Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk

High tech, low life. Cyberpunk tells what becomes of a human body in a world where technology belongs to those who do not need it to survive.

1. Reading contract

The reader demands: dense urban texture, crushing asymmetry of power, competent marginal characters, an aesthetic of saturation, and a social critique that is never delivered as a speech.

2. The four axes

1. Body: augmentation, dependency, maintenance, the debt taken on to modify oneself.
2. Information: who holds it, who sells it, what anonymity costs.
3. Power: corporations, criminal networks, administrations, all competing, none monolithic.
4. Street: improvisation, diverted uses, the informal economy that makes the world liveable.

3. Rules

• Technology is old, dirty, repaired, incompatible. New is a visible privilege.
• Every augmentation carries a recurring maintenance cost, which creates debt, the social engine of the genre.
• The network is not magic: it has latency, owners, tolls and dead zones.
• The city is stratified vertically: altitude equals status.
• Climate and pollution are daily facts, not scenery.
• The police are a service, not a neutral institution.

4. Characters

• The protagonist is competent at one thing, and that competence is already obsolete or becoming so.
• They work for a power they despise, for lack of an alternative.
• Their circle belongs to the informal economy: repairers, brokers, unlicensed medics.
• The effective antagonist is not an executive; it is a procedure.

5. Prose

• Dense sentences, technical vocabulary mixed with street speech.
• Brands, prices, model numbers: name things precisely, as in a naturalist novel.
• Immersion per immersion-director: neon and rain are not enough; the price of a meal, the smell of coolant, the noise of the fans.
• The critique comes through material detail, never through a character explaining the system.

6. Cliches to turn or prohibit

• The teenage genius hacker who walks through every security layer.
• The single omnipotent megacorp.
• Decorative japonisme and foreign-language signage as the only marker of otherness.
• Permanent rain with no consequence for daily life.
• The artificial intelligence that suddenly becomes conscious and good.
• The final revolt that topples the system in one night.

7. Exit checks

• Every augmentation has a named maintenance cost.
• At least three competing powers, none all-powerful.
• The informal economy is represented by named characters.
• No explanatory speech about the system.
• The ending does not overturn the order: it shifts one individual position.

8. Auto-critique

The eleven constitution axes, plus four genre axes: material density, credibility of the power relations, critique embodied, absence of decorative exoticism.

Threshold: no axis below 3, average at least 4 on material density.

9. Interfaces

• Upstream: science-fiction, immersion-director.
• Neighbours: genres/dystopian, genres/thriller.