Top 100 Quotes About Cyberpunk
#1. It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.
Paul Di Filippo
#2. Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.
Paul Di Filippo
#3. Cyberpunk was really a reaction against old boy sci-fi which was about white guys in space who would come up with some kind of technological thing.
Pat Cadigan
#4. As far as I know Misha wrote the first cyberpunk poetry.
John Shirley
#5. I first conceived of my far-future setting 'Punktown' in 1980, and though it contains 'punk' in its name, the term 'cyberpunk' hadn't been coined yet. I took my inspiration strictly from punk music.
Jeffrey Thomas
#6. The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.
Douglas Rushkoff
#7. One of the things I like about Cyber World is that it shows cyberpunk has left its heteronormative boy's club roots behind in the dust.
Jason Heller
#8. There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.
Robert Sheckley
#9. Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.
Bruce Sterling
#10. In the electronic game world, I know I have a reputation for doing the cyberpunk thing, and for doing the serious epic fantasy thing, but if you go back to when I was a kid, I've been a Disney fan all my life.
Warren Spector
#11. Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-'80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot.
Ernest Cline
#12. In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.
Daniel H. Wilson
#13. What I need I carry in my head. Everything in that machine came from me. My fat burned into knowledge. My calories pedaled into data analysis" -- The Calorie Man
James Patrick Kelly
#14. My feet catch the roof like the arrester hook of a fighter jet coming into an aircraft carrier.
Sam A. Patel
#15. This is a psychofield, a thoughtspace, essentially unstable. While most people conceptualise thinking as this straightforward linear thing, I see ideas spreading out into alternatives before one is selected. In this place every notion can potentially become reality.
Tade Thompson
#16. The traceur doesn't knock an obstacle out of the way unless it's absolutely necessary. He meanders his way past it. Over. Under. Through. Around. He gets past not by moving the obstacle but by moving himself. That is parkour, and working this job I use every technique I know just to get it done.
Sam A. Patel
#17. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
William Gibson
#19. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer.
Tade Thompson
#20. The arm that carries the data. That's your wing.
Sam A. Patel
#21. I go outside, bundled against the wind from the east. I wander the streets of my past, waiting for one more dawn.
Jason Heller
#22. She glimpsed the sexless mounds between their legs and shuddered. For some reason, she found their lack of genitals uncannily obscene, an indignity, a piece of humanity they had been denied.
Jason Heller
#23. I will dive to find Rosalie. She is out there, floating for me if I can only swim long enough, climbing up through silent silver bubbles up and up and free.
Jason Heller
#24. The mind has doors...even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.
Raphael Carter
#25. ...the bioidentical cortex chip that will be implanted subcutaneously on the inside of your forearm. It is a proprietary biocircuit developed in our labs specifically for this purpose, and it is unlike any other in the world.
Sam A. Patel
#26. Their detectors, like everything else about them and their small, shrinking world, were always looking for the wrong weapons, Sem thought as he began to sharpen his pencil.
Jason Heller
#27. That's the point of Zeno's Paradox, isn't it? Whatever your goal, you're never more than halfway there.
Sam A. Patel
#28. Destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
William Gibson
#29. Funny how they're corpses if you didn't know them, but bodies if you did.
Jason Heller
#30. Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
Neal Stephenson
#31. Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.
Tade Thompson
#32. I can't,' I say.
Her mind closes like a shutter, with finality.
I wish, at that moment, that I had said something else.
Tade Thompson
#33. A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone.
See Spot.
See Spot run.
See Spot run from a gaping chest wound.
Run Spot run.
See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.
J.E. Mac
#35. A washing machine repairman dying of laryngeal cancer had only one recurring thought: There is no excuse for making an angel cry.
Tade Thompson
#36. It is a certainty, not just a conviction, the way believing in God is a conviction, but believing in gravity is a certainty.
Tade Thompson
#37. The electro-cauterizer sliced through the wires behind my cybernetic eye, and as the world went black, so did a large portion of my memory.
Jason Heller
#38. Five-Year," a term given to cash minted before 2023. That was the last year cash was produced without embedded chips that could trace every use of the currency as if it was a debit or credit card.
Gary A. Ballard
#39. My experiment has demonstrated that people from the past can be artificially reincarnated. The purpose is so people from Twinmortal do not commit the same error that we did.-Amaranth
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#40. What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
Lana Wachowski
#41. We are all part machine, Kaaro. Your phone is a polymer under the skin of your hand. You have a locator chip in your head.
Tade Thompson
#42. What's a quantum extrapolator?' I ask.
'You are,
Tade Thompson
#43. It wasn't until the first of us began killing ourselves in unusual ways - tearing off our own faces, gnawing off our own limbs - that the government took notice. But they waited until we started killing the oligarchs who created us before they acted. Typical.
Jason Heller
#44. Narrow, angular features, pouty lips and hatred-filled pale, washed-out blue irises glared back at him.
Caleb flashed the young man a malevolent smirk and readied his blade. "Jude Winslow, I presume.
G.S. Jennsen
#45. Are you . . . a policeman?"
"No. They'll be along shortly, I expect. Public suicide's a felony."
". . . I'm sorry.
James Tiptree Jr.
#46. standard Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID, interface. The same kind doctors use to communicate with surgically implanted components like pacemakers.
Sam A. Patel
#47. He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
Neal Stephenson
#48. see, when I'm not paying attention to my barriers, I can glimpse other people's thoughts. I catch them like lingering aftertastes or smells they leave in their wake: bitter envy, coppery anger, sour regret, the foul miasma of malice and cruelty.
Jason Heller
#49. I'd been an outcast my entire life. Growing up with technophobe parents in the dawn of a Cyborg Age did that to a person.
Anna L. Davis
#50. This is what she hated most about the on-line world, the shadows as much as the bright lights of the legal nets: too many men assumes that the nets were exclusively their province, and were startled and angry to find out that it wasn't.
Melissa Scott
#51. And this is the end of Elaine Stainless, it seems. I thought I was helping those I'd harmed before, somehow - that I was making amends. I still think that now, if I'm honest. It's not like there's anything else I can do. Your backstory always gets you in the end.
Jason Heller
#52. There are only a few planets with life. It is an oddity. It is really difficult to have the necessary conditions not only to support life but also to maintain the life inside a planet.-Loto
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#53. I am a more modern female vampire since I came just when our world was disappearing due to the intromission of this future.-Enyo
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#54. The Yoruba say 'o d'oju ala' when someone dies. I will see you in dreams.
Tade Thompson
#56. Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.
Thomas Pynchon
#57. You can't hack your destiny, brute force ... you need a back door, a side channel into Life.
Clyde DeSouza
#58. Her slender hand on the small of his back, night after night - this had saved his life.
Jason Heller
#59. I blinked, and the world exploded with data. Images, scanned documents and photographs, a whirlwind of numbers, under-the-table deals, and whispered words.
Jason Heller
#60. ...the wires he wore had grown all through him, as the roots of trees replace the flesh of corpses; and the vast coils of the whale's brain wrapped around him like a gray constricting snake. I pitied him: but it was probably stray feedback from the Net...
Raphael Carter
#61. I let go of the tenuous control I had and scream into the void. Without lungs you can scream forever, and I do.
Tade Thompson
#62. How can it be hard and easy at the same time?" asked Omar.
"It's like a really tall wall," said Anja. "It might be hard to climb, but there's no flying crocodiles to fight off while you do it.
Dan Wells
#63. I pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you'd find living under a rock. Vermin.
Raphael Carter
#64. She blew a light and watched a fire start. They would never leave her, now. I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.
Jason Heller
#65. You had to draw lines, and that choice was in itself dangerous; all boundaries had a double edge, were like swords that could always be turned against you in the end.
But you still had to choose.
Melissa Scott
#66. The best way to hide the truth is to shroud it in myth
Sam A. Patel
#67. The alien reached out her hands to hold Alex's tightly. "Please. Some of what I want to express, it may be difficult to locate the right words."
"Of course."
Pure alabaster eyes stared back at her. "Child, there is a hole in your mind.
G.S. Jennsen
#68. Today we no longer fear technology. It's no longer a question of assimilation. What remains to be seen is what we are about to become.
Jason Heller
#69. That's sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something ... real." Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. "Real love, real friends, real body parts ...
Jess C. Scott
#70. You could love someone so strongly, for so long, and still forget - until the memories returned.
Jason Heller
#71. She made us realize that human dignity is inalienable, and as long as there is still breath left in your body, there will always be something left to fight for.
Sam A. Patel
#72. I need to fight for the preservation of the Earth type planets and its coexistence with worlds after death.-Banyan
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#73. You know what it is like to wake up in the middle of a bunch of corpses with a little girl in your arms scared to death?-Enyo
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#74. The loss of a Netlimb was a queer sensation, a kind of panicked tickling as the brain strained to maintain its binary illusion that there actually was a limb where a limb no longer existed.
Gary A. Ballard
#75. Glimpses through the clouds of numerous and enormous Second Free Zone residential arks and barges lumbering through their selective tracks like a slow-motion game of hide and seek played by listless, blunt whales.
Kieran Shea
#76. Well, what brand of water do you drink?"
"Just what was in the faucet, sir," says Delphi humbly. "I--I did try to boil it--"
"Good God.
James Tiptree Jr.
#77. ...if you can achieve total intimacy with a piece of cable that costs fifty-nine kopeks, what good is it? How can you say you have something special with a person, when you can get the same thing with anyone in Russia in fifteen minutes?
Raphael Carter
#78. Glittering news chips in men's sideburns and women with braided microfilament glo-strands stepping around me, laughing with silver lipsticks. Kaleidoscope streets: lights and traffic and dust and coal diesel exhaust. Muddy and wet.
Jason Heller
#79. once you start running and apply the mathematics of change, suddenly this insurmountable distance gets crushed under the curve of motion.
Sam A. Patel
#80. Mortal has not been a habitable place for a long time. We have been trying to survive patching it but one day it will break completely. Twinmortal is the future for all of us. You will achieve that future for us by learning has much as you can.
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#81. But that was then, and then is a world away from now.
Sam A. Patel
#82. Alice in Wonderland, Alice down the rabbit hole, Alice out in Cyberspace, flung along the lines of data, flying across fields of light, the night cities that live only behind her eyes.
Melissa Scott
#83. What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?
Clyde DeSouza
#84. Maybe that was why it was almost always the underclasses, the women, the people of color, the gay people, the ones who were already stigmatized as being vulnerable, availble, trapped by the body, who took the risk of the wire.
Melissa Scott
#85. In print news your job is to know things about others, you peer out at the world through an arrow slit. In telepresence you _are known_. If I'd still been writing for a newspaper--if there still were newspapers-- I could have forgotten...
Raphael Carter
#87. Oyin Da's mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves.
Tade Thompson
#88. With your hand controlling all the input and your eye reading all the response you can make them a god . . . and somebody'll do the same for you.
James Tiptree Jr.
#89. Do you remember, Abelard ... Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God."
"I remember."
"I was wrong, darling. Being God is better.
Bruce Sterling
#90. You are not a sensitive and will never experience this, but raw data surges, blunt data with errors which are slowly refined like the process of chiselling out a sculpture from a block of marble.
Tade Thompson
#91. We are a species born from the planet. If the machines truly want to protect the Earth type planets they must learn to take care of us too.- Sun Wukong
Carolina Cody Aldaz
#92. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.
William Gibson
#93. Maybe we should all find one," I say. Or maybe, just for once, I should wait for someone to find me first.
Jason Heller
#94. I saw them do it. Chip vandals. Right there on Commerce, behind the main road...They cut his head open. They know I watched.
Anna L. Davis
#95. Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?
Nick Land
#96. like all of her, wrong sex, wrong class, wrong attitude...
Melissa Scott
#97. Life seemed ideal to him right then, and he was happy for the first time in a long time, and it felt like the sun was shining from his heart. - from the novel Brainjob by David Sloma.
David Sloma
#98. He kissed the tip of my finger, and I smiled at this. I would not be able to heal him, but he would not hate me for failing. That would be enough for both of us.
Jason Heller
#100. Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
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