Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

Bruce Sterling's "Mirrorshades" represents the first anthology of the nascent movement known as cyberpunk. It is also a coming of maturity for science fiction as the dominant form of postmodern literary expression. This is illustrated most vividly by Darren Harris-Fain's critique of the first story in the anthology, "The Gernsback Continuum". The story by William Gibson is a denunciation of the ideals of Gernsback, the founding principles of American science fiction, and Modernism through the adventures of a photographer on assignment to catalog the remaining architectural remnants of "American Streamlined Moderne" described by the character's employer "...as a kind of alternative America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams." As Harris-Fain explains "This futuristic yet historical architecture is explicitly connected with science fiction stories, pulp-magazine artwork...and movies such as Metropolis (1926) and Things to Come (1936)..." The Gibsonian character's immersion into this results in his timeslipping into Gernsback's time-space continuum and seeing the following visions of this Modernist conception of the future world and its inhabitants:"they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American....the Future had come to America first...in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuels, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world."The character finds this a nightmarish experience due to the connection he has already made with the architecture that "...Albert Speer built for Hitler". He equates it to "...the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda".While most of the rest of the collection does not reach as direct a level of societal critique they do illustrate strongly why cyberpunk was more than just a science fiction subgenre but rather the vanguard of literature in late capitalist society.And frankly, like much science fiction it is easy to read and damn good fun.

This was an interesting anthology. 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. This falls a little from column A and a little from Column B. Some had a tinge of hope at the end and others wanted to see the world burn. It's a good read and a great stepping point to introduce people to other writers in the genre beyond Gibson, Stephenson, and Sterling.

The book came in great condition. The only reason I didn't score it as 5 stars is because it wasn't brand new (which I knew when I was buying it). All the pages are there, and because of the books age (not because of the seller), the pages are tinged a little yellow, but that's natural. My book had no "ear folds" on any of the pages and I love it. If I lose this one I'll buy another from this seller.

It's interesting to read the early cyberpunk to get a sense of where the genera has been. The visions of where technology could could lead as written in the early 80's are fun and some are eerily accurate. This is a must have for anyone interested in the genera.

A classical and good start for discovering some of the first cyberpunk novellas.That's not the ultimate anthology, but you can get reading it some hints on this mouvements in the 80's.

There are a couple of cyberpunk stories in here, but there are too many other genres, like post-apocalyptic and urban fantasy, for me to be happy calling this a Cyberpunk Anthology.Genre aside, the quality of the stories is a mixed bag too. There's a stpry-by-story blog review which I found interesting to read alongside this collection. I didn't agree with everything that reviewer said, but it made an interesting companion.

Exceeding all expectations! Love it! Excellent stories and characters! Recommended to all fellow cyberpunk fans! The atmosphere in those stories is truly astonishing!

or maybe its bad, i dont know. i tried to read it forever ago and the stories never grasped me, maybe i just dont have a big enough boner for cyberpunk literature to swallow everything thats written with the label.

Disappointing a scanned copy of the book poor quality PDF style-