When I was researching/writing for my novels The A-Men, The A-Men Return and Forever A-Men, I read a lot of dystopian stories to get just the right balance of future world and collapsing society. I wanted to use the trope of the main character entering a riot-torn corporate-run city while mixing this with strong fantasy elements/stories. Gibson was an early influence for me… but the final list included:
Cloud Atlas*
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Battle Royale
Brave New World
A Clockwork Orange
Count Zero*
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Neuromancer
The Children of Men
Altered Carbon*
The ones with asterisks are my personal favourites.
But very early on I also added noir classics especially from the 1940s to my reading list, and in this way created plotlines that were very much in the dystopian/crime/punk vein. Though few scifi authors cite noir fiction as an inspiration, when you read them they have many dystopian tropes and really shows me that they do/were influenced.
Somewhere in the Night, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Nightmare Alley — almost everything by Cornell Woolrich… the list goes on.
Is there any consensus on what the “second best William Gibson novel” is? I liked Neuromancer, and want to read something else by him, but I’m probably not going to read his whole collected works, so if I just read one more Gibson novel, what should it be?
(the only other thing I’ve read by him was a short story collection with ‘Johnny Neumonic’ in it).
The interesting thing about Gibson is that his latest books are not, strictly speaking, science fiction, and yet they’re exactly the same as his older books. The world has simply caught up with him.
I think you could make a good argument for his “Greg Mandel” trilogy – which begins with Mindstar Rising– to be cyberpunk (or at least cyberpunk’s next door neighbour).
Harboiled SF detective noir… I reckon they pretty much fit the cyberpunk definition of “high tech and low life” (wiki) to a T.
Two of Morgan’s other novels – both set much more near-future – are worth checking out too: Market Forces and Black Man (published as *Thirteen *in the US). I suppose an argument could be made that Market Forces isn’t cyberpunk – just of the grounds that it’s missing the high-tech… but IMO it’s got more than a double dose of dystopian future to make up for it.
I don’t know if I’d consider it cyberpunk, but I recently read Sleepless by Charlie Huston & got a Bladerunner/Gibson/Doctorow vibe off it.
It’s a bit grim, but if you’re into thrillers & post-apocalyptic novels (tho it’s set more in the slo-mo apocalypse itself than the aftermath) I think it’s worth a look.
Another SF detective-type novel with cyberpunk leanings is Kiln People by David Brin.
