Calling all Chooms!
BayCon 2027's theme, "Night City Rising," turns our attention to cyberpunk, a genre built from neon, static, and the collision of high technology and low life. BayCon is a community that gathers every year to celebrate the boundless creativity and cultural insight found across speculative fiction, and this year we turn to the city after dark.
We invite you to explore stories of corporate control, digital identity, augmented bodies, and street-level resistance, especially those crafted by the writers, filmmakers, artists, and game designers who built this genre from the ground up, and the ones still shaping it today. Cyberpunk has never been only chrome and rain. It is a lens for asking who profits when the future arrives unevenly, and who fights back when it does.
Speculative fiction is, at its core, a vessel for questions. What happens when the machines outlast the people who built them? Who owns your memories when your body is for sale? Who controls the signal, and who survives outside its reach? From the neon-lit streets of classic American cyberpunk to the philosophical weight of Japanese animation, from Black and queer reclamations of a genre once coded as boys' club noir to Caribbean and diasporic visions of urban dystopia, cyberpunk has always been bigger than its own aesthetic. Storytellers keep expanding what "the city" can mean, and who gets to rise within it.
This year, BayCon highlights the contributions of foundational voices like William Gibson, whose novel Neuromancer helped bring the genre into mainstream consciousness; Pat Cadigan, often called the "Queen of Cyberpunk" for reclaiming its sensibility and stakes; game designer Mike Pondsmith's famous tabletop system Cyberpunk 2020 and its successor Cyberpunk RED gave the genre its lasting rules of style, code, and survival, and later inspired CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077; Samuel R. Delany's dense, subversive science fiction laid groundwork the genre still builds on; and Nalo Hopkinson, whose urban dystopias widened the genre's map. Animation legends like Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of Akira, and Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell, gave the genre some of its most lasting images of consciousness caught inside the machine, and reaching past it, work you can experience firsthand in our world-famous anime screening room. Filmmakers like Lilly and Lana Wachowski, the directors whose The Matrix turned resistance against control systems into a cultural touchstone, continue to redefine what it means to tell stories that are dystopian, political, and defiant at once.
Through panels, readings, screenings, tabletop play, and creative spaces, BayCon 2027 will spotlight these voices and the legacy they have built. Our anime room will run a full slate of cyberpunk classics and deep cuts on the big screen, the same room BayCon fans have counted on for years to find the titles no one else is showing. From hard-edged tech noir to high-concept animation to the game tables where players write their own runs through the sprawl, we celebrate the storytellers who remind us that the future is not handed down. It is hacked, rewritten, and fought for.
BayCon 2027 is your invitation to jack in, and maybe, just maybe, find out what is rising in the dark.