WI: earlier Cyberpunk?

What if the sub-genre of Sci Fi known as Cyberpunk, (or at least something with most of it's key themes, settings, character archetypes, and writing style) emerged before the 1980s?
 
Part of the problem is that Gibson literally created a good chunk of it out his own mind—not to mention that in so doing he helped create the modern world and metaphors we use.

Secondly the 1980s had corporations much more prominent than the '70s, along with the rise of the Japanese, and easily envisioned computer technology (even here, Gibson had payphones in Neuromancer because he didn't think of the mobile phone). Go much earlier and you can see SF descriptions of computer technology being wildly off what happened.

Bruce Bethke actually invented the word cyberpunk[1] in '80, though the story wasn't published until '83 (Gibson invented the term cyberspace). For all intents and purposes the idea of cyberpunk fiction, however, was entirely created by Gibson.

Which is not to see Gibson get sole credit, as Bethke mentions in the essay I linked:

Then again, Gibson shouldn't get sole credit either. Pat Cadigan ("Pretty Boy Crossover"), Rudy Rucker (Software), W.T. Quick (Dreams of Flesh and Sand), Greg Bear (Blood Music), Walter Jon Williams (Hardwired), Michael Swanwick (Vacuum Flowers)… the list of early '80s writers who made important contributions towards defining the trope defies my ability to remember their names. Nor was it an immaculate conception: John Brunner (Shockwave Rider), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), and perhaps even Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination) all were important antecedents of the thing that became known as cyberpunk fiction.

Frankly the only way to get cyberpunk fiction is to somehow have Gibson write his book earlier. You could have more overt cyberpunk themes (corporations replacing the nation-state and the meaningless of government, computer technology ramped up, more competent criminal class usually signified by the Yakuza, specificity of description[2] applied to SF, the metaphor of a virtual world brought to computing technology) but it's very hard to get that wrapped up all in one.



[1] He also came up with spam as a term for junk email.

[2] As Gibson talks about he never liked "and then, he put on the spacesuit" style of writing common to SF:

William Gibson said:
It's probably been fifteen years since I read Hammett, but I remember being very excited about how he had pushed all this ordinary stuff until is was different- like American naturalism but cranked up, very intense, almost surreal. You can see this in the beginning of The Maltese Falcon (1930), where he describes all the things in Spade's office. Hammett may have been the guy who turned me on to the idea of superspecificity, which is largely lacking in most SF description, SF authors tend to use generics- "Then he got into his space suit"- a refusal to specify that is almost an unspoken tradition in SF. They know they can get away with having a character arrive on some unimaginably stange and distant planet and say, "I looked out the window and saw the air plant." It doesn't seem to matter that the reader has no idea what the plant looks like, or even what it is. I think Hammett may have given me the idea that you don't have to write like that, even in a popular form. But with Chandler- I never have read much of his work, and I never enjoyed what I did read because I always got this creepy puritanical feeling from his books. Although his surface gloss is very brilliant, his underlying meaning is off-putting to me.
 
You'd get Dieselpunk, Atomicpunk or Transistorpunk (which are all already genres by the way; I didn't make them up for any possible name for a pre-Cyberpunk Cyberpunk in this ATL).
 
You'd get Dieselpunk, Atomicpunk or Transistorpunk (which are all already genres by the way; I didn't make them up for any possible name for a pre-Cyberpunk Cyberpunk in this ATL).
I love the way Dieselpunk sounds! It brings to mind a desert highway, massive trucks, biker gangs, and rusty cities:cool:
 
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