William Gibson
Cyberpunk's defining writer and the most culturally influential SF author since the Big Three: cyberspace, the Matrix lineage, fashion, music and the entire aesthetic of the networked age trace to Neuromancer.
Cyberpunk
High tech, low life: hackers, megacorps, neural implants and neon-lit street-level futures, codified in the 1980s.
The authors (3)
Neal Stephenson
The bridge between cyberpunk and Silicon Valley's self-image: the Metaverse, Google Earth's acknowledged inspiration (Snow Crash's Earth software) and a tech-industry readership that treats his novels as product roadmaps.
Tad Williams
The crucial bridge between Tolkien's epic and Martin's: Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is the acknowledged direct inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire, and Otherland anticipated the metaverse novel by a generation.
Essential books, oldest first (8)
The Girl Who Was Plugged In
Hugo winner (1974) and proto-cyberpunk's key exhibit — Gibson has acknowledged the debt; the brain-in-a-jar celebrity economy reads today as documentary.
Neuromancer
The first novel to win the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K.
Burning Chrome
The seedbed of cyberpunk — 'Burning Chrome' coined cyberspace, 'Johnny Mnemonic' got the film, and 'The Gernsback Continuum' remains the sharpest single critique of SF's own nostalgia.
Snow Crash
Time top-100 novel, coiner of 'Metaverse' and 'avatar' in their modern senses, and Silicon Valley's most-cited fictional blueprint — for better and visibly worse.
The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Hugo winner (1996); the Primer became a real-world fixation of educational technologists — the genre's most direct blueprint for AI tutoring, decades early.
City of Golden Shadow
The genre's great pre-broadband metaverse epic — VR worldbuilding at a scale not attempted again until the streaming era, and a visible influence on everything from the Matrix sequels' discourse…
Chasm City
BSFA Award winner; a standalone noir that many readers rate the most purely enjoyable Revelation Space novel, and proof the universe could carry any genre dropped into it.
Pattern Recognition
The model for SF-of-the-present that much of the literary mainstream quietly adopted; viral marketing, fan forums and brand paranoia mapped before the platforms that perfected them existed.