If cyberpunk no longer fits our vision of the future, what does?

Cyberpunk, once a hi-tech picture of the future, now feels passe. A new adaption of sci-fi novel The Peripheral gives a fresh perspective on how tech could transform humanity, says Annalee Newitz

By Annalee Newitz

I WAS watching the new series based on William Gibson’s 2014 sci-fi novel The Peripheral when I had one of those nerdy, late-night realisations: cyberpunk has become the retro-future, a vision of tomorrow that feels like the past. Even Gibson himself, who coined the term “cyberspace”, has stopped writing cyberpunk, a subgenre devoted to corporate dystopias centred on virtual reality and sentient AI. The Peripheral is a far cry from his 1980s novel Neuromancer, in which hackers “jack into” a virtual metropolis. …