Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of low-life and high tech" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown on radical change in the social order.
Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Phillip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip Jose Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of science fiction.
Cyberpunk plots often center on conflict among artificial intelligences, hackers, megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors. Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.
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