Sterling organized this collection to introduce the Cyperpunk genre to the 1980's. In the preface to his own story, he writes: "Something is loose in the 1980's. And we are all in it together."Each writer displays masterful skill in writing the short story form. They were fun and entertaining, and satisfied my literary hunger for resonance. Others made me wonder where they were taking the story, and reminded me of Hemingway, how he writes a story with a deeper meaning, but you wanted a plot and

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Ancient Rayguns: "Mirrorshades" by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling et al(Original Review, 1985)Isn't that just the thing? With the digital world, social media and the online life, comes an entirely new kind of creeping, monolithic conformity. When everywhere you go cookies are recording your choices, advertising companies can predict your needs and your boss is your friend on Facebook, you need to be careful about what you download on K...

3 and a bit stars rounded down.This anthology collects together twelve stories from the beginning of the cyberpunk genre in the 1980s. While I’m not well-versed in the genre (a lot of sci-fi leaves me cold), I’ve enjoyed the Gibson novels I read in the past, and a couple of films. I’m not sure I’d class all these stories as cyberpunk as such – some seem more some variation of speculative fiction than anything else (one story has Houdini performing various escape acts of increasing difficulty; wh...

Perhaps looking back at cyberpunk from 2014, it is impossible to fully grasp what the authors at the beginning of that movement were truly about. We have Bruce Sterling's intro of this anthology to help us out, including other names for the movement at the time - Outlaw Technologists, Eighties Wave, Radical Hard SF, and others. Maybe we just needed to call it the Weird at the time, and in each decade assign different authors to that category. When I read this anthology I struggle to place each s...

Incredibly dated and barely even cyberpunk. Brief short story collection from the early days of cyberpunk, with some authors that you'd consider it (Gibson, Cadigan, Rucker, Sterling) and some you wouldn't (Greg Bear.) The stories themselves are bad, as many don't even bother with computers or the internet at all, and come across as a weird "rock and roll" version of New Wave SF. The focus on drugs seems naïve in a world where people deal with mood-altering drugs to medicate mental issues on a d...

Patchy. As this is the book that defines the cyberpunk "movement" in a way, it seems churlish to say that some of the stories are more fantasy than cyberpunk, but as the genre is today, that's the case.

Here the mediocre and the barely readable rub shoulders with pop genius. The lesser cyberpunks come across like caffeinated 1950s squares desperately trying to sound like the beatniks they've heard so much about. Want some holodrugs to go with your cyberslang, daddy-o!!?The greats have a singular ease of style and taste for the bizarre that gives you a whiff of the 80s, but the colors are still bright after twenty years.Flawed, but essential.

In what seems to be becoming a trend for me in anthologised short fiction, Mirrorshades as a collection shines despite many of the individual stories being rather lacklustre. Reading this book more than 30 years after it was published, and having read quite a bit of cyberpunk fiction that was released in those same three decades, has provided an interesting perspective on what cyberpunk was to the people who created it and caused me to seriously rethink my own ideas about what makes something cy...

The best story in here is William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum", which anyone who cares already has in Burning Chrome. The rest is largely trash.

Initial reaction: Probably 3.5 stars. There are some really interesting and good stories in the mix included here, and only a few that didn't really strike me all that well, whether it was the fact some of them were random and not necessarily what I would term cyberpunk, or that some of them seemed a little dated. I did appreciate Sterling's introduction on Cyberpunk as a genre overall, and I thought it was a good collection overall. Some of the authors I'm very familiar with their work, while o...

look, did i read all the stories? nowill i do so someday? mAYBE (h a, sure)do i care? nah honestly . . . the best part of this anthology is the foreword.– it's a really cool, if vaguely outdated (look, fawning over the punkness of home photocopiers just did not age well man) and fanboy-y, essay about scifi and society and the genre of cyberpunk, and it makes the rest of the collection look really sad in comparison.the real plot twist is how the quality of the foreword suggests the man who comp

Cyberpunk used to mean so much more than crazy future clothes, oppressive corporate regimes, and cybernetic enhancements, but these days the word mostly conjures up Gibsonian dystopias. It's interesting to read a broader range of stories from the time, selected by people who were part of 'the Movement', but it might be even more interesting to read Bruce Sterling talk about himself in the third person when he describes prominent figures of cyberpunk. Amusing!

Just started the book but already love it... why haven't I been reading cyberpunk my whole life? The excellent first short story by Gibson, "Gernsback Continuum," narrates the story of a contract photographer hired to document the vestiges of 1930's US futurism, but also somehow manages to function as an abbreviated history of US modernism in the twentieth century and a commentary on the history of science fiction whose negativity suggests a cyberpunk vision in confronting the present (early 198...

I am not a big fan of short stories. That said, there were some decent entries (Solstice by James Patrick Kelly and Freezone by John Shirley among them). There were also some I didn't care for. One was co-authored by William Gibson who is actually my favorite cyber-punk author. In a few places the stories were getting dated. Nor surprising since they were all written over 30 years ago. If you are a big fan of 80's SF it might be worth reading.

A battered copy lives in my nightstand at all times. Between novels, I always come back to this, flipping through the pages until a word catches my eye. Such a diversity of talent, mixed together quite well here.Rated Individually:• "The Gernsback Continuum" (William Gibson) ★★★★★• "Snake-Eyes" (Tom Maddox) ★★★★• "Rock On" (Pat Cadigan) ★★★★• "Tales of Houdini" (Rudy Rucker) ★★★★★• "400 Boys" (Marc Laidlaw) ★★★★★• "Solstice" (James Patrick Kelly) ★★★★• "Petra" (Greg Bear) ★★★★★• "Till Human Voic...

This anthology got off to a pretty disappointing start, but fortunately I stuck with it because by the end there were some pretty good stories. Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum isn't really cyberpunk, but it is a significant observation on the difference between the 50s vision of the future and that in the 80s. What I find amusing is that somebody could easily write a Gibson Continuum story now highlighting the differences between the 80s future and ours. As demonstrated by a number of the stori...

Featured in my Cyberpunk 2077 reading list video This review is a mess I refuse to fix — you probably should read someone else's. This review is not intended to be accessible or readable, it's a detailed resource for myself. If the detailed notes box was bigger I would've put it all in there on private, but GoodReads limits that to 500 characters for no good reason...ContextAmong straight guys under 30, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 in the next few days is perhaps the most anticipated video game...

I think I'm just not a cyberpunk fan, or at least not this old-school cyberpunk. The stream-of-consciousness presentation is the worst part, to me, but the content isn't a lot better. So many of these authors think it's cool to throw random jargon, names, etc, without any reason to do so, as if making up words is worldbuilding. They all seem to be excited about drugs, particularly hallucinogens. A lot of the stories are misogynist, male-gazing slobberingly at the naked chicks they condescend to

A very mixed bag. This probably counts as essential reading for fans of cyberpunk, but only some of the stories qualify, genre-wise. However, the other stories fit in in terms of era. They are more interesting academically, as a glimpse into what else was going on in literary sci fi in the early 80's.Of special note is that the 2 Gibson stories printed here were also included in Burning Chrome, so if you, like me, initially picked this us as a Gibson completist, you will be a little disappointed...

Other than Dangerous Visions, is there a more lauded and groundbreaking multi-author anthology in science fiction than Mirrorshades? Indeed, it's tempting here to review the context of the book moreso than the book itself, so forgive me such digressions.To a reader over three decades on the text is, frankly, a little patchy. As might be expected, it's quite varied in tone and style, from the whimsical to the overwrought. Some of it's outside of what one immediately thinks of as cyberpunk post-Ne...