Cyberpunk

Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson, first appeared in Omni , 1981, copyright © Omni Publications International 1981, used by permission of the author
    Mozart in Mirrorshades, by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, first appeared in Omni , 1985, copyright © Omni Publications International 1985, used by permission of the authors
    Interview with the Crab, by Jonathan Lethem, first appeared in Bread #1, 2005, printed in Men and Cartoons , copyright © 2004, 2012 Jonathan Lethem
    El Pepenador, by Benjamin Parzybok, collection original, copyright © 2012 Benjamin Parzybok
    Down and Out in the Year 2000, by Kim Stanley Robinson, first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction , April 1986, copyright © 1986 Kim Stanley Robinson
    Rock On, by Pat Cadigan, first appeared in Light Years and Dark , copyright © 1984 Pat Cadigan
    Getting to Know You, by David Marusek, first appeared in Future Histories , 1997, copyright © 1997 David Marusek
    User-Centric, by Bruce Sterling, first appeared in Designfax , 1999, copyright © 1999 Bruce Sterling
    The Blog at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay, first appeared in Chizine , 2008, copyright © 2008 Paul Tremblay
    Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars, by Cat Rambo, first appeared in Talebones , winter 2006/2007, copyright © 2007, 2012 Cat Rambo
    Blue Clay Blues, by Gwyneth Jones, Interzone , 1992, copyright © 1992 Gwyenth Jones
    The Lost Technique of Blackmail, by Mark Teppo, Electric Velocipede #19, Fall 2009, copyright © 2009 by Mark Teppo
    Soldier, Sailor, by Lewis Shiner, first appeared in Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe , 1990, copyright © 1990 Lewis Shiner
    Mr. Boy, by James Patrick Kelly, first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction , June 1990, copyright © 1990 James Patrick Kelly
    The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics, by Rudy Rucker, first appeared in New Blood , July 1982, copyright © 2012 Rudy Rucker
    Wolves of the Plateau, by John Shirley, first appeared in Heatseeker , copyright © 1989, 2012 by John Shirley
    The Nostalgist, by Daniel H. Wilson, first appeared on Tor.com , 2009, copyright © 2009 Daniel H. Wilson
    Life in the Anthropocene, by Paul Di Filippo, first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Apocalypse SF , copyright © 2010 Paul Di Filippo
    When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, by Cory Doctorow, first appeared in Baen’s Universe , 2006, copyright © 2006 CorDoc-Co, Ltd. Some rights reserved under a creative commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license

INTRODUCTION

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    By Victoria Blake

    “As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands,” Bruce Sterling wrote in the first issue of Cheap Truth , a one-page, double-sided bright coal of a fan-zine first published in 1983. “Dreaming of dragon-hood, Fantasy has puffed itself up with air like a Mojave chuckwalla. SF’s collapse ha[s] formed a vacuum that forces Fantasy into a painful and explosive bloat . . . Short stories, crippled with the bends, expand into whole hideous trilogies as hollow as nickel gumballs.”
    These were fighting words, aimed directly at the bulls-eye of publishers, editors, critics, authors, and readers in the “smokestack” publishing-industrial complex. There was, Sterling wrote in Cheap Truth issue five, “a crying need to re-think, re-tool, and adapt to the modern era. SF has one critical advantage: it is still a pop industry that is close to its audience. It is not yet wheezing in the iron lung of English departments or begging for government Medicare through arts grants. . . . SF has always preached the inevitability of change. Physician, heal thyself.”
    The physician, in this case, was the collection of early 80s writers that Cheap Truth showcased as carriers of the flame—Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, et al—and the challenge was to find a new voice for a new kind of reader in a new kind of world. “This year’s Nebula Ballot looked like a list of stuff that Mom and Dad said it was okay to read,” a pseudonymous Lewis Shiner wrote in Cheap Truth . “I mean, this is the kind of writing that Mom and Dad grew up on, full of ‘Golly’s’ and blushes and grins. And aren’t those dolphins cute? . . . They’d rather hear that somebody ‘muttered an oath’ or came out with some made-up word like ‘Ifni!’ than be told that they really said ‘shit’ or ‘shove it up your ass, motherfucker.’”
    Nobody had ever read anything like what the cyberpunks were