So You Want To / Write a Cyberpunk Story

So you've decided to write a Cyberpunk story. You love to read about man's fight against injustice from MegaCorp firms' invasive and oppressive technology and corruption, and societal decay amidst advanced technological innovations, so you've decided to give your interpretation of it. You know that cyberpunk is about way more than just a mashup of Tokyo and film noir aesthetics; it's got to be about political or philosophical issues, too.

First, be sure to check out Write a Story for basic advice that holds across all genres, with fleshed out characters with compelling motivation and some clear stakes. Then, come back here for some extra advice.

All examples here are, well, examples. Do not try to wrap your head around a story using all of the examples.

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Necessary Tropes

The very nature of the genre dictates that your material will fall under any of these tropes. Learn to use them well. See also Cyberpunk Tropes for additional tropes.

• Bittersweet Ending: Usually, a cyberpunk story, with its dark and depressing themes, usually doesn't have an ending where the hero wins and lives happily ever after. Or maybe he does win, but something is left awry. In Blade Runner, Deckard gets the girl and defeats the "villain" but has to run for his life. There are a few exceptions to this, but not many.
• Darker and Edgier: Use with moderation and realism in mind. Oversaturating the corruption and vice can make a story look cheesy or filled with more drama or worse than the audience can handle.
• Dystopia: A cyberpunk setting is usually a gritty, depressing world with crime and despair running rampant. It's not a nice place to live.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: A cyberpunk world is usually so messed up that it's almost impossible to change it for the better. However, if changing things for the better IS possible, then it will usually either be achieved at a high cost or require a lot of time, hard work and determination to get there.
• Extreme Speculative Stratification; your futuristic cyberpunk city should have extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty. In the shadows of a gleaming executive tower for a MegaCorp, where executives fly from rooftop helipads in AI-piloted Cool Ship copters, homeless people should scrounge for broken electronics waste in an Abandoned Area and sell their organs to Black Market brokers.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: Not surprising, considering that cyberpunk was quite influenced by the Film Noir style. Most cyberpunk stories tend to have anti-heroes as their protagonists or anti-villains as their antagonists. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this, like Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), for example. Black-and-Gray Morality is also a viable alternative.
• Rule of Cool: Style is everything. If the hero can't do it with panache, it's not worth doing (Unless it is). Use in extreme moderation.
• Science Is Bad: To a certain degree. The negative effects of technology feature heavily in cyberpunk fiction, but it is often not technology itself that is explored, but rather the possibilities for abuse. Of course, if you also want to explore technology's benefits, then go ahead, but like we said, don't forget to explore its negative side-effects as well. It's necessary — one of cyberpunk's recurring themes is about how technology won't solve our problems or change human nature for the better.
• Sliding Scale of Cynicism Versus Idealism: Mostly cynical or at least Earn Your Happy Ending. Cyberpunk stories tend to be set in a dark horrible world filled with injustice and crime. Bullets are a way to solve problems where hackers fail, and people, good and bad, if those terms are applicable, tend to die painfully.

Choices, Choices

These tropes cover a wide spectrum of choices regarding a certain element of your story, and you're going to have to pick a spot somewhere on that spectrum. Unless we've forgotten to include something, and you can spot it, because in that case you might actually surprise us after all.

• Police State vs. Anarchy: Is the government an all-powerful organization that enforces the law through Private Military Contractors, Secret Police and Sinister Surveillance, or is the lack of government and control that leads to a MegaCorp dominating and creating a Crapsack World?
• Scientist vs. Soldier, especially The Gunslinger vs. Playful Hacker: Your protagonist is going to have to solve their problems one way or another, it's not going to be easy. Does he or she solve her problems through the careful (or not so careful) application of projectiles, or are they solved through the use of viruses, trojans, denial-of-service attacks and forced intrusion?
• The Alternet: Is the net like the real world with webpages and other such things, or is some variety of Cyberspace the norm?
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: How do people who have cybernetic implants act? Do they run around and kill everyone because their implants makes them go crazy, or are they perfectly well adjusted beings?
• Do Androids Dream?: If your story centers around the existence of Artificial Humans, how are they treated? Are they on par with humans, or are they treated as slaves? What makes it possible to discern an android or an AI from a human? Do android have emotions, desires, feelings?
• The Singularity: Want a big finale and/or an over-arching theme to tie together the actions of the characters? It's also a natural extension of the Cyberpunk theme of disorienting rapid cultural and technological change. A technological singularity has featured in the works of the greats. Of course this last point might be a reason to avoid it, too.
• Cyberpunk vs Post Cyber Punk: Is technology a tool of dystopian oppression or something that allows the people to fix problems?
• Working-Class Hero: A good consideration for cyberpunk stories since this character archetype fits in the stories showing Capitalism Is Bad. Generally a Farm Boy in most portrayals, but in science fiction works like this, scientists like Science Hero Gadgeteer Genius are quite a viable choice, as long as this character opposes the plutocracy of the upper-class people.

Pitfalls

Watch out for these tropes! They're bad news - or, well, at least they're tropes you generally want to avoid - and they're particularly common in your chosen genre.

• Cluster F-Bomb: People swear, it happens. However, having characters constantly swear will not make them look cool or gritty.
• Recycled Script: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?-type plots have been done millions of times before (Bubblegum Crisis, Armitage III, Blade Runner...). This is not to say it can't be done again, but you should make sure you story is not a cliché Blade Runner knockoff. If your trenchcoat-clad hero fights runaway robots and doubts his own humanity... you'd better be a damn fine writer, son!
• Summer Blockbuster: Consider this: In the entirety of Blade Runner, only about a dozen shots were fired. Not all Cyberpunk stories are (or need to be) Action-Adventure tales, but the best examples balance exciting action with deeper themes. Try to find the right balance for your story, and check out Write an Action Movie for more help on writing the action genre.
• Tomato in the Mirror: People who are interested in cyberpunk are usually not the least Genre Savvy in the world, and will usually spot this from miles away. That is not to say it can be done, but your readers will expect your main character to be an Artificial Human, or at least a clone even before they've read the first paragraph. Surprise them.

Potential Subversions

These tropes are in common use throughout the genre, so we'll forgive you if you use them - but if you can think of a good way to subvert, invert, or just plain avert them, then you just might be able to start a new trend....

• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: Remember that not all cyberpunk stories has authority as the enemy. Sometimes the police, or even the Secret Police, or even a Reasonable Authority Figure, are the heroes tasked with cleaning up the mess of the anarchists and hackers and criminals make. Blade Runner, Snatcher, Judge Dredd and Ghost in the Shell were all about government-employed heroes fighting off the Designated Villain.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: These are usually Big Bads, because of their access to money, secret research labs and mercenaries, but do they have to be? Maybe they're perfectly ordinary people, or even heroes? Surprise your readers if possible.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: This was less of a problem before people had cybernetics ^note Yes, we do have these. Artificial Limbs, pacemakers, bionic ear implants, bionic hearts, etc. Nowadays, we know that any implants short of rewiring your brains doesn't cause personality damage. While it can still be used to emphasize transhumanism or the loss of one's autonomy to a capitalist system, beware its ableist connotations or the temptation to allegorize cybernetics with scientific racism.
• Mad Scientist: As with above examples, not all scientists, even in cyberpunk stories, are portrayed as morally-insane people (Playful Hacker is one of the more-benign Mad Scientists). There might be more-positive alternatives like Reluctant Mad Scientist or even The Professor Science Hero to contrast them.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: You can try setting cyberpunk in the present day (like this) or maybe the distant Bad Future with humanity having long since abandoned a ruined Earth. Steampunk is partially a result of setting the concepts before cyber was a word. Also consider creating a Retro Universe where things have diverged from our regular timeline, for an alternate version of our own world. While '80s Cassette Futurism-inspired worlds are very popular, how about cyberpunk inspired by Y2K or histories around the world?
  • Over the Runet such things are sarcastically labelled as "Cyberpunk that we deserved", especially as the occasions turn from grim to idiotic.

Writers' Lounge

Blog

What is Cyberpunk by the author of the The United Federation of Charles is a good explanation as to what the "mood" and major tropes of the genre are.

Suggested Themes and Aesops

• What makes us human? Feeling, understanding, comprehension, self-awareness, etc.
• How do people treat non-Homo Sapiens Sapiens? Fantastic Racism, treatment of robots, androids, clones, etc.
• What is reality?
• Gnosticism: Themes and questions of the nature of what makes a human are nigh-omnipresent as humans gradually become walking Ships of Theseus through cybernetic augmentation.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Is human individuality superior to advanced tech, or is it the opposite?
• Individualism vs. Collectivism: Should the rights of the individual be compromised for the better of the group?
• Authoritarianism vs. Liberalism: Should people be seen by CCTV cameras at all times, have their phone lines tapped and their daily lives monitored for safety, or should they have privacy, even if that interferes with police work?
• Transhumanism vs. Human Conservatism: Should people be allowed to augment themselves, or will that bring about social downfall?
• Bread and Circuses: The potential for human apathy and hedonism as key to the success of evil.

Potential Motifs

• Anything goes, but especially ancient literature and art. The Birth of Venus goes extremely well together with People Jars, and images of gods and the divine fit extremely well with the creation of artificial lifeforms.
• Film Noir themes usually go well with cyberpunk too, since cyberpunk was quite inspired by it.

Suggested Plots

• A Benevolent Alien Invasion landed in a Dystopian nations where Humans Are the Real Monsters.
• A Red Scare story set in Bad Future if you want to get political. Since some cyberpunk stories advocate Capitalism Is Bad contrary to what Red Scare does, try to write in certain conflicts such as class struggles. Explore the contrast between the chaotic, dingy, drug-addled and murderous corporate hell that is a typical cyberpunk society and the squeaky clean, spit-and-polish governmental panopticon on the other side of the Iron Curtain (Or Fascist/Religious Extremist Curtain, as a hallmark of Communism is extreme drug use that outpaces Capitalist countries). They are both authoritarian, make no mistakes, and none of them are good. But which is a better place to live? The commies may have bread lines, but they also have actual bread and not synthisoybread... except when The Bread is a Lie or cooked with typically communist substandard ingredients, such as unfiltered cooking oil pulled from the sewers.
• For a change of pace, consider letting your antiheroes leave the Big Noir City for a while and see what is outside. This will allow you to dip your story into other genres like After the End or Dieselpunk. If all the money is in Big Noir City and all the food for Big Noir City comes from corporate soy farm/factories, the rest of the world is economically on its own. Explore the societies that could arise there: neoprimitives, neofeudalists or solid small communities that live on scraps left over from megacorps and macgyver their own low tech machines from junk.
• Another spin on that "what is beyond Big City Noir" question is the highway setting. Imagine driverless eighteen wheelers that haul cargo between corporate strongholds such as factories, data centers or power plants that tower over the forgotten countryside like medieval castles over peasant fields. Imagine "utinni" raiders that waylay these robotrucks with crude EMP devices to steal the cargo, and small fleets of kill drones that protect freights from these scavengers. Add local traffic between smaller and poorer communities, in the form of old timey human piloted trucks, always with someone riding shotgun and wielding an actual shotgun, and armed hitchhikers earnin their buck as freight guards. Characters who are on the run from Big Bad Inc, and wanted in Big City Noir may find refuge on the road.
• A Shiny New Australia (and perhaps New Zealand) where unfettered capitalism still exist in the dystopian future. The Australian Wildlife are under corporate threat, and Australian Aborigines still face racial prejudice and still under slavery by the Sociopathic Soldiers in favor of One Nation Under Copyright run by Peace & Love Incorporated.
• What about using cryptocurrency as a driving force for Techno Dystopia and Corporate Warfare? What about a pack of self-admitted dumbasses holding on rapidly inflating stocks of a chain Game Store while singing sea shanties in a game of Stock Market Chicken until billionaires are having a nervous breakdown from the economic damage being done?
• A Sympathetic P.O.V. about the MegaCorp and its members (e.g. the CEO, the PR guy, the financial wizard, etc.). Said members needn't be portrayed as utter saints or dicks, just to keep up with the cynical cyberpunk theme. How did the company become this big and powerful? Is the MegaCorp as "all-powerful" as it projects itself to be? What about the corporate rat race? Do megacorp employees even have time to contemplate their morality when they're looking over their shoulders for rival employees?

Departments

Set Designer / Location Scout

• Cities. Big, dark cities. Loads of neon lights and dull surfaces. Glass, urbanism, downtrodden undergrounds and shady pubs. Small apartments. Everywhere looks like central Tokyo. Maybe a space station or an abandoned genetic factory.

Props Department

• Weapons. BFGs. Katanas. Go for cool as much as practical.

Costume Designer

• Trenchcoats, mirrorshades, leather jackets, and the alike. Everything is in black or other dull colours, with small amounts of bright colours for emphasis, especially neon-green, neon-blue, neon-red, fluorescent orange and neon-purple. Could your hacker wear a tool belt with electronics accessories?
• What about figures of authority and privilege? Should your corpos wear old-fashioned suits to match their greed, or godly robes to symbolize their disconnect from humanity? Are the cops dressed more like Deckard, or Judge Dredd? It all depends on how human, or inhuman, you want them to be.

Casting Director

• Femmes Fatales, Private Investigator, Corrupt Corporate Executive, and other Film Noir types.
• Androids, Transhumans, Super Soldiers, aliens and other Science Fiction types.

Stunt Department

• Fight scenes, though you can get away without them. For flashy action scenes, look for action inspired by Hong Kong Gun Fu flicks or over the top anime stunts. If it's more subdued, quick and brutal gunfights or Film Noir tension can do a lot with very little.

Extra Credit

Big Hits or Classics

• Blade Runner (Also check out its progenitor: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.): Ironically lacks most of the features, but the Trope Codifier in terms of scenery and neo-noir atmosphere.
  • Blade Runner 2049: With stunning cinematography and compelling explorations into human desire, Blade Runner's Actionized Sequel became a Cult Classic.
• Neuromancer: The other trope codifier, that masterfully defined the genre's slang, aesthetics, and tone.
• The Stars My Destination: The Ur-Example of Cyberpunk before there was Cyberpunk. The Mirrorshade Writers were all pretty much inspired by Bester's stories and, according to Michael Swanwick, the genre basically started as a response to the New Wave movement Bester was a part of.
• Ghost in the Shell: One of the classic examples and Trope Makers of the genre... except that strictly speaking, it's a defining title of post-cyberpunk.^note A rule of thumb: if your hero is on their own, it's a good ol' straight cyberpunk. If they work for the Man, it's generally post-cyberpunk.
• Bubblegum Crisis: A defining example and trope codifier for the whole anime industry. Drawing on the classics (even then) like Blade Runner and adding a counter-culture note from the likes of Streets of Fire and a jumpy hard-rock soundrack, it sets the example to most of the followers like one above (except it replaces lively glam rock with a droning ambient).
• Battle Angel Alita: Another Long Runner classic, the story still continues, exploring a lot of abovementioned themes to the point that Once Original, Now Common — which it tries to fight with introduction of High Concepts like cyborg martial arts tournaments and switching to a Political Thriller genre.
  • Alita: Battle Angel: A (very partial) Creator-Preferred Adaptation of the above, which failed to become a box office hit but got a very vocal and dedicated following, becoming a Cult Classic straight on the release.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Adaptation and Sequel in Another Medium of the Tabletop RPG Cyberpunk. A good starting point for beginners to the genre, combining almost every cyberpunk trope with a more modern introspection on the genre's legacy.
  • Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: The anime Spin-Off provides a quick and flashy distillation of the genre's bright yet nihilistic ethos that resonated strongly with audiences.
• Deus Ex: A Conspiracy Kitchen Sink in a cyberpunk setting.
• Snow Crash: Both a send-up as well as a straight example of the genre.
• A Clockwork Orange for a Pre-Cyberpunk movie/book about society run amuck.
• Transmetropolitan: Intrepid reporter exploring the in's and out's of a future world gone mad.
• The Matrix: While straying from its cyberpunk roots, it brings up numerous interesting cyberpunk themes, and brought anime and Gun Fu-inspired action to the mainstream.
• Isaac Asimov's robot series, for additional reading on robot behavior. However, they predate when Cyberpunk was established as a genre and are more idealistic.
• A Scanner Darkly, a very dark book/movie on people and the negative effects of drug use and ubiquitous surveillance.
• Inception, a much more subtle take on cyberpunk. Compare to Neuromancer, contrast with The Matrix.
• Videodrome and eXistenZ: Combining the Cyberpunk with heavy doses of Bio Punk, these films question the Science Is Bad assumptions common to the genre, the fear of mass culture, and the very nature of ideology.
• Takeshi Kovacs by Richard K. Morgan for a far future example of the genre.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Sequel to The Terminator. What it lacks in neon-drenched streets or android detectives, it makes up for in fascinating discussions on being outcast from society, artificial intelligence, and short-sighted corporate greed leading to humanity's doom.
• TRON: Visually defined Cyber Space to the public, and shows an oppressive digital world with art direction by the legendary Syd Mead.
• RoboCop (1987) combines a Cyberpunk setting with action, satire, and Black Comedy.

Critical Flops

• Johnny Mnemonic: The Movie has a lot of Narm Charm but plot holes large enough to drive a truck through. Read the short story from Burning Chrome instead for a quick and well-executed taste of the genre.
• New Rose Hotel: The Movie is a subdued version of Gibson's story but with many good points.
• I, Robot: The Movie is notable for being an In Name Only adaptation of Isaac Asimov's work and a Cliché Storm of Cyberpunk stories.

Proceed with Caution

• Detroit: Become Human: Fantastic performances and character chemistry haven't stopped audiences from noting its haphazard appropriation of bigotry and racism actually undermines its desired message.

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