Bruce Bethke coined the phrase as a title for a 1983 short story. I always thought it was Bruce Sterling, but I looked it up...robojam wrote:For some reason William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' seems to get the credit for 'inventing' the concept, yet Blade Runner (and of course DADoES) predates it.whyterabbyt wrote:Dick was primarily preoccupied with the nature of both human identity and reality, and there was very little of what would normally be associated with Cyberpunk in DADoES. Maze of Death from '68 does include references to a virtual reality, though, the mechanism behind the shifts of reality the protagonists unknowingly experience.mikusan wrote:So did Philip K.Dick also invent cyberpunk? In 1968? I always knew he was a genius!!
Its not alone for addressing VR in that timeperiod; for example Ben Bova's "The Duellng Machine" detailed immersive VR in 1969.
Realistically it is probably something that has no point of origin and only the term has a point of origin.
The works of Dick have often been cited, yet if we look at it in terms of the use of future technology in media, I have heard a convincing argument that Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' is a forerunner of the concept.
I think the only thing we can really say with any certainty is where the term originated from.
There are plenty of SF precedents for the cyberpunk "movement" - Brunner's "Shockwave Rider", 1975 is a real good example.
Dick's hand-picked heir apparent K.W. Jeter wrote a very Dickian pre-movement cyberpunk novel "Dr. Adder" in 1972. It barely saw the light of day until a publisher horny for "cyberpunk" cachet re-published it in 1984. He went on to write two excellent, more mainstream SF sorta c-punk novels, "The Glass Hammer" and "Farewell Horizontal", seriously recommended. He now writes movie and TV tie-ins - and the "Blade Runner" sequels.
But, only in my very personal opinion, Dick is NOT the progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. Gibson's work always seemed more equal parts Chandler and Norbert Weiner. Dick's stuff seems to me to be much more nuanced, personal and (here I get into trouble) delicate. Speed-freak surrealism.
My favorite Dick novel is "A Scanner Darkly", which, depending on your mood could be major c-punk or closer to real literature. His most major work was "The Man in the High Castle", the perfection of the alternate history genre. Notice no one has dared take that on for a movie.
Cyberpunk was mainly used as a book marketing term and by naive young rock bands. Then there was "spatterpunk". And don't even get me started on "steampunk".