A dystopia is an imagined society where life is oppressive, unjust, or frightening in some systematic way. Cyberpunk often depicts such societies, but the terms answer different questions. Dystopia describes the condition of a world. Cyberpunk points to a tradition of science fiction interested in technology, networked power, altered bodies, and people navigating the edges of established systems.
The overlap
Both kinds of story can ask who makes the rules and who bears their cost. Surveillance, restricted movement, and controlled information may appear in either. A city where every resident is watched could be dystopian even if its technology is ordinary by the standards of its world. It becomes especially cyberpunk when information systems, corporate or institutional power, and street-level adaptation are central to how the story works.
The distinction is not a test with a fixed number of required features. A work can belong to both descriptions. Calling something dystopian does not explain its visual language, and calling it cyberpunk does not tell us whether every part of its society is equally bleak.
A comparison through two imagined cities
In one city, a government assigns every person a job and forbids travel. Its oppression is clear, even if the story says little about networks, body modification, or the people who exploit gaps in the system. “Dystopia” is the more informative first description.
In another city, residents buy neural connections to work. Employers own the data those connections produce, and people excluded from official networks build informal alternatives. The city is also dystopian, but cyberpunk helps name its particular relationship between technology, power, and outsiders. These are invented examples for comparison, not summaries of existing works.
Why the label matters to a reader
Labels are useful when they set expectations accurately. If a reader wants to understand a society's rules, ask what makes it oppressive. If they want to understand its cyberpunk qualities, ask how technology is owned, how people adapt, and whose perspective the story follows. The two questions can lead to different details in the same scene.