[jhbadger]

That (also called "future noir") actually is a separate genre, related to cyberpunk, but not exactly it. A lot of works loosely called cyberpunk have noir tendencies with detectives, femme fatales, and an overall 1940s feel, but other works really do have the 1970s punk feel.

[A_D_E_P_T]

There's a common thread. Literary cyberpunk, and "future noir," are both centered around crime: Hackers, contraband-smugglers (from new nano-drugs to brain implants,) people who have found themselves caught between the gears of criminal conspiracies, etc.

The defining characteristic of 80s-90s cyberpunk is that it's about near-future crime. So it shares an awful lot -- if not absolutely everything -- with noir. The "punk" aspect is that cyberpunk stories are often told from the perspective of the criminal rather than the detective.

The r*dditors who go on and on about "i-it's all about urban dystopia and corporate conspiracies!" are dead wrong, because both elements don't always (-- indeed very rarely --) feature in the foundational literary works of the genre. Take Burning Chrome, for instance: All of the stories are about crime, but the features of the settings are rarely clear.

So much for literary cyberpunk. Cyberpunk in art -- e.g. www.cyberpunk.tech -- is its own thing, and just as old.