Quotes & Sayings About Cyberpunk

Ebun becomes completely conceptual in the xenosphere. She is an idea from infancy, the non-verbal stage. There are no words with which to understand her form, and there is no image. We are aware of her presence, but it is extremely abstract. The idea is her own, from her own early life. Even she does not fully understand it, but she can pull it out of lost memories and use it. She is safe. It is an elegant solution which I wish I had thought of. — Tade Thompson

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. — Neal Stephenson

It was true. Nothing was ever lost. And nothing was ever forgotten, no matter how painful. The city was like a heart that way. She had four chambers, too. She had arteries that led in and out. She kept things moving. She kept the oxygen flowing in and out, in and out, clean for dirty, dirty for clean, the filthy midnight whispers for the purest morning prayers — Jason Heller

You could love someone so strongly, for so long, and still forget - until the memories returned. — Jason Heller

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.

This was what she hated most about the on-line world, the shadows as much as the bright lights of the legal nets: too many men assumed that the nets were exclusively their province, and were startled and angry to find out that it wasn't...rather than ever admit fear, they walked with raised hackles, looking for a fight. — Melissa Scott

Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness. — Tade Thompson

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

The implants just give you a new set of reproductive-free imperatives, that's all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn't be worth anything if they didn't give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to the trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute. — Ian McDonald

Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and comfortable chairs. But it was impossible. No autumn--only a cold wind that blew through our summer, freezing the leaves in their places before they could motley and fall. — Raphael Carter

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

I want to tell you that it's horrible. I want to tell you that being suppressed makes every moment of existence a torment, because maybe that would help--but it would be a lie. In fact, the most horrible thing is how easy it is to slide into contentment, how hard it is to nourish anger or regret. If you lose the sense of smell, say, or taste, you'd grieve for it; but if you were born without that sense, you'd never miss it. That's how it was for me--the sense was gone, as though it has never been. For the first few years after suppression, I kept myself in misery by sheer effort of will, trying to imagine, every day, what it was that I had lost. But in the end, it became to much trouble. I gave in to the inevitable. I forgot. — Raphael Carter

What we call the xenosphere, the psychic link that you are all able to exploit, is made up of strands of alien fungi-like filaments and neurotransmitters. We call the xenoform ascomycetes xenosphericus. It is everywhere, in every environment on Earth. These delicate filaments are too small for the naked eye to see, and they are fragile, but they form multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin. They have an affinity for nerve endings and quickly access the central nervous system. Everybody linked to this network of xenoforms, this xenosphere is uploading information constantly, passively, without knowing. There is a global store of information in the very atmosphere, a worldmind, which only people like you can access. — Tade Thompson

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

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

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

It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence. — William Gibson

From up here, the city below looked calm. Peaceful. Serene.

It was a lie.

Mia could feel the lie in her bones, in the foreboding creeping along the fine hairs on her skin. But mostly she could feel it in her head, where preparations were underway across Romane to meet the coming chaos. — G.S. Jennsen

Funny how they're corpses if you didn't know them, but bodies if you did. — Jason Heller

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out-it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by. — Paolo Bacigalupi

...even the Gujarat-bot dreams of electric sheep. — Tade Thompson

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

Judge not what is best by pleasure, though to nature seeming meet, created as thou art to nobler end, holy and pure, conformity divine. It's Milton, Paradise Lost, something Ashey said to me when I told him I wasn't into porn. He's always quoting stuff like that; he thinks it will inspire me. It does. — Jason Heller

You can't hack your destiny, brute force ... you need a back door, a side channel into Life. — Clyde DeSouza

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held. — William Gibson

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

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

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

As far as I know Misha wrote the first cyberpunk poetry. — John Shirley

...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

The genius is apparent from page one. . . . A seamless fusion of virtuosity and insight. . . . If William Wordsworth were alive today and writing cyberpunk, this is what he might write.

- David Farland
New York Times Best Seller
Lead judge for the world's largest genre writing competition — Milo Behr

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

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ... — William Gibson

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

The Machinery are a bunch of fuckwits who believe that the human body is best conceptualised as a machine, and that if behaviour is stripped down to only what is functional, a higher form of humanity will emerge. This means actions that lead to the fulfilment of their basic needs only. Disease is a malfunction. You can see where this goes. They're boring as hell, they only speak to convey information and they are more inflexible than actual machines. They are said to be good spouses and accountants. The one beside me has a distinct self-image, fully identified as a machine. He repeats to himself mentally, 'You are a machine, you are a machine. — Tade Thompson

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things - though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside. — Jess C. Scott

Power rides her fingers, she moves from datashell to datashell, walking the nets like the ghost of a shadow, her trail vanishing behind her as she goes. She carries power in the dark behind her eyes. — Melissa Scott

It had been bound to happen. If anything, technology created a space for the strange and the afraid. Some would argue that the environment had created those people, but I doubted that. Those who flocked to technology as a place to hide and to fit in would have found something else, but instead they found another life. — J.P. Carver

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes. — Warren Ellis

If you read no other work of what's known as "cyberpunk" (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson's Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including "cyberpunk" itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors. — Nancy Pearl

I think they are a better race than humans ever were. — Angelo Tsanatelis

There are no limits, only plateaus. — Sam A. Patel

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

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.

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

I feel something else break through the numbness. Something raw. Something primal. Something visceral. — Sam A. Patel

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

That would prove a recurring trait in him - the need to cover up his inadequacies with small lies and slight exaggerations. To pretend knowledge he didn't have. I forgave him this flaw for I knew what it hid; I could feel his need like a pleasantly raw wound in my mouth, and I could not help but savour it. — Jason Heller

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance. — Neal Stephenson

Proximity to the device tempted him, a muted siren's call to undress, open the coffin-like lid and climb into the lukewarm saline solution, to plug his interface jack in, sheathe his genitals in the waste catch and sink down into the glorious rush of jacking in. He missed the freefall adrenaline of consciousness translated into pure data, of his body rendered in liquid mercury, shifting and changing with his every thought. He missed the thrill of cracking databank security, of running from anti-intrusion software and other hackers. — Gary A. Ballard

The woman's gaze sent chills racing down his spine. The diabolical, aberrantly predatory arch of her lips curdled his blood. Seriously, his blood must be curdling back at the lab right now.

"Nice illusion. I'm definitely feeling the evil vibe here."

She stood and rounded the desk with perfect grace. "There is no illusion. Explain yourself quickly now, before I grow bored by your presence and dispense with it. — G.S. Jennsen

What is a medium like telepresence but the extension--no, the very definition--of ourselves? Are we, who live things at a distance, the same species as our ancestors, we could hear of events in the same town only by going there? If you met a person from that time, would you have any more in common with him than with a whale, or a chimpanzee? You have traveled to meet me with better than seven-league boots; and I have done more math this morning than Pythagoras, and Euclid, and all Ancient Greece and Rome. Surely, if we are human, they were animals; and we a race of gods, if they were men. — Raphael Carter

My feet catch the roof like the arrester hook of a fighter jet coming into an aircraft carrier. — Sam A. Patel

Are you . . . a policeman?"
"No. They'll be along shortly, I expect. Public suicide's a felony."
". . . I'm sorry. — James Tiptree Jr.

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

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

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. — Nick Land

The arm that carries the data. That's your wing. — Sam A. Patel

Japan is a wonderful country, a strange mixture of ancient mystique and cyberpunk saturation. It's a monolith of society's achievements, yet maintains a foothold in the past, creating an amazing backdrop for tourings and natives alive. Japan captures the imagination like no other. You never feel quite so far from home as you do in Japan, yet there are no other people on the planet that make you feel as comfortable. — Corey Taylor

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

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged. — William Gibson

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

You think we have a connection because of all the things you've sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn't real. Trust comes when you've worked with someone for years; it doesn't speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn't materialize when you stick a cable in someone's head. What you get from screening me isn't friendship, it's data. We're strangers. — Raphael Carter

I'd caught what cameras call an updraft: just as the viewers got over the first rush of interest, others smelled the excitement and tuned in. The surprise of the newcomers strengthened the scent, attracting still more people, in a spiral that could make the feedback escalate out of control. Wave upon wave of astonishment crashed through me. I tried to look down, but the curiosity of millions forced my head back up. I stood there staring at the whale like someone forced to look into the sun, unable to turn away, though my mind cringed from the sight and my eyes were burning. It was not just an updraft, but riptide: feedback so strong that it flooded out my own emotions and derailed my thoughts. The audience grew so large and so greedy that it wouldn't even let me blink. — Raphael Carter

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you. — William Gibson

A washing machine repairman dying of laryngeal cancer had only one recurring thought: There is no excuse for making an angel cry. — Tade Thompson

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

Oyin Da's mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves. — Tade Thompson

She placed a hand on his arm. "It's not our fault, not truly. It's theirs. The killers. They're the ones who - "

"Get down!" Caleb collided with her back, sending her crashing to the floor hard enough to knock the air from her chest. The windows shattered and the sounds of a city overtaken by chaos rushed in. — G.S. Jennsen

...you think cabling is unnatural--that's what your arguments all come down to. But it's not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It's like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn't a coincidence, it can't be. They fit together so easily--like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound... — Raphael Carter

I need to fight for the preservation of the Earth type planets and its coexistence with worlds after death.-Banyan — Carolina Cody Aldaz

I had recognized her. They had tried to tear her out, but she had lived in me--deep in my heart and secret, nameless and indescribable, yet never entirely gone. She had been a face in the window of every departing train, a form seen from the back on every crowded street, always just out of my sight, always turning away. And I had known her when she came to me, though I could not say it, and though the very thought had sent my mind skidding across the ice into unconsciousness. — Raphael Carter

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

As each story for Cyber World popped up in my inbox, my confusion about how I defined cyberpunk grew. And I loved that feeling. Left to define the term "Cyber World" as they saw fit (or gloriously unfit), the authors formed a vast unconscious collective that redefined cyber-something-or-other for the current millennium. A network, you might even say. I don't say that flippantly. Cyberpunk - or should we just start saying "cyberfiction"? - must must continually plug back into itself, challenge itself, consume itself, and reinvent itself if it hopes to survive and remain relevant. — Jason Heller

What's a quantum extrapolator?' I ask.
'You are, — Tade Thompson

But that was then, and then is a world away from now. — Sam A. Patel

..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse. — Raphael Carter

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

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

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

...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

What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality? — Clyde DeSouza

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

standard Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID, interface. The same kind doctors use to communicate with surgically implanted components like pacemakers. — Sam A. Patel

I'll ask you to look at the ships arrayed against you and consider what weaponry they might possess. Weaponry strong enough to crack your hulls? I know what weaponry you bring to bear, and I assure you it will not crack ours.

"Are you willing to risk the lives of thousands under your command to find out? Are you willing to risk your own life?"

The silence hung across space like a shroud.

"This is not over, Admiral Solovy."

"That is the first true thing you've said today. — G.S. Jennsen

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again. — Rudy Rucker

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image. — Paul Di Filippo

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

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

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

There are stories about technology. There are stories about stories. Most of all, though, there are stories that tackle our understanding, or lack thereof, of the many machines that have freed us to love, work, birth, build, change, destroy, and reconfigure reality, often beyond our will or comprehension - even as they greatly augment our will and comprehension. — Jason Heller

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

That's the point of Zeno's Paradox, isn't it? Whatever your goal, you're never more than halfway there. — Sam A. Patel

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

..she can feel that burden sometimes like a wall pressing in over the dome of the false sky that bounds the city.
*Someone has to*, she says again, as if the ghost is somewhere in the machines that create this Seaheaven, as if he might have cared and turns away, walks back down the vivid street, the dust soft and almost real against her feet. — Melissa Scott

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

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

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

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

The mind has doors...even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers. — Raphael Carter