• Title: Cyberpunk
• Author: Various
• Genre/Subject: SF Anthology
• Publisher: Underland Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Start date: 11/21/23
• Finish date: 12/18/23

Review:

Excellent anthology from the best Cyberpunk notables from the last 40 years. 40 years, seriously it’s been that long since the genre was introduced in Omni magazine.

Some old favorites here, and ones that are often hard to find like Mozart in Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling. As I was reading it I observed to my wife that this collection was excellent, but man was some of it dark, dark, very dark. One of the quotes I have always loved to describe Cyberpunk as a genre is, “Tales of high-tech low lifes.” Spot on, these are often characters that are protagonists, but never “the good guys”, low level criminals that exist on the periphery of society that technology built and controls. I remember when I first discovered the genre back in the 1980s. I was buying Burning Chrome by William Gibson and the dude at the checkout in Coles said this, never forgot it, “Gibson, I love his stuff. Always makes me feel like its raining.”

It’s good to see the early stories but this collection included ones published as late as 2010, and these were just as good, and influenced by the modern incarnation of those early SF dreams of the 1980s.

Certainly a great read and I recommend it to younger folk than myself to see how it all started and how it developed over time.