Many consider William Gibson's works such as Neuromancer to be the origins of the cyberpunk genre, but I have to say I think this honor may belong to John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, published in 1975. A world with a society linked by a worldwide system of networked computers (long before Al Gore invented the internet), an antihero worthy of any cyberpunk novel, a worldwide economy based on credit and data, people changing identity's at the drop of a hat (or stroke of a key)years before Madonna made an art of it- this book is a must read. The cyberpunk novels have all been written since the computer revolution of the 80's and 90's, which is one of the things which make this book so amazing. Brunner, heavily influenced by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was amazingly prescient in his description of a world where the apocolypse came not in the form of nuclear annihilation, or dystopian military oppression, but from a post data overload world where people have lost the essence of their freedom simply because they became distracted and gave it away- to corporations and the government, which seem intertwined in Brunners world. I also found the his innovative writing style in this work has held up well. A few changes here and there, and it would make a great movie- maybe if A Scanner Darkly does well enough this summer, someone out there will run across it and see it's potential. It's certainly timely enough.
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