Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

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Behind him, under the laser light of a Blaupunkt holestage, people a foot high chattered about the war in Thailand and how lucky the United States had been to escape another Vietnam. Curved partitions in trans-lucent foam, glowing with the soft lights placed behind them, marked a central area, then undulated away, forming a corridor that led into darkness.

An un-holy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens. Bruce Sterling is a recent winner of the Nebula Award and the author of the nonfiction book "The Hacker Crackdown" as well as novels and short story collections. I didn’t rate all the stories, but I did think it was doing something more interesting than the Niven and Asimov that formed much of my then sf diet.Similarly, in The Matrix, mirrors are often featured in scenes, both distorting and showing an image of the characters in reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theories in Simulation and Simulacra (1981) — a work that even appears as a fake book in Neo’s apartment. It's all in the mix"—this is true of much Eighties art and is as applicable to cyberpunk as it is to punk mix-and-match retro fashion and multitrack digital recording.

Contributions from Greg Bear and Pat Cadigan also rocked my adolescent world, but it was James Patrick Kelly’s Solstice that really blew my mind.Adding to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Robbie Davis-Floyd stated in 1998 that “we are all cyborgs now,” simply for using computers and earphones or for wearing glasses. A one-off with pure roots of rebellion--surely how Sterling wanted to cap the collection by putting the 'punk' in 'cyberpunk'. Anyway they said it was a psychiatric problem, so they sent me to see a shrink, It was around then that your guys got in touch with me. The hacker and the rocker are this decade's pop-culture idols, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots. Later he realized this was a mistake—he was still taking antinausea pills (USE CAUTION IN OPERATING MACHINERY).