Cyberpunk
A personal ontology found in cyberpunk, read not as a prophecy of the posthuman but as a long act of mourning for the human. An essay on body and code, memory and mechanism, and on the fragile song that keeps humming beneath the circuitry.
I. A mirror, not an invention
Some artistic genres do more than entertain. They disclose a personal ontology, and they feel less like inventions than recognitions. Cyberpunk has always been one of those mirrors for me. Beneath its neon and noise it vibrates with the same philosophical tension that animates my music and my music-making, the friction between body and code, memory and mechanism, dream and decay. It speaks of a world where transcendence no longer descends from the heavens and flickers instead on a screen, where the sacred has been rewritten in algorithms, and where the hunger for meaning persists like a pulse under the circuitry.
I should say at once what kind of love this is, because it is easily mistaken for its opposite. I do not love cyberpunk because I love technology. It is exactly the other way round. I love the human, and cyberpunk is the genre that has looked most steadily at what technology does to it. I am not a posthumanist. I do not believe that the human is a provisional draft waiting to be uploaded, upgraded or overcome, and I distrust every philosophy that speaks of the body as hardware and of the person as software that could run elsewhere. What I love in cyberpunk is precisely its grief. At its best the genre is a long act of mourning for the human, written by people who could already see the machinery of its disappearance and who refused, even as they described it, to stop loving what was being lost. I read cyberpunk the way one reads an elegy, and I hear it the way one hears a lament.
That reading needs a word of explanation, because the genre has also been read in exactly the opposite way, as the joyful gospel of the cyborg and the network. I will come to that reading shortly, since my love for the genre only makes sense once it has been faced.
II. Why it speaks to me
I am drawn to ontological thresholds, the places where reality fractures and identity becomes vaporous. Cyberpunk’s obsession with what is real, with simulated minds, prosthetic bodies and the blurred line between the organic and the synthetic, mirrors my own metaphysical questions. What is the self? What does it mean to be a body rather than merely to have one? I ask these questions through the piano, through words and through composition, and cyberpunk asks them through neon-lit rain and neural implants.
As someone who has often felt like an exile, geographically, spiritually and artistically, I recognise myself in cyberpunk’s protagonists. They are nomads, misfits and hackers, displaced from utopias that never came. I too drift between languages, disciplines, nations and identities. Cyberpunk does not offer wholeness. It offers fragments that speak, and I have always been a collector of fragments.
Cyberpunk also foretold our present before it arrived, the corporatisation of emotion, the monetisation of desire, the disappearance of the private self into streams of data. Its worlds are less distant futures than the deepening of what already surrounds us, a civilisation where consciousness is outsourced and memory is sold. Fredric Jameson called the genre the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself, and I think he was right about the diagnosis. What fascinates me, though, is not the dystopia as such. It is the residue of lyricism that survives within it, the small tenderness of a machine that still dreams of music, the glitch that feels like a prayer.
I have a deep suspicion of hegemonies, musical, political and technological. Cyberpunk set out as an anti-corporate, anti-utopian and anti-authoritarian genre, a rebellion against sterile perfection, and like my own critiques of historicism it tears the smooth skin off official narratives to reveal the circuitry of exploitation beneath. I am also aware of the irony that the rebellion has become a franchise. The video game Cyberpunk 2077 and the streaming series built around it sell the revolt against corporations as a corporate product, with the same efficiency with which the music industry sells nostalgia for the song it has industrialised. That irony belongs to the genre’s own subject matter, and the best cyberpunk already knew it.
My baroque and romantic temperament sits uneasily in a digital age. Cyberpunk worlds are rotting cathedrals of data, decaying palaces of information, opulent and broken, and that tension between beauty and ruin, between ritual and decay, matches my own aesthetic. My ear hears more than tones. It hears symbols, ghosts and afterimages. Cyberpunk sounds like a synthesiser in a cathedral and looks like a haiku etched in code, so it is no wonder that I, who understand music as allegory and breath, resonate with a genre that makes machines weep and networks dream.
III. The dream of leaving the body
The strongest objection to my reading is written into the genre’s founding novel. In Neuromancer the hacker Case has lived for the bodiless exaltation of cyberspace, and when he is cut off from it his own flesh becomes a prison. For him, Gibson writes, “the body was meat”. Early cyberpunk was haunted by the dream of a mind that could slip out of its body and live as pure pattern in the network, and a whole school of theory has read the genre as the prophecy of that escape. Donna Haraway, in her manifesto for cyborgs of 1985, celebrated the cyborg as a joyful dissolution of the old boundaries between human, animal and machine. N. Katherine Hayles reconstructed the long history by which information came to be imagined as something that could lose its body without losing itself, and she showed how much of the posthuman imagination rests on that forgetting of embodiment.
I take the objection seriously, and I answer it from inside the novels. The genre seduces with the fantasy of disembodiment and then punishes it. Case’s contempt for the meat is the contempt of an addict, and the book never lets it become wisdom. Molly, the street samurai with mirrored lenses grafted over her eyes, is the most bodily presence in the story, all reflexes, scars and pain. The digital ghost of the dead hacker Dixie Flatline, a recorded personality that can think but cannot feel, asks only one thing of Case in return for his help, to be erased. The copy knows that it is not a life. And in the years that followed, the writers who are sometimes called postcyberpunk, Richard K. Morgan and Pat Cadigan among them, and Gibson himself in his later novels, brought the body back to the centre of the genre, as if its first dream had been an illness that had to be lived through to be cured.
This is where my own philosophy enters, and I must explain it, because the rest of the essay depends on it. I call it a tragic humanism of embodied appearance. Its central claim is that reality does not simply lie there as an inventory to be scanned. It appears, it presents itself to someone, and that someone is never a pure mind but a body with ears, breath, weight and a face. I call this appearing in person comparecencia, borrowing the Spanish legal word for the act of presenting oneself before a court when summoned. The image I use to think it is a loom, the loom of melos. Its warp is made of three threads the Greeks already named in their music. Léxis is the saying before anything is said, the vocative impulse by which a voice turns towards someone. Harmonía is the fitting together of sounds, the way one pitch leans on another. Rhythmós is the shape of flowing time, kin to the heartbeat, the stride and the breath. Across this warp run three strata of the living body. The first is the flesh, the face, the breath and the weight a singer puts into a note. The second is inclination, the intention and gesture by which one sound leans towards the next. The third is the toward, the direction and continuity by which a phrase is always on its way to what has not yet come. When all nine crossings of the loom are alive at once, something appears in person, and I call that event truth.
Seen from the loom, the posthuman dream has a precise shape. A machine can copy harmonía and rhythmós perfectly, the ratios of pitches and the proportions of time. What it cannot copy is the flesh that breathes them and the toward that carries them into a future that can be lost. A copy has no stake in its own continuation, which is why Dixie Flatline wants to be deleted. Only what can die can appear in person, and that is why I call my humanism tragic. Cyberpunk, read with this ear, is the most eloquent proof of it that our age has produced, because it imagined the escape from the body in such detail that it ended by showing what the escape would cost.
IV. Altered Carbon, or the price of immortality
This is why my favourite work of the genre is Altered Carbon, first Richard K. Morgan’s novel of 2002 and then the series that adapted it. Its premise is the purest experiment my ontology could ask for. Human consciousness is stored in a cortical stack at the base of the skull, and bodies have become sleeves, interchangeable shells into which a stack can be inserted, rented or bought. Death is no longer an event but an inconvenience, unless the stack itself is destroyed, which the world of the story calls real death. The very rich, nicknamed Meths after the patriarch Methuselah, store copies of themselves in orbit and live for centuries, changing bodies as one changes clothes, while the poor are resleeved into whatever flesh is cheap or are left on the shelf. Against them stand the Neo-Catholics, who refuse to be resleeved and accept real death as the price of being one person, once.
The story is cruel in exactly the right way. The Meths have conquered death and lost everything that death gave to life. They are bored, depraved and terrifyingly patient, because nothing they do can ever be irreparable, and where nothing is irreparable nothing is precious. Takeshi Kovacs, the soldier sleeved in a stranger’s body, keeps tripping over the habits of the flesh he wears, its nicotine craving, its reflexes, the way it remembers things he never lived. The body turns out not to be a garment. It has its own memory, its own inclinations, its own say in who one is. In the language of my loom, the stack holds a pattern, but the inclination and the toward live in the flesh, and they do not transfer cleanly. The series is a slow demonstration that what can be copied without loss was never a person in the first place.
That is why I watch it as a work of mourning. It shows a civilisation that has achieved the posthuman dream and is dying of it, and it keeps returning, beneath the violence and the neon, to the people who still love in a single body that will end. The fragile thing it defends is the thing my music tries to defend, the singular appearance that will not come again.
V. A lament inside the machine
As a musician I hear this mourning before I read it, because the greatest cyberpunk films are, at their core, laments. Vangelis scored Blade Runner with the Yamaha CS-80, a synthesiser whose polyphonic aftertouch let the player shape each note with the pressure of the finger, so that the most electronic instrument of its time became, in his hands, an instrument of breath. It is the synthesiser in the cathedral I spoke of, and it sings. The film ends with Roy Batty, the replicant built to die after four years, saving the life of the man sent to kill him, and then speaking of the things he has seen and that no one else will remember. Rutger Hauer, who played him, cut the speech written for him and added the line that closes it, all those moments lost “like tears in rain”. A machine mourns its own death and, in mourning it, becomes the most human presence in the film. There is no posthuman triumph in that scene. There is only the oldest human knowledge, that what has been lived will be lost, and that its loss is what makes it precious.
The Japanese masters of the genre went further and placed archaic ritual song at the centre of the machine. For Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo turned to Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the collective led by Shoji Yamashiro, who built the score from Balinese gamelan, the flutes and drums of Noh theatre and Buddhist shōmyō chant. For Ghost in the Shell, Kenji Kawai wrote a wedding song for a cyborg’s awakening, sung in an archaic form of Japanese by a choir of folk singers, with a harmony inspired by the polyphony of Bulgarian village women. In both films the most advanced technology of the imagination is accompanied by the most ancient human voice, the voice of the rite, the funeral and the village. I hear in that choice a confession. When these artists wanted to say what is at stake in a world of machines, they did not reach for the sound of the machine. They reached for the song.
That, to me, is profoundly musical, the insistence of melody within noise, the persistence of pulse in a disintegrating rhythm. Cyberpunk’s protagonists fail, often beautifully, but they fail humanly, through love, betrayal, memory and longing, and the neon only serves to light their fragility. I have spent my artistic life trying to restore the human voice within abstraction. Cyberpunk at its best does not trust disembodied reason either. It demands a soul in the circuit, and in that demand I hear an ally.
VI. An elegy, a warning, a confession
So I love cyberpunk because it is more than a genre. It is a mirror, a warning and a confession, a poem scratched onto a screen in the final hour. Like music, it remembers futures that never were and futures that still might be. In the end it is a vision of endurance rather than despair. It tells us that even in a world built of artificial light the darkness still listens, and that somewhere, through the static, a fragile human song goes on humming. It is an x-ray of the present and an elegy for the human within the machine, a nocturne played on circuitry for a world still capable of trembling.
VII. A personal library of cyberpunk
What follows is a personal map rather than a canon, gathered by the same ear that wrote the pages above. I have tried to say in a line why each work matters to me, and to mark where a work is a relative of the genre rather than one of its members.
Books
The seed of the whole genre is Philip K. Dick, whose novels keep asking whether the world we stand in is real and whether the person in front of us is a person. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) became Blade Runner, and Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and VALIS take the same question into decay, addiction and revelation. William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, founded the genre’s language and, as I have argued, its central temptation. Neal Stephenson gave it satire and scale in Snow Crash (1992), the novel that gave us the word metaverse and the modern sense of avatar, and then widened it in The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Bruce Sterling, the movement’s theorist, wrote Schismatrix and Islands in the Net. Pat Cadigan’s Synners is the genre’s most unsparing book about what happens to a mind wired into the network, and John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’ is its punk heart. Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, is the one I return to most.
Around that core stand books I would call relatives rather than members of the family. J. G. Ballard’s Crash, High-Rise and The Atrocity Exhibition are psychological proto-cyberpunk, the body fused with the machine of the motorway and the tower block. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland map the paranoid technological underbelly of modernity. Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, His Master’s Voice and The Cyberiad are a theological science fiction written before the genre had a name. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is not cyberpunk at all, but it is the most devastating novel I know about bodies made to be used, and it belongs on this shelf for that reason. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood carry the genre’s corporate nightmare into biology. Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World splits a single mind between a data city and a walled town without shadows. Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit brings cybernetic metaphysics into military space opera, and Jeff Noon’s Vurt is the genre’s most poetic British dream. Finally, for the reader who wants to see the posthuman dream stated without any mourning at all, there is Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena, the philosophy of acceleration that my own thought exists to resist.
Films
The pantheon begins with Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and its worthy successor Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017). Beside them stand Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), to be seen in its Japanese original, and Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988), the two great Japanese laments of the genre. The Matrix (1999) and its sequels by the Wachowskis, up to The Matrix Resurrections (2021), turned the question of simulated reality into popular mythology, with Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation visible on screen. Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and Tron. Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) imagined the inside of the machine, Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995) adapted Gibson directly, and Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) adapted Dick.
The wider circle includes works that share the genre’s metaphysics more than its streets. Ghost in the Shell 2. Innocence (Oshii, 2004) is the most philosophical of them all, a meditation on dolls, souls and the gods we build. Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006) is the great dream-technology film, the prelude to Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), and Nolan’s Tenet (2020) is a cousin by its obsession with time and identity. Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015), Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and A. I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg from a project of Stanley Kubrick, 2001) ask what we owe to the minds we make. Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) is a masterpiece about recorded experience, Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) the genre’s genetic humanism, Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom, 2003) its most tender love story, and Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) and Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998) its bureaucratic and noir nightmares. Tetsuo. The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989) is industrial body horror, the flesh literally invaded by metal, and A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006) rotoscopes Dick’s paranoia. I also keep a place for less famous films that deserve more love, The Thirteenth Floor (Josef Rusnak, 1999), Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018), Elysium (2013) and Chappie (2015) by Neill Blomkamp, Anon (Andrew Niccol, 2018), Prospect (Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl, 2018), The Machine (Caradog James, 2013), Automata (Gabe Ibáñez, 2014), the Italian Nirvana (Gabriele Salvatores, 1997), Hardware (Richard Stanley, 1990) and Avalon (Oshii, 2001), shot in Poland with Polish actors, haunting and forgotten. Mad Max. Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) is not cyberpunk but its apocalyptic twin.
Series
Altered Carbon (Netflix, 2018-2020) is my favourite and the purest in spirit, for the reasons I have given. Black Mirror (Charlie Brooker, from 2011) is the anthology of technological dread, Mr. Robot (Sam Esmail, 2015-2019) the confession of a hacker who cannot trust his own mind, and Westworld (Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, 2016-2022) a long parable about memory and suffering as the birth of a self. Among the animated series I would name Ghost in the Shell. Stand Alone Complex (2002-2005), Cyberpunk. Edgerunners (Studio Trigger, 2022), a tragedy set in the world of the video game I mentioned, Cowboy Bebop (1998), Serial Experiments Lain (1998), the metaphysical prophecy of the internet, and Love, Death and Robots (from 2019). Aeon Flux (MTV, 1991-1995), Max Headroom (1987-1988) and Continuum (2012-2015) complete the shelf.
Music
I have already spoken of the three scores that matter most to me, Vangelis for Blade Runner, Kenji Kawai for Ghost in the Shell and Geinoh Yamashirogumi for Akira. To them I would add Yoko Kanno’s jazz for Cowboy Bebop, Daft Punk’s score for Tron. Legacy, Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s Blade Runner 2049, and Zimmer’s Inception and Dune. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Babel and his music for the Black Mirror episode “Smithereens” show how a melody can survive inside a cold sound world. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network, Gone Girl, Ghosts I-IV) and Cliff Martinez (Drive, Only God Forgives) write the anxious pulse of the genre. Beyond the cinema, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is a founding document, and the electronic artists I keep returning to in the same spirit are Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Massive Attack, Burial, Gesaffelstein, Lorn and Arca, the retro-futurist synthwave of Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, Mega Drive and Com Truise, and the industrial lineage of VNV Nation, Front Line Assembly, Cyberaktif, Skinny Puppy and The Future Sound of London.
Visual art
The genre’s eye was formed by H. R. Giger’s biomechanical surrealism, in Necronomicon and in the creature he designed for Alien, by Syd Mead, the visual futurist behind Blade Runner, Tron and Aliens, who returned to concept work for Blade Runner 2049, and by Moebius, whose The Long Tomorrow, drawn with Dan O’Bannon in 1975, fed the vertical city of Blade Runner. Masamune Shirow’s manga of Ghost in the Shell belongs here too. Among living artists I admire Simon Stålenhag, whose Tales from the Loop and The Electric State paint melancholy machines in Scandinavian landscapes, and the digital surrealism of Beeple. And there is Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005), whose decayed metaphysical landscapes carry the genre’s baroque anxiety without a single circuit in them.
A path through it all
If Altered Carbon is one’s entry point, as it was for me in spirit, I would follow the neural path outward in three stages. Begin with Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, the sacred texts, continue through Mr. Robot and Black Mirror, the confessions, and end with Paprika, Vurt and Avalon, the dreams. Read and watched in that order, the genre reveals what I believe it always was, an x-ray of the present and a long elegy for the human, still singing inside the machine that was built to replace it.
Edition and citation
How to cite. Josu De Solaun, “Cyberpunk,” Melosías, 7 November 2025, permanent link.