Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

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Innis pushed off and swooped across, grabbing the man as he passed, taking them both to the opposite wall and kicking to carom them outward. I reread a Philip K Dick short story ‘Web of Air, Chains of Aether’ (or something like) last week and it was only 10% of the story I remember. After Rice tells him that she was decapitated in the original timeline by French revolutionaries, Mozart suggests that Rice go meet her, since he saved her life. Wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit with SENTRAX in red letters down its left breast, and soft black slippers, he floated in a brightly lit white corridor, held gingerly to a wall by one of the jumpsuit’s Velcro patches.

I agree with Dano on Islands in the Net, classic cyberpunk, though personally I hated Snow Crash (I know, I’m a terrible human being) even though I like Stephenson generally.

Critics, myself included, persist in label-mongering, despite all warnings; we must, because it's a valid source of insight—as well as great fun. George Jordan sat on the kitchen floor and vomited, then pushed himself away from the shining pool, which looked very much like what remained in the can. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers.

William Gibson's Neuromancer , surely the quintessential cyberpunk novel, is set in Tokyo, Istanbul, Paris. As an image, and therefore a virtual “object,” Neo, as seen reflected in Morpheus’ sunglasses, has the potential to be The One — this is how Morpheus always sees him. And though the semioticist Charlie Sanders Peirce has criticized this notion in the 20th century, the Scholastic idea was that each seed is a potential tree, thus each seed is a “virtual” tree.While the 1995 movie adaptation of Gibson’s story, Johnny Mnemonic, featured Molly renamed as Jane, and with no visual augmentations, the Wachowski Brothers brought her back to the trilogy that kept cyberpunk alive and kicking for the next century.

An invisible flame passing between them, or a boiling cloud of pheromones—her eyes seemed to sparkle with them. With Cyberpunk, I find it tends to fall in a scale from optimistic, like in Trouble and her friends, to full blown dystopia like Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller.

Britain's innovative SF magazine Interzone has also been a hotbed of cyberpunk activity, publishing Shirley, Gibson, and Sterling as well as a series of groundbreaking editorials, inter-views, and manifestos. Morgan and McDonald are fine, but just too interested in playing with genre tropes to really hook me. Broken Angels, I’ve not read it yet I admit, to be honest I couldn’t see why Altered Carbon needed any sequel, which I suspect put me off a bit.

Starting with “Mirrorshades” or “Snow Crash,” actually, because the one has the diversity of writing thing, and the other has humor (which first-wave cyberpunk kind of lacked) and thus is more accessible. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined—and confined—in an ivory tower.

The online zines like Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Strange Horizons all have good things, and Asimovs and Weird Tales often have interesting stuff. At this point, Parker, the propaganda officer, arrives, along with a number of former ladies who are all hoping to seduce him to get a chance to "sleep in [his] clean sheets and raid his medicine cabinet" although Parker is "short, fat, and repulsive". Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the impact of SF's last designated "movement," the New Wave, brought a new concern for literary craftsmanship to SF.