In my mind, the “Big Three” cyberpunk novels are Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Altered Carbon. If someone is new to the genre and asks what they need to read, these are the three I recommend. But I realized the other day that each book also comes from a different decade.
1980s: Neuromancer
1990s: Snow Crash
2000s: Altered Carbon
This got me thinking about what defining cyberpunk work I would pick for the 2010s. And… I’m not sure. I think the best-selling book from the 2010s that would be considered cyberpunk is probably Ready Player One. I don’t think the book aged well, but it sold like crazy at the time. On Amazon, it has almost 150k reviews.
But ignoring books, what would be the defining cyberpunk movie from each decade?
1980s: Blade Runner
1990s: Ghost in the Shell? The Matrix?
2000s: ???
2010s: ???
What do you think? What would you say defined cyberpunk in the 2010s?
Ready player one as symbolic of the ethos of nostalgia fart-huffing and monopolistic capitalist cash-ins of the 2010s is more like living in a cyberpunk nightmare than defining a genre, but fuck it.