‘Cyberpunk was a voice of Bohemia - Bohemia in the 1980’s. The technosocial changes loose in contemporary society were bound to affect its counterculture. Cyberpunk was the literary incarnation of this phenomenon. And the phenomenon is still growing. Communication technologies in particular are becoming much less respectable, much more volatile, and increasingly in the hands of people you might not introduce to your grandma.

But today, it must be admitted that the cyberpunks - SF veterans in or near their forties, patiently refining their craft and cashing their royalty checks - are no longer a Bohemian underground. This too is an old story in Bohemia; it is the standard punishment for success. An underground in the light of day is a contradiction in terms. Respectability does not merely beckon; it actively envelops. And in this sense, “cyberpunk” is even deader than Shiner admits.

Time and chance have been kind to the cyberpunks, but they themselves have changed with the years. A core doctrine in Movement theory was “visionary intensity.” But it has been some time since any cyberpunk wrote a truly mind-blowing story, something that writhed, heaved, howled, hallucinated and shattered the furniture. In the latest work of these veterans, we see tighter plotting, better characters, finer prose, much “serious and insightful futurism.” But we also see much less in the way of spontaneous back-flips and crazed dancing on tables. The settings come closer and closer to the present day, losing the baroque curlicues of unleased fantasy: the issues at stake become something horribly akin to the standard concerns of middle-aged responsibility. And this may be splendid, but it is not war. This vital aspect of science fiction has been abdicated, and is open for the taking. Cyberpunk is simply not there any more.’

— Bruce Sterling, 1991, ‘Cyberpunk in the Nineties’, Interzone 48, pp. 39-42