ABSTRACT
Cyberpunk has always been predominantly visual and its central appeal has always been tied to the reflections of mirrored sunglasses, visions of majestically floating gigantic neon billboards, and depictions of virtual realities as translucent vectors of logic. As both cyberpunk's original literary texts and films and its most recent incarnations in video games, short films, and even digital art attest, virtual realities, virtual interfaces, and neon-saturated urban sprawls define the genre; therefore, cyberpunk is most productively conceived of as a visual aesthetics that revolves around incarnations of light, understood both as a visual phenomenon and a form of energy that cyberpunk texts implicitly assume is never-ending. From the perspective of its ocular origins, cyberpunk and its obsession with incarnations of light may be a reflection of science fiction's quickening into digitality and recognition of the long-suppressed role of visuality in science fiction at large.
