i have discussed several months ago the ambience and aesthetic similarties 
i think exist between tolkien and wolfe's work and cyberpunk.

but something occured to me about genre conventions today. i was thinking about a protest in new york that i saw several years and remembered the riot gear of the police, and that got me to thinking about the recent ghost in the shell television series and the popularity of "cop drams" and the reasons why we enjoy detective stories and crime stories especiallytough and heroic cops or detectives.. who sometimes have a philosophical side and always are more vulnerable and mechancholy than they let on. (which is a role severian often plays)

 one of our first reality television shows in a contemporary sense besides things like game shows, talk shows, and the news (i'll stand by the claim that the news is reality tv) was of course "cops".

in william gibson's bridge trilogy, rydell, is a policeman and then a security guard, and is a candidate for the reality tv show "cops in trouble."  this is more of a joke than anything, and not very central to the story. but gibson is enamoured with mystery and crime noire. his last book "pattern recognition" was i think not even crime noire but an actual mystery.

while wolfe is definitely not cop drama, his work is as we have said a kind of detective story and that is only a short step away from crime noire which permeates cyberpunk.

arguably the first cyberpunk novel, do androids dream of electric sheep is a detective story and crime noire, and the ridley scott's film blade runner had such an effect on japan that a subgenre of scifi anime has always been cyberpunk whether as adventure or mystery.

in the case of the ghost in the shell films and recently the television series, we actually do have not only a mystery but also crime noire, cop drama, and a detective story with the theme machine transcendance if not divine transcendace (though in the as i have said oshi mamoru was trained as a catholic priest).   

i find it very interesting that oshi has unlike gibson has put together a more identical set of motifs to wolfe's and yet produced something so different, though they seem to address many of the same things.  

i guess what i am claiming, is that besides the bildungsroman or the "heroic quest" (i think campbell is very shallow) or spiritual meditation (i won't say allegory), a good chunk of wolfe actually is cyberpunk....

i am afraid my memory is going bad but someone just said that after reading (there are doors? which i have not read) that it was the best philip k. dick book not written by philip k. dick.

that is the point i am trying to make exactly. if cyberpunk isn't looking at wolfe (and it might be though i have no evidence or thought about it much) it is looking to dick and i have not read enough dick, but i think, in his position, wolfe cannot looking at dick.

in any case, wolfe is to some degree a cyberpunk author or cyberpunk is, if any genre can cliam to be, in the same tradition as wolfe.

EOT;