by BJ Bell
Cyberpunk just looks and feels cool.
The gritty, saturated neon signage and the dark urban sprawl engage our craving for mystery and danger. Body modifications that not only look dope, but can make us stronger, more agile, and more deadly, satisfy a deep-seated desire to be physically powerful. The ability of human brains to interface directly with technology in a world that’s dependent upon that technology scratches our itch for clever agency.
That edgy aesthetic, however, can subvert the sociological narrative at the heart of cyberpunk stories—one that attempts to address issues of inequality, human value, and alienation. As such, I believe a tweak is in order for whatever modern cyberpunk becomes.
I’ve loved technology and science fiction since a very young age, but I didn’t read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and William Gibson’s Neuromancer until my early twenties. Those novels are exactly the kind of absurd, visceral, and sexy fantasy world twenty-year-old BJ Bell wanted to inhabit. I connected with it instantly, and while I knew they were supposed to be dystopian fiction and a sociological criticism of laissez-faire capitalism, I still wanted to live within those fantasies. I know I wasn’t alone.
The archetypal cyberpunk protagonist is a hacker-samurai in a leather jacket or a smart-ass console cowboy with a self-destructive streak. They’re literally rebels without causes because their motivations are highly self-serving, and their antagonists are typically champions of a status quo that they (the protagonists) themselves have completely accepted. We still relate to them because it’s easy for us to feel as they do—that the deck is stacked against us—but also because they’re just really damn cool.
But what if we didn’t let them off the hook that easily? What if we demanded more punk in our cyberpunk?
Two Cyberpunk Classics That Nailed the Style but Missed the Ethos
One of my favorite characteristics of the Snow Crash world is its blatant absurdism. It often leans so heavily into the kitsch of marketing and capitalist culture that some would argue the novel is actually cyberpunk satire. For example, our main character is shamelessly called Hiro Protagonist. On top of being a samurai and a hacker, he’s a pizza delivery guy for a mob-run franchise. It’s an engaging story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but I believe there’s real heart and backbone missing. In the end, Hiro faces off against the big bad Rife and defeats him, saving the world from the deadly virus, but he does so without pause or comment on the tribalism of the burbclaves, the franchise-nations, and the corporate mobsters that perpetuate suffering, violence, and inequity throughout the world.
In short, Hiro is heroic, but he’s not punk.
Neuromancer is a different story. It’s no wonder it became the quintessential model for what cyberpunk should look like. Night City is beautiful and dark, and so are the characters that occupy it. Molly Millions is a femme fatale who is impossible to forget, and the Rastafarians are delightful. The main character, Case, is a very different type of protagonist from Hiro. He doesn’t have a clear antagonist to heroically defeat, and more often you find him in a “man versus self” narrative. The problem is that his arc is virtually flat. His story ends with him a little more wealthy and healthy, but otherwise he’s still living the life of a self-interested hustler. Worse, he helps unleash a god-like super AI but registers zero anxiety or guilt over the potential fallout from that decision. That’s the opposite of punk.
The Difference Between Looking Punk and Being Punk
What is punk: rebellion is intolerance (or at least anxiety) of a status quo that’s contrary to the character’s own personal ethos. For rebellion to matter and be engaging, it has to reject nihilism and self-interest. It absolutely has to stand for something. Advocacy is punk.
If you think about what punk started out as in terms of music and culture, it was more a collective than an enterprise of self-interest. People showed up for one another in dank basements and dusty garages to listen to music that fat-cat record producers weren’t interested in promoting because it didn’t jibe with the established metrics. The music also carried a message that was contrary to an authority that punks did not see as representative of their own beliefs. It was a community of like-minded individuals. Community is punk.
I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing that the characters should start off full punk, or even be that way most of the time. Neither am I saying cyberpunk protagonists have to be folk heroes. The characters I fall in love with are those who show vulnerability and struggle to be better. They may go about things the wrong way and make bad decisions, but they get called out when they do. In the end, their arcs trend toward reshaping their life and their world for the better. They’re determined, and they try. Ardency is totally punk.
What I think this looks like is what I’ve tried to do with my cyberpunk novel, Karma Ledger. I hope that the world, the city of Nexus-Hub, is every bit the kind of world that Night City is in Neuromancer or the burbclaves are in Snow Crash—seductive and dangerous, with all the trappings of the cyberpunk aesthetic. The difference is that when my characters fall into a trap, I don’t let them off the hook. The consequences of buying into it are theirs to reckon with. My protagonist, Taro Matsunaga, starts the novel no differently from the cool samurai-hacker with a leather jacket—in his case, it’s a casual suit jacket with joggers—but ultimately he becomes a true advocate for his values and an ardent supporter of his community.
Why the Villain in Karma Ledger Has No Face
There’s another piece that feeds into how punk is cultivated: the underlying power structure of the cyberpunk world. Karma Ledger’s world of Nexus-Hub stands apart from what I’d consider classic cyberpunk because the greater antagonist isn’t a specific company or person so much as a social surface area.
In the real world, big bads don’t become big bads purely by chance and opportunity. They have their own communities and social circumstances that promote them into positions of power. Karma Ledger, therefore, has many antagonists. Toge-Kim, CEO of Arura Group, serves as the more tangible threat to Taro Matsunaga, but there are also the faceless ones: Arura Group as a whole, the other mega-corporations of Nexus-Hub, and the Nexus-Hub Board of Directors.
I made these enemies faceless by design because they represent the greater threat: a community of self-serving individuals all making decisions to the detriment of society as a whole. They share an ethos. And often, they genuinely believe they’re on the side of progress. You can’t reason with that kind of threat, and you can’t launch an assault on it in a procedural narrative. In truth, there’s never an ending—there are only, at best, equanimous periods of relative peace and freedom before the whole damn cycle repeats.
That seems daunting, but remember, the protagonist has their own punk community. In Karma Ledger, that community is Sangha Syndicate, an equally anonymous force that supports our protagonist—and not with a decisive scheme orchestrated with the intention to subvert the antagonists, but with the merit-driven goal of building up their own community.
Although much of what I have said reads as something adjacent to a “substance over style” criticism of classic cyberpunk, that’s not my purpose. The classics are the classics for a reason, and I love them. They laid the foundation for me to build upon, and building on it is what I want to do.
Let’s keep the cool but tweak it by breathing new life and ethos into it. And above all, let’s amp up the punk!
BJ Bell is the author of Karma Ledger, the first novel in The Kalachakra IP, a cyberpunk series set in a surveilled near-future where community and spiritual practice become quiet forms of resistance.