In his latest comic "Cyberpunk: Peach John," manga author Rootport imagines the Japanese folklore hero Momotaro -- who is said to have been born from a giant peach -- living in a dystopian future. But while the writer created the storyline and dialogue, his sci-fi-inspired imagery was produced entirely by artificial intelligence. In fact, the 37-year-old has never drawn a comic by hand. The publishing house behind the work, Shinchosha, believes that "Cyberpunk: Peach John" is the world's first complete AI manga work. On sale in Japan from Thursday, it was illustrated using Midjourney, an online image generator that can produce detailed pictures based on users' prompts.

I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below. Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

Cyberpunk is like cyberspace: instantly recognizable, but so ubiquitous as to be intangible. An aesthetic movement and a commentary on capitalism, it can be a genre, a subjectivity, an adjective, a political approach, a time period. It can tackle artificial intelligence, embodied identity, digital immortality, or simply, in the case of Pat Cadigan's Synners, whether a marriage can survive electronic pornography addiction. Like the best fiction, cyberpunk still slips on like a pair of fingerless gloves, even if--in the 21st century, partially situated in the future it imagined--it's hard to see where fiction ends and reality begins. Despite all of this, cyberpunk often gets reduced to an aesthetic: black leather, mirror shades, implants--pieces of flare that look cool when lit by neon and computer screens.

William Gibson published his classic novel Neuromancer almost 40 years ago, but it still feels fresh today. Science fiction author Matthew Kressel has been a fan of the book ever since reading it back in 1987. "When I first read Neuromancer, everything I had read before that was golden and silver age [sci-fi]--Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Asimov, all that stuff," Kressel says in Episode 477 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So when I encountered Neuromancer, I was like, 'What is this? Science fiction of the '40s and '50s tended to evoke a consensus future of jetpacks, flying cars, and domestic robots. Neuromancer helped crystallize an alternative view of the future, one dominated by hackers, drugs, and mega-corporations. This darker view, which came to be called cyberpunk, proved far more prophetic. "More than any other science fiction book that I can think of, Neuromancer conveys what the future is going to feel like," says Geek's Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley. Science fiction author Sam J. Miller constantly finds himself discarding story ideas because he realizes that Neuromancer beat him to the punch. "The ideas are so dense and exciting," he says. "If you were to rip off half the things in this book and use them in a book now, it would be amazing.

Step out onto the streets of Night City, Cyberpunk 2077's futuristic vision of a dystopian Californian metropolis, and very little looks immediately familiar. The city's buildings have been replaced with squat brutalist apartment blocks, hologram-coated concrete towers, and neon-lit side streets where people with metal computer implants stare at strangers with glowing eyes or clench high-tech guns with gleaming cybernetic hands. Still, Night City, despite how alien its strange technology and architecture may appear, represents a future very much in touch with the concerns of our present day. Cyberpunk follows V, a character created by the player who ends up entangled in the politics of Night City's most powerful megacorporation, Arasaka, and fighting for their life after a heist gone wrong. Like the genre it's named for, the game is rooted in the 1980s futurism--in a time when the rise of home computers and rapid technological innovation butted up against increasing economic disparity caused by privatization-happy political leadership in America and abroad. So many cyberpunk staples appear quaint in hindsight.

Cyberpunk--the genre, not just the video game--is back. Altered Carbon and Westworld were hits, there's a new Matrix movie in the works, and Cyberpunk 2077 is poised to be the year's most successful, and most hyped, video game. For Mike Pondsmith, one of the genre's founding fathers, it all makes perfect sense. In the world of cyberpunk, technology has the ability to create miracles, people are struggling for power, the future is uncertain, and corporations have the power of gods. "We have a more cyberpunk world than ever before," Pondsmith says.

CD Projekt could use a big hit. The company has only one other major game franchise, and all eyes are on "Cyberpunk" because it is the industry's only original major title coming to market this holiday season. Executives at CD Projekt said the cost of making and marketing "Cyberpunk" was significantly higher than the roughly $80 million the company spent on its last game, "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," without providing specifics. They said they initially miscalculated how long "Cyberpunk" would take to complete, with the health crisis most affecting the latter stages of four years of development, following pre-production work that started around 2012. With employees homebound, making even a minor tweak--such as changing the placement of characters or objects in a scene--would take hours instead of minutes, said Marcin Iwiński, who co-founded CD Projekt with a high-school friend in the early 1990s and is now co-chief executive with Adam Kiciński.

K Allado-McDowell had been working with artificial intelligence for years--they established the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google AI--when the pandemic prompted a new, more personal kind of engagement. During this period of isolation, they started a conversation with GPT-3, the latest iteration of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model released by OpenAI earlier this year. GPT-3 is, in short, a statistical language model drawing on a training corpus of 499 billion tokens (mostly Common Crawl data scraped from the internet, along with digitized books and Wikipedia) that takes a user-contributed text prompt and uses machine learning to predict what will come next. The results of Allado-McDowell's explorations--a multigenre collection of essays, poetry, memoir, and science fiction--were recently published in the U.K. as Pharmako-AI, the first book "co-authored" with GPT-3. By its very nature, the book forces us to ask who is responsible for which aspects of its authorship and to question how we imagine or conceptualize that nonhuman half.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Apple engineers embarked on a rare collaboration with Google. The goal was to build a system that could track individual interactions across an entire population, in an effort to get a head start on isolating potentially infectious carriers of a disease that, as the world was discovering, could be spread by asymptomatic patients. Delivered at breakneck pace, the resulting exposure notification tool has yet to prove its worth. The NHS Covid-19 app uses it, as do others around the world. But lockdowns make interactions rare, limiting the tool's usefulness, while in a country with uncontrolled spread, it isn't powerful enough to keep the R number low. In the Goldilocks zone, when conditions are just right, it could save lives.

Double-dog dare you, SCOTUS: A federal judge obliterated the Trump administration's plans to include a citizenship-based question in the 2020 census, Mark Joseph Stern writes. In addition to deconstructing the various ways the commerce secretary violated established law in trying to make this happen, Judge Jesse Furman also issued a read-between-the-lines challenge to the Supreme Court, which may take up the case. Barr sinister: William Barr showed up to his confirmation hearing Tuesday with the goal of assuaging an anxious nation. The attorney general nominee succeeded, delivering what Andrew Cohen calls a "bravura performance," managing to look serious, somber, and sober. But don't be fooled, Cohen insists: Barr is still unfit to oversee the Mueller investigation. Has he become a radical socialist?