“High-tech, low life.”

That was the phrase I kept running across a few years ago when I started asking, “What is cyberpunk? What makes the genre unique?” It’s a pretty good summary. Cyberpunk stories envision a world teeming with groundbreaking technology, but also filled with poverty, crime, and bloodshed––oftentimes to a greater degree than the real world.

Others will say cyberpunk fiction is defined by the aesthetics: rainy downtown nights, neon signs and LED screens flashing in the darkness, Japanese and English mixed together, trench coats, mohawks, piercings, cybernetic implants, drugs, sirens.

And often what’s discussed is the mood of cyberpunk stories. They’re melancholy.

Bleak.

It’s a Man vs. Society story and the house always wins. People are desperate. We are small and corporations are big, to the point of overwhelming us in every way. No point in saving the world, then. All that matters is survival, and getting paid. No one’s looking out for you, not even the police. Especially not the police. They’re run by megacorps, just like politicians and everything else.

These are the kinds of things cyberpunk characters will tell you. And it’s certainly one way of analyzing these stories. But there’s a deeper core in the mainframe that generates this genre. And I believe it’s this:

Cyberpunk blends utopian and dystopian visions of the future

What you’ll find in this genre is that these two visions are intermingled. There are some amazing technological inventions in this world. You just have to walk through an urban wasteland to go get them.

Think of the utopian and dystopian elements as two knobs on an e-bike. One changes the wheels bright orange, the other bright turquoise. Turning one up turns the other down, but neither one can be turned all the way off. The wheels always contain both colors, to some degree.

When we hear “cyberpunk” we usually think of movies like Blade Runner, books like Neuromancer, TV shows like Altered Carbon, or video games like Cyberpunk 2077. In these worlds, the turquoise color (dystopian element) is turned most of the way up.

But this is just one flavor of the genre; there are three:

• Majority dystopian
• Majority utopian
• Even split

And each variation shows us that technology merely acts as an amplifier on all aspects of human nature. In some cases, we see amazing technological feats with just a hint of the downsides. In other stories, the endless iterations of human depravity are shown through each and every cybernetic device––except (perhaps) in our protagonist.

There’s always a light in the darkness within these worlds. It’s not horror, nor pure dystopia. There’s usually something, or someone, redeemable.

And in that way, it mirrors our own world.

No matter how marvelous the latest tech product seems, it will be riddled with the same flaws of every human heart.

And no matter how dark the world gets, it’s never hopeless, because a non-neon light has come into the world.