You might never have heard of Molly Millions, the street-samurai heroine of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but in a way, you’re living in her era.

If you have not, you are a savage and an infidel and deserve the future that's handed to you. But c'mon. Bit of a reach here. take it away, author:

In cyberpunk, the Cold War never ended; it just got higher tech.

THANK YOU. Bruce Sterling pointed out that Neuromancer was seminal because it was the first sci fi novel since Hiroshima that wasn't either space opera or post-apocalyptic. It had been 40 years since someone had looked at the present, extrapolated out to the future, and hypothesized changes that didn't require either wiping the slate clean or advancing so far that any technology was indistinguishable from magic.

worthy of note: cybyerpunk presupposes implants, not VR goggles. Everybody does what they do by having hardware attached to their wetware. it's virtually impossible to find a cyberpunk novel that doesn't involve some form of biological-technological melding and it's the lack of survivable cybernetics that really distinguishes our present from cyberpunk's future. Note that cyberpunk is also invariably pessimistic and that this implant technology is invariably presented as a necessary but dehumanizing force.

Apple's design aesthetic isn't cyberpunk, it's Bauhaus via Dieter Rams. Alexa and Siri and all the computers talking to you is Star Trek, not cyberpunk. And while the heroes of cyberpunk generally break the law in order to take down large corporations, they do it for equality and equalization. The fundamental problem is there's no money in it so every Silicon Valley visionary you've ever seen turned to advertising.

Even today, the best explanation of cyberpunk lies in what the android Replicant, Roy Batty, mourns to Deckard at the end of Blade Runner. “I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

What the fuck are you talking about.