At the dawn of the 1980s, the architects of the budding artistic movement that would become cyberpunk had no idea they were doing the work of modern oracles. John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer all consolidated the aesthetics of hacker culture with the sensibilities of the punk rock movement, predicting social trends and scientific advancements in the process. The genre owes a debt to countless pioneers and ancestors, but there is arguably no singular piece of cyberpunk fiction more recognizable than Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
