I know what you’re thinking: “WTF do I want with a dissertation about cyberpunk, I just like playing the games / watching the movies?”

Well the thing about dissertations is, they usually have a “history and definitions” section. In this document, it’s pages 11-27, which contains things like:

The term “cyberpunk” was originally popularized by a 1985 Washington Post article by Gardner Dozois, who borrowed the term from the title of Bruce Bethke’s 1983 short story (Dery 75). In the article, “cyberpunk” referred to work by authors like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, who were writing stories about isolated hacker heroes fighting against faceless international megacorporations in a gritty, high-tech near- future. The word was embraced as a marketing tool by science fiction publishers, and Sterling himself enthusiastically espoused it in 1986 by editing the “cyberpunk reader” Mirrorshades. However, Gibson, the crown prince of the cyberpunk movement, has acknowledged that the term “is mainly a marketing strategy – and one that I’ve come to feel trivializes what I do” (McCaffery interview 279). It is somewhat ironic that a genre movement claiming to deride the alienating nature of capitalism was, in fact, partly defined by the capitalist needs of its publishers…

So let’s say you’re having an online argument, or decide to write a cyberpunk-related paper for school, now you have a well-referenced source of the basic relevant facts. Plus, it also mentions a bunch of stories and films which you may want to check out. Finally, the dissertation’s argument sounds interesting, though I haven’t read it all the way through.

Anyway, here’s the disseration home page, in case the pdf direct link is changed or something: https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/cc08hj32d