Headcrash is a

satirical Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming o ...

cyberpunk Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian Futurism, futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of low-life, lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial in ...

novel by Bruce Bethke, published in 1995 by

Warner Books Grand Central Publishing is a book publishing imprint of Hachette Book Group, originally established in 1970 as Warner Books when Warner Communications acquired the Paperback Library. When Time Warner sold their book publishing business to Hache ...

. It won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1995. It follows Jack Burroughs, who loses his bureaucratic corporate job and goes undercover on the InfoBahn (internet), creating a new persona as a popular, cool virtual character aliased MAXK00L, in a

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...

social media area: Bethke unintentionally named the entire

subgenre of

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imagination, imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, Paral ...

in his 1983 story "

Cyberpunk Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian Futurism, futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of low-life, lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial in ...

Reception

Enjoying moderate sales and mixed reviews (often centering around whether the reviewer saw it as satire or a failed attempt at sincere comedy), the book went on to capture a few awards, most notably the Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback novel in 1995.1995 Philip K. Dick Award
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References

1995 novels Cyberpunk novels {{1990s-sf-novel-stub