1999: Larry and Andy Wachowski release The Matrix, the first mind-bending installment in what will become an influential sci-fi film trilogy. Cyberpunks quickly forget that technocultural flops like Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity ever existed.

The movie took cyberfiction staples like those found in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy — including his classic 1984 novel, Neuromancer, from which the internetworked concept of “the matrix” is taken — and mashed them together with anime, wire-fu, postmodernism, metaphysics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations,...