Religion and Cyberpunk

 

Fervent by cantis5 (Deviant Art)

Religion and cyberpunk is, of course, close to my heart. My first published novels (the AngeLINK series) are largely about a dystopia where America has officially become a theocracy. Your access to social media (and all other online services) is dependent on being officially registered as a member of a number of "acceptable" religions. Those, of course, include the big three, if you will: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but also goes all the way down to things like Wicca, etc. Our main character is an ex-communicated Catholic who lost all her online priviledges... and is trying to make a living as a privite eye, a detective.

All of my AngeLINK books were out of print until recently when Wizard's Tower Press re-issued them. So, they're very dated in the way of twenty-five plus year old books, but feel free to check them out if you're at all interested. 

The short story inspiring this nostaglic little trip is:

“Terms of Enlightenment” by Patrick Hurley (Lightspeed, March 2026) https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/default/terms-of-enlightenment/

This story is fairly straight-forwardly cyberpunk, in my opinion, as our antihero, Jay, has been sentenced to "VSIM" (virtual simulation) rehabilitation by a judge and what follows is kind of classic Buddhist story of redemption and tigers, but with hackers. Like, "Should you kill Buddha on the road?" with the answer being, "Maybe, if it was simulated reality!" (except not, because our antihero does, in fact, have empathy and mercy.)

Listening to this was interesting because the narrator has a British accent and that (to my easily influenced American ears) made the story seem grittier and more anchored in a cyberpunk world, for some reason. It also cast the Buddhism in a more surprising light, because the voice talking to me was decidedly "Western." 

Buddhist images are commonly associated with cyberpunk, thanks to the fact that so many of early cyberpunk writers set their stories in Japan and, of course, Japan has its own very strong cyberpunk movement. But, people have extended this to other religions as well. There are Jewish cyberpunk stories that involve mechanical/technological reimagings of the golem folklore, as well as books like He, She and It by Marge Percy and the comic book character Rueben Flagg from American Flagg by Howard Chaykin. Islam had its cyberpunk in the Buyadeen Cycle series by George Alec Effinger and a short story that I haven't read yet by Bruce Sterling called "Compassionate, the Digital" (which you can read here: https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1560380883100.pdf) among others. I'm sure there are books beyond my own that feature various sects or branchs of Christianity and cyberpunk... and not just in a Christian Literature kind of way. 

I suspect that the reason for all of this has to do with what I have been referring to as "the questions of cyberpunk." These are the themes that you tend to see a lot in early cyberpunk as well as some of the more recent iterations and those are things like, "What is our relationship to the digital world and what does it do to our sense of empathy, our 'soul,' our basic  humanity, if you will?" It's not surprising that religion finds its way into these stories from time to time because religion also answers (or tries to) very similar questions like "What does it mean to be human? Do I exist beyond my body?" etc. 

Also, some of the big three as they are practiced today, in the modern world, stand largely in opposition to the digital experience that allows for trans and queer existance. For a writer, the conflict basically presents itself easily when you want to explore things like "What does gender even mean if I am a brain in a jar?" since religions (or at least some branches as they are interpretted today by the more conservative elements in our society) have a very strong feeling about what it means to inhabit gender n a "traditional" way.