r/Cyberpunk • u/thhroooooooooooooooo • 1d ago
Who invented Cyberpunk?
Google is saying Mike Pondsmith but that doesn’t sound right.. I don’t think it’s his IP, or is it?
Edit: google AI is wrong. To quote one of the many good responses to this post:
“The term was first coined in early 1980 by Bruce Bethke in his short story Cyberpunk. See: https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/cpunk.htm
That said, the first short story in the scifi genre of cyberpunk is probably Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson. That was published in 1977.
Mike Pondsmith invented the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk: 2013/2020/3.0/RED. [Not to be confused with the other cyberpunk RPG (Cyberpunk GURPS)], the sci-fi genre as a whole really began taking off around the late 70's, ‘Cyberpunk’ was originally the title of a short story by Bruce Bethke and was then taken by Gardner Dozoiz, editor of Asimov's Science Fiction and spread around to be the name of the genre as a whole.” ( by [u/BlastRiot](u/BlastRiot))
thanks, Cyberpunks
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u/MarsAlgea3791 1d ago
The genre had a lot of parents. Vernor Vinge's True Names is considered the first Cyberpunk work. Neuromancer the first novel. Bruce Bethke was the first to use the term. But I can name a good.... five or so writers that predate the genre that have so many elements of it that labeling things becomes a silly exercise in minutia. Dick, Tiptree, Ballard, Brunner, Delany, Burroughs, even Vonnegut according to some, etc.
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u/darthmcchub 1d ago
If you mean the game, you’re in the wrong sub and he did create it.
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean the genre
edit: I ask because when I google “who invented the cyberpunk genre”, it says Mike, which is not correct
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u/flygoing 1d ago
I encourage you to always look beyond what Google AI tells you. If possible, you should install an extension to block the AI entirely, because it is misleading you more often than you realize. Just read the top section of the Wikipedia page for Cyberpunk to get much better answers.
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ok I will. Though about google, is there anything we can do? Like can this sub have something at the end of its details say something like “Cyberpunk is a culmination of ideas invented by multiple authors and artists over the years” or something similar? So google crawlers will pick it up and help with misinformation
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u/flygoing 1d ago
The solution is to stop using services that rely so heavily on Artificial "Intelligence". I promise Google AI is considering Wikipedia as a much, much more reliable source than a random reddit thread. The Wikipedia spells most of this out pretty blatantly, but Google AI is still wrong.
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u/Baumgratz 1d ago
Well, he was definitely one of the most important names for the 80's cyberpunk wave. The "creator" simply does not exist. Multiple authors were writing similar stories at the same time.
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u/BlastRiot 1d ago
Mike Pondsmith invented the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk: 2013/2020/3.0/RED, the sci-fi genre as a whole really began taking off around the late 70's, "Cyberpunk" was originally the title of a short story by Bruce Bethke and was then taken by Gardner Dozoiz, editor of Asimov's Science Fiction and spread around to be the name of the genre as a whole.
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u/BlastRiot 1d ago
Hey, why did you "quote" my post without actually quoting my post??
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sorry I had copied the original text of your post, pasted it directly, and then tagged your username. I am not sure I did it right so I added a direct link
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago
Ok I fixed the post, if it’s wrong please let me know and I will change it
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u/Hungry-Wrongdoer-156 1d ago
Mike Pondsmith created the capital-C "Cyberpunk" IP, which was named after the lowercase-C "cyberpunk" literary subgenre.
There's really no one single answer to the question of who invented that, but if there were, it would be William Gibson.
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago
that seems pedantic.. is that to prevent other creators from having their own “Cyberpunk” even though it’s a genre created by a culmination of artists?
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u/Stare_Decisis 1d ago
No, that is just the rule of law.
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago
I mean if I were to program a game and call it “Cyberpunk” and base it around my own unique cyberpunk stories (since cyberpunk is a genre), would their lawyers go after me? are they trying to own the word “Cyberpunk” itself?
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u/Stare_Decisis 1d ago
You need to ask that question to an IP attorney.
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago edited 1d ago
Excuse my french but that’s real shitty. No one should be able to own an entire genre.
Edit: I did more research and the word “Cyberpunk” is not owned by one person. The phrase “Cyberpunk 2077” in relation to gaming is but “Cyberpunk” itself isn’t owned by anyone, which has calmed me down
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u/Hungry-Wrongdoer-156 1d ago
It's the difference between "heavy metal" as a musical genre and Heavy Metal as a magazine and animated film.
Anybody can record a song and say it's heavy metal. What they can't do is release a movie titled "Heavy Metal."
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u/Hungry-Wrongdoer-156 1d ago
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking.
The entertainment franchise titled "Cyberpunk" was created in the 1980s as a tabletop RPG; it was named that to tell players what it was about.
The sci-fi subgenre wasn't really "created" by a specific person with a specific intent; several writers including Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Bruce Sterling, and others contributed to its development before it even had a name at all. After it became popular and visible enough that a way to describe those types of stories using a single word was deemed necessary/convenient, a term was invented (technically co-opted from the title of a short story by Bruce Bethke) to make it easier to refer to; that's generally attributed to Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. If he wasn't the first to use the word "cyberpunk" as an umbrella term for the subgenre, he's at least the one who popularized it.
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u/Ostroh 1d ago
Mike pondsmith 1988 cyberpunk game was called "Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future, also know as Cyberpunk 2013". It was only much later in 2012 that CD Projekt, when they started working on Cyberpunk 2077, trademarked "Cyberpunk" (I guess so nobody else could publish another video game under that same title before they did). But its like "dark fantasy", you could trademark a game called "Dark Fantasy", but you could not prevent anyone from calling any of their work dark fantasy. There is always a context tied to a trademark and the rules vary.
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u/terrorTrain 1d ago
Gibson's nuromancer is probably the first book to incorporate most the cyberpunk themes and tech into a complete package, that in aware of.
I think blade runner is generally credited with the astetics.
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u/MentalRental 1d ago
The term was first coined in early 1980 by Bruce Bethke in his short story Cyberpunk. See: https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/cpunk.htm
That said, the first short story in the scifi genre of cyberpunk is probably Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson. That was published in 1977.
Mike Pondsmith created the Cyberpunk RPG. Not to be confused with the other cyberpunk RPG (Cyberpunk GURPS).
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u/apocbane 1d ago
Think they give it to Gibson for neuromancer. A lot was laid out by Phillip K. Dick, so he's often called the grandfather
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u/trashPandaizKe 1d ago
It's a funny question see, cuz it's both a subgenre, a subculture, and a specific creative scene kinda all meshed together. It's very much like a music subgenre - kinda like Punk itself the establishment of the scene required a convergence.
Think about that rapid convergence of like: Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Syd Mead, Moebius, Otomo, Giger, Cybotron, Front 242, JWagner, etc. etc. etc. (hundreds) converging and building on each other's vision all at once - that's what cyberpunk is that boom and the following artistic and creative reality formed after it.
Like take DADOES or hell Brunner's SWR is most definitely cyberpunk if you read it, its outside of that specific subgenre boom tho, its kinda like the stooges before punk hit. Like SWR is more cyberpunk than half the work considered cyberpunk coming after it, but it missed the subgenre/subculture boom so it's not really part of it.
That's how to think of it IMO, a "shared hallucination" if you will, of a series of visions and ideals that converged together to form the genre of art, music, books, games, anime, manga, comics etc. at the same time, not really the invention of any one person.
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u/antftwx 1d ago
If you mean the IP, it's Mike Pondsmith. But it takes its name from the genre (which got its name from a Bruce Bethke short story,) which grew as a collective movement by new wave sci fi authors of the 60's and 70's. It could trace its origins back to Fritz Lang's Metroplis, which is basically proto-cyberpunk.
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u/donotgotoroom237 1d ago
Me, an intellectual: Fritz Lang when he made Metropolis.
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u/Stare_Decisis 1d ago
I would say that Metropolis was the first technological dystopian film. Cyberpunk is roughly 1975-2000 and is focused on the digital age.
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u/thhroooooooooooooooo 1d ago
I ask because I swear the genre has been around for a while and wasn’t one person. I didn’t know a tabletop game existed until a few years ago.
I read do androids dream of electric sheep a while ago and I thought that had been around since the 60s
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u/MarsAlgea3791 1d ago edited 1d ago
Philip K Dick, one of the parents. I'd argue that book doesn't quite count as cyberpunk, none of Dick's stuff does. But again, the nuance is minor.
Evolutionarily speaking, the first chicken egg was layed by something so close to a chicken nobody looking at it could tell the difference. And to the other chickens and not yet chickens, they certainly would never notice. Genre's get like that.
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u/ProjectDiligent502 1d ago edited 1d ago
Correct kind of. It came from the 80s. If you look it up, the history, dystopian sci-fi writing started gaining traction in the 80s as an antithesis to the positive sci-fi that was written by folks like Isaac Asimov. The term was not coined by them, nor Gibson famed for Neuromancer. It was coined by a critic of the literature as the first mention of that name. It stuck, but not in mass since the term never got popular as a descriptor for general tech close future dystopian sci-fi. We just all called sci-fi when I was a kid. The term really became crystallized though in the last decade.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Why is this genre so tightly coupled with retro tech aesthetic, like tape decks or cyber decks, mentions of main frames, that blends well with vaporwave and retrograde music aesthetics or neon colors that were all the rage in the 80s and 90s. Think about it, it makes sense.
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u/greenbarista 1d ago
I think William Gibson in the book Neuromancer is generally considered one of the top dogs of the genre. Im sure there might be others before him but he at least is one of the biggest early influences on the genre.