So You Want To/Write a Cyber Punk Story

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
How-To Guide


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So you've decided to write a cyberpunk story. You love to read about man's fight against injustice, invasive technology and corruption, so you've decided to give your interpretation of it.

First, be sure to check out Write a Story for basic advice that holds across all genres. 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.

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.

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 SWAT teams, Secret Police and Sinister Surveillance, or is the lack of government and control that leads to the state of the world?
  • 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?
  • Hard Sci-Fi vs. Cyberspace: Is everything in your world explained through plausible technology, or are you writing this on a typewriter?
  • 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?

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.

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....

Writers' Lounge

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?
  • What is consciousness? What is sentience? How does one detect either? What rights does either confer on the being that has it? Should we use artificial neural nets and deep learning?
  • 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?
  • The individual vs. the corporation vs. the State
  • Order Versus Chaos: is order the same thing as peace and law, or is order a want invented by war and corrupt fascists?
  • Futility vs. Cautious Optimism
  • What is the effect of the boss' and HR's use of the computer, in particular operations research and process management techniques and project management techniques? Has the cybernetic takeover already happened and turned the boss into a figurehead for his computer? Does technology make work more menial and life more boring?
  • Great Man theory of history versus Big History; the individual versus impersonal forces
  • Left wing politics versus the Cold War being long gone
  • Gaia's Lament, technological and social innovation
  • Survivalism vs. the end of the world eg. is a guy on the internet forum that has five boxes of canned mushrooms, fifty cans of peas, a chain-lock and puts a knife on the end of the stick that he found in the park going too far, or not far enough?
  • Use of advanced technology by those in abject poverty eg. budget cell phones in Somalia (the telecom industry of which boomed since Barre fell and while there was no longer any functioning State, by the way)
  • What relationship does technology have with creativity and expression? Eg, should singers with record deals use pitch correction, also known as auto-tune? Should we use a store-bought, copyrighted, official music CD with an electric violin with lots of other electro-phones, or should we use the Youtube song cover an unknown, but clearly proficient singer made using a cheap webcam, a banjo and the help of her friend on the acoustic violin? Should we rock out to Rage Against the Machine, Krio de Morto, or Othernoises? Should we go to an un-amplified classical violin session in person, or should we stay home and watch X-Factor on cable? If we want to go to an un-amplified classical violin session, should we ask Cortana to suggest one, or should we bicycle to the town square and look for posters, and will the content of the violin session be affected by this choice? What's the relationship between the medium and the message? Does the meaning of the Fox News reporter's outburst during the Katrina disaster change when copied from TV to Youtube? Does Beware the Batman have an evil version of Anarky and the comic books have both "good" and "evil" versions of Anarky because BtB is a television show, the comic books aren't and television inherently values order more that comic books, or because of who the writers are?
  • Machine readable language vs. natural language
  • COBOL, FORTRAN, C/C++/Microsoft Visual C# vs. Haskell, Gallina, Erlang, Eiffel and RavenSPARK
  • MS Windows and MacOS versus Linux and GNU Hurd
  • What is efficiency? What is efficient? Is conformity, incumbency and institutionalization efficient, or is logic and simplicity efficient?
  • Should we avoid buying integrated circuit containing products to delay the dangers of nanotech?
  • Does technology imply belligerence?

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.

Suggested Plots

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. How expensive the weapon is depends on how heavily armed the character can realistically be expected to be. At the cheap end of the scale are household goods used as improvised weapons, such as a chair or a pocketknife. A bit more material gain means melee weapons commonly used in gang warfare, such as a chain-lock or a baseball bat. More money can buy firearms used in gang activities, such as a pistol chambered in .22 Long Rifle, a starter pistol modified into a weapon, a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun or even a Claridge Tec-9 modified for automatic fire. A professional army would carry automatic rifles and light weapons, such as the M-16A2 or the AKM. The best equipped in cyberpunk would have fighting vehicles, such as tanks, ships, and drones. If you want to get really stylish, there are katanas. If you want eccentricity, there is the broom-handle with a kitchen knife on it and a homemade lo-jack hidden inside. Go for cool as much as practical.
  • Surveillance and counter-surveillance equipment.
  • Computers and data storage media, such as a CD-R or a flash drive.
  • Cell phones. Not recommended for rebels, because cell phones are totally insecure. Those turning the cell phone into a roving bug don't even have to get close to it, they can do it remotely.
  • Electronic locks and the means to defeat them.
  • A token rudimentary, important item to throw that advanced stuff into sharp relief, such as smuggling data on paper past metal detectors.

Costume Designer

  • Trenchcoats, sunglasses, 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.

Casting Director


Stunt Department

  • Fight scenes, though you can get away without them.

Extra Credit

  • The Matrix: While straying from its cyberpunk roots, it brings up numerous interesting cyberpunk themes if you can spot them.
  • Isaac Asimov's robot series, for additional reading on robot behavior.
  • 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.

The Greats

The Epic Fails

  1. ↑ Yes, we do. Artificial Limbs, pacemakers, bionic ear implants, bionic hearts, etc
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