already building, but now it was a word, and as all writers know, words are power.

Less than 10 years later, Bruce Bethke introduced a new version of that word to the literary scene with his 1980 short story “Cyberpunk.” Said Bethke in the foreword to his story on the British website infinity plus, “In calling it that, I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. My reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember.”

History of the original literary punk

Most people think of the movie from 1982 as an early example of cyberpunk. In fact, the movie and the novel it was based on, by Philip K. Dick, was cyberpunk before anyone knew what cyberpunk was, including Dick himself, but it was the editor of another magazine, Gardner Dozois of (better known as ), who talked about it as a cultural term in the media. This made way for arguably the most famous cyberpunk novel, by William Gibson, in 1984.