• Title: The London Reader: Cyberpunk Now
• Author: Various
• Genre/Subject: Cyberpunk SF
• Publisher: Amazon
• Publication Date: 2016
• Start date: 8/1/24
• Finish date: 8/3/24

Review:

This was on my reading list for a while now and I finally got around to it. This was sort of like a digest or magazine in that it had fiction, non-fiction, interviews, art, even poetry. All modern and recent as of 2016, so you’re not going to see Burning Chrome or something from 1980s Omni.

The main thing that attracted me to this in the first place were the two interviews with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling respectively. The legendary lights and pioneers of the cyberpunk genre. One thing that quickly became clear from the interviews was that neither author is comfortable with the term cyberpunk or being credited with “inventing” it. Another thing that was clear is that neither consider themselves prophets. Gibson put it best when he said that his first ventures into SF were back in 1977 and the current events he witnessed inspired him to project that forward. How he felt it might unfold he wrote stories about and sometimes he got it right, sometimes it even exceeded the mark.

I remember discovering cyberpunk back in the 80s and have watched it flame up and then burn down again. I like it, but I think it had its day and we have moved forward from it. There’s always going to be SF, hard SF, subgenres abound and continue to emerge and this is a good thing. If I wrote a novel I wouldn’t want it pigeonholed into some subgenre that some critic decided to put it in. It’s like in the old days of record stores you could never predict where they stuck Jimi Hendrix.

The short stories were good, not great, not visionary by any metric but decent and good to read. Saying that, I know that consciously or unconsciously I compare anything with a cyberpunk label to the original 80s novels and stories and that’s not fair. But it is what everyone from the old days does and it just is.

That’s really all I have to say, good not great but overall a solid way to spend a few hours.