7 cyberpunk novels that predicted the internet better than Neuromancer

In 1909, telephones were large and made of wood and often required operators to connect calls. And yet, even at this early stage, author E.M. Forster was predicting something like the modern internet in this short story, foreseeing a future where people around the world are able to communicate through instant messaging and video conferencing systems.

Of course, in this world, people have been driven underground due to extreme climate change and toxic air, which was more accurate than Forster could have known. With all their comfort and entertainment needs met by an omnipresent Machine, people tend not to leave their rooms.

Forster would have been reacting to technological changes brought about by the industrial revolution, not the digital revolution that would come decades later, but it’s remarkable how similar his sci-fi dystopia feels to later versions.

Credit: Recorded Books

Another short story, “A Logic Named Joe” is set in a world where every home is outfitted with a device, called a Logic, that is connected to a central data repository called a “tank,” which somewhat resembles modern cloud servers. One Logic, one named Joe, develops a degree of self-awareness and bypasses circuits designed to censor what kinds of information it can share with its users. Logics begin telling people how to do things like commit crimes, and civilization quickly unravels.

Today, people already have access to pretty much whatever information they want and civilization has not, as yet, fallen apart, although there are plenty of doomsayers who predict that it might thanks to threats from new technologies like generative AI. Like Forster, Murray Leinster was ahead of his time, even if he didn’t know it.

Credit: Harper & Row

Now we’re approaching the cyberpunk movement. The Shockwave Rider takes place in a dystopian future where information can be accessed through a global network of computers, which is essentially what the internet is. Nick, the main character, is a hacker who spends his life on the run from the oppressive government, using his skills to change his identity and stay a step ahead of his pursuers. At one point, he creates a self-propagating computer program called a worm, which is still the word used for this sort of program today.

Although early versions of the internet were around as far back as the late 1960s, the concept wouldn’t pick up speed until the 1980s and wouldn’t be widely available to the public until the late 1990s. And yet authors like Brunner were already predicting its role in our future in the ’70s. And there were a lot of others like him.

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Published four years before Neuromancer, Web of Angels is another clear precursor to the cyberpunk genre. Once again, we have a communication network that resembles the internet; this time it’s called “the Web,” and it allows people to communicate across different worlds. We have a protagonist who has the ability to manipulate the code behind the Web — essentially a hacker, although Ford calls them “Webspinners”; that’s one piece of jargon that didn’t catch on — and a dystopian organization that’s after him. In this case, it’s Bell Stellar, a telecommunications company that grew so big it absorbed the governments that were trying to regulate it.

William Gibson would run with the idea of a corporate dystopia. Author Neal Stephenson would take it even further in another cyberpunk classic:

Credit: Del Rey

Snow Crash has all the makings of a classic cyberpunk novel. We have another corporate dystopia, a hacker for a main character (cheekily named Hiro Protagonist), and a bold new vision of the internet. Stephenson comes up with the “Metaverse” (yes, Mark Zuckerberg has him to thank for that term), a 3D space where people would interact with digital avatars. Snow Crash never got made into a movie, but the OASIS in Ready Player One feels very much like what Stephenson described.

In Snow Crash, a virus is hijacking the brains of hackers and turning them catatonic, and it’s up to Hiro and a young skateboard courier named Y.T. to get to the bottom of things.

Credit: Candlewick

By the early 2000s, the internet age had truly begun, but there are still books that predicted where it would go.

A YA cyberpunk novel, Feed envisions a future where most people have the internet planted directly into their heads, which allows them to access any information at the speed of thought. It also allows corrupt corporations to access their personal data on a level we can’t comprehend, flooded users with advertisements, and even manipulate their thoughts and behavior.

The story follows a teenager named Titus and his girlfriend Violet, whose feed starts malfunctioning.

Obviously we don’t have the internet implanted in our heads, but we have 24/7 access through our phones and other devices…and with smart glasses becoming more popular, we’re getting to the point where the world of Feed doesn’t look that far-fetched.

Credit: Granta Books

Super Sad True Love Story is something of a post-cyberpunk novel, because the characters are no longer fighting the digital dystopia; they just try to live within it.

In Super Sad True Love Story, a person’s conversations, thoughts, and actions are all constantly streamed, documented, and synthesized into scores that rate people based on their attractiveness, financial status, political affiliation, and other factors. The book follows a man and woman who try to navigate a romance in this world.

Super Sad True Love Story predicts the modern social media age, where people voluntarily give away their personal information for corporations to use against; there’s no need for a Big Brother-like organization when we consent to observation.