[Chipped]

Anyone know any authors similar to William Gibson and books purely related to Cyberpunk. I want to learn indepth about the cyberpunk genre in order to write my bio for my char.

[Digital_Viking]

Neal Stephenson
Walter Jon Williams
Bruce Sterling
Steven Barnes

[Crunch]

Much of Greg Bear, All of Pat Cadigan. Most of Norman Spinrad. Some of Rudy Rucker. All of John Shirley. You can do a lot worse than picking up the Mirrorshades anthology edited by Sterling as a starting point. It's from the 80s (when Cyberpunk was the coming thing) so the future may seem a little dated (I just finished rereading Islands in the Net by Sterling and video cassettes feature prominently in his future, it doesn't hurt the story but it shades into the retro) but the stories are great. Additionally there's a brand new Cyberpunk anthology edited by Blake that looks awesome.

If you have access to any of the last two years of Fantasy and Science Fiction Naomi Kritzer is three stories in (Liberty's Daughter May/June 2012, High Stakes Nov/Dec 2012, and Solidarity March/April 2013) to a distopic near future series that seems really promising. You might check with your local public library to see if they have or can get them for you.

While it's not technically "cyberpunk" Philip K. Dick's work laid a lot of the ground work. Asimov's Lije Bailey novels (in which a cop with a robot partner solves crimes on a hive world) are an influence. David Drake's Lacey stories (a series of stories about a brainscrubbed detective in a world in which privacy has been outlawed) are massively good. I'd also recommend looking at Alfred Bester especially the Demolished Man. Donnerjack by Zelazny and Lindskold is good as well.

[Eugene]

Charles Stross' Halting State and Rule 34 are good if not exactly punk.  George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran series is seminal and a look into an Islamic cyberpunk worlds with lots of BTLs and personafix chips.  Giannis Milonogiannis' Old City Blues comic is also awesome, and readable online.

[Djinnocide]

I don't think his writing style is necessarily like Gibson's from a technique standpoint, but if you're itching for that good futuristic/noir style, check out Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon. Great book.

[Crunch]

Charles Stross' Halting State and Rule 34 are good if not exactly punk.  George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran series is seminal and a look into an Islamic cyberpunk worlds with lots of BTLs and personafix chips.  Giannis Milonogiannis' Old City Blues comic is also awesome, and readable online.

Actually Stross' Laundry Files may be the most Shadowrun Like books in existence.

[Digital_Viking]

I don't think his writing style is necessarily like Gibson's from a technique standpoint, but if you're itching for that good futuristic/noir style, check out Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon. Great book.

LOVE Takeshi Kovacs

[GiraffeShaman]

Transmetropolitan comic series by Warren Ellis.

[BlueTroll]

You could do worse than Simon Morden - his Metropolis series is nice.

[TX_DM]

Hannu Rajaniemi, the Quantum Thief. His work is considered Post-human, but then it still has all the essential elements.
Charles Stross, Accelerando, It'll bend your head around.
Cory Doctorow, because William Gibson recommends him.
Gary A. Ballard, Under the Amoral Bridge (series), this one is much more traditional cyberpunk, and pretty good for an indie work on amazon.

The problem is, cyberpunk as a genre existed for all of about 30 seconds on the literary stage then it was washed away by its own commercialization. Have you watched "Johnny Mnemonic" lately? A terrible movie for its time. The story is still awesome, though.

Edit- The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, features more bioware than cyberware but pretty much the same thing and really awesome and unique perspective.

[Silence]

There are still novels that share a lot of themes with it.  And TX has a point.  Hollywood grabbed onto cyberpunk as a savior and killed it.  I'm kind of surprised that nobody recommended Cat's Paw, though.  Let's face it, what really happened was that most of the writers were writing in the late '70s and through the '80s, and when offered a decent chunk of change for the rights, had no issues signing the rights over, and lost their control.  Phillip K. Dick was pretty fortunate that Blade Runner stuck so close to his story, so he was completely blindsided by what happened with Johnny Mnemonic.  Most of the people he'd worked with had been fans of his, so he ended up influencing a LOT of TV, and still does, when somebody approaches him in the right way.  J. Michael Strazynski actually managed to get Dick as a writer and technical consultant on Babylon Five.

Ultimately, the cyberpunk genre is about what happens when the attitude of "No Future" ends up in the future.  Frankly, one of the best sources I can give anyone who wants to understand what the games about is David Drake's Hammer's Slammer's series.  Not really "cyberpunk" but the central characters are professionals who are usually on the shit end of the stick, and just trying to survive, because if they're dead, they can't spend their paychecks. 

Something else to consider when writing your bio is how your character deals with magic.  One of the great references for the darker side of things is the Hellblazer comics.  It has a lot of the old punk ethos to it, and John Constantine makes a great guy to model a magician you really hate on.  Frankly, I think Harlequin was modeled on him.

Shadowrun is, ultimately a game about a world that changed drastically, and the characters are professionals at what they do.  The amusing and sad thing about it is that most of these characters have no idea how much they and their are molded after the old punk ethos, and the ones who have survived for a while are still professionals.  This is not to say they aren't going to occasionally get a wild hare up their ass about something, and decide to do something about it.  But it does mean that only using the seminal cyberpunk writers is not really going to help you get the full feel for writing your bio.

[Crunch]

Philip K Dick died in March of '82, Babylon 5 came out in '93.

I assume you meant Gibson re: Johnny Mnemonic.

And Gibson is still writing great books that are Thematically Cyberpunk, now they just happen in the present rather than the future.

[Silence]

I thought Dick died in the late '90s.  Damn.

[ImaginalDisc]

Charles Stross' Halting State and Rule 34 are good if not exactly punk.  George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran series is seminal and a look into an Islamic cyberpunk worlds with lots of BTLs and personafix chips.  Giannis Milonogiannis' Old City Blues comic is also awesome, and readable online.

Dear god, yes. The take on personality, language, skill, and data modules alone makes it worth reading.

[DWC]

It's a bit of a stretch, but look for Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies.  They're technically Warhammer 40,000 licensed fiction, but are so far removed from the frontline bolter porn that they're pretty much hard science fiction with elements of cosmic horror in the vein of Eclipse Phase.