REMINDER: this is the last call for FAQ questions. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about my story, “Cyberpunk,” or the writing thereof, send it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. Given that we want to have Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk Revisited ready to release in March 2025, I have set a hard deadline of Saturday, February 1st, 2025. After that date, any and all questions about “Cyberpunk” will receive the same reply: “Buy the book.”
We’re planning to have the e-book uploaded and ready for pre-orders by mid-February. We’re also talking about doing a special limited-edition hardcover, most likely to be signed and serialized, but those plans are still in flux.
In the meantime, some new questions have come in.
Q: What do you think of George Alec Effinger’s contribution to Cyber stuff? He’s the one we discovered first, and my wife is a real fan. She was saddened by his death, but she felt his writing suggested a life on the edge.
A: George was a friend. Not the best of friends, as concomitant with living life on the edge he was often broke and in need of help, but I counted him as a friend.
A year or so before he died he surprised me by phoning one day, to tell me he had three novels under contract and his publisher had asked him to find a co-author, just in case his health problems got worse and he couldn’t finish the books. He asked if I was interested.
I was, and we tried to work together for a while, but by then his medical problems had progressed to the point where he had trouble articulating what he was thinking, or even remembering what he’d said from one day to the next. Eventually I had to give up and back out of the project. It was unworkable.
What do I think of his contribution? I thought When Gravity Fails was brilliant, and was always a little sad that I never thought to ask him to sign my hardcover copy. For that matter I thought What Entropy Means to Me was brilliant, too, when I first read it, but the one book I most regret not asking him to sign was my hardcover copy of Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson.
Why that book? Because it made me laugh.
Q: Wow. I just read your December 30 post, but I feel like I’m missing something. Bottom-line it for me.
A: The bottom line is that my four-book deal with Jim Baen just about destroyed my fiction writing career. Before I signed those contracts, I was a promising young writer who was selling every short story he finished and already had one novel out. The time I spent as editor of the share-cropped anthology series would have been much better spent writing and selling more of my own stories, and the Cyberpunk novel fiasco prevented my selling any novel-length fiction to anyone for five years. By the time I finally was able to buy my freedom from that contract—and it cost me thousands to do so—the two markets I’d been selling most of my short fiction to, Amazing and Aboriginal, were coughing blood, and while I had recovered the rights to the Cyberpunk novel, every agent and editor I spoke with assured me there was no point in trying to sell it anymore, as the market had spoken with Godlike finality, and cyberpunk was dead.
Cyberpunk is dead, you say? Okay, then hand me a wooden stake and a mallet, and let’s make sure. Which is how I came to write Headcrash.
Q: Great story! The game had a good story line, but was more for high end specs consoles and pc!
A: Um, thanks, but I had absolutely nothing to do with Cyberpunk, the video game, Cyberpunk, the role-playing game, Cyberpunk, the comic book, Cyberpunk, the TV series, Cyberpunk, the lunchbox, Cyberpunk, the flame-thrower…
People seem to imagine that being the guy who wrote “Cyberpunk” has made me rich and famous. It made me famous, all right, but that’s where it ends. Aside from the original short story sale in 1982, and the very few publishers who have had the decency to pay me for reprint rights rather than simply bootlegging the story, I have never made another dime off “Cyberpunk.”
I’ve had a lot of near misses. In the early 1990s, some gaming company approached me wanting to buy the rights to use “Cyberpunk” for a role-playing game. I was interested at first, until it became clear that they didn’t actually want to use my story or have me be involved in any way, they just wanted to own the name, so as to establish standing in order to sue the makers of the Cyberpunk: 2020 game.
This continues to this day. People approach me claiming they want to buy the rights to adapt “Cyberpunk” for stage, screen, gaming, or other purposes (and the less said about the folks who wanted to do Cyberpunk: The Musical, the better), but invariably, they don’t want my ideas and they don’t want me involved, they just want to own the name, in hopes that it will give them leverage over someone else. Right before the pandemic I was being aggressively courted by a company that claimed they wanted to option “Cyberpunk” and turn it into a direct-to-streaming TV series—
But once again, it turned out they didn’t really want to use my story or have me involved in any way, they just wanted to establish standing, so that the makers of the Cyberpunk: 2077 TV series would pay them to shut up and go away.
Sigh.
For the record, the Rebel Moon movies on Netflix have nothing to do with my 1996 novel of the same name, either; and no, we never received even a token “shut up and go away” payment.
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REMINDER: this is the last call for FAQ questions. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about my story, “Cyberpunk,” or the writing thereof, send it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. Given that we want to have Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk Revisited ready to release in March 2025, I have set a hard deadline of Saturday, February 1st, 2025. After that date, any and all questions about “Cyberpunk” will receive the same reply: “Buy the book.”
And while you’re waiting for it, considering buying some other books, too, okay? At least, take a look at SS#23, and maybe read “Eddie’s Upgrade,” by Kevin Stadt. If you like cyberpunk, you’ll love that story.
