Bruce Bethke (1955 – )

Bethke has been a surfer, rock musician, teacher, and sausage maker before settling down to the life of writer and software developer in the wilds of Minnesota. His fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, Asimov's Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and Easyriders. The author of the Philip_K._Dick award-winning novel, Headcrash, as well as many other works. Bethke is at this date best-known for inventing the word "Cyberpunk" in his 1980 short story of the same name. He is perhaps less celebrated for being the author of more than two hundred computer software books, manuals, and articles.

Some years ago Bethke collected everything he had to say about the subject into an essay, "The Etymology of Cyberpunk," which can be found on his personal web site. Yet every spring, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, he gets deluged with email from earnest young students writing term papers who want to ask him the same six questions. The reason for this remains a mystery.