Cyberpunk

was just a trendy phrase, a literary or Hollywood idea. So I wrote the story to express that feeling.”
    Third, the iconoclast in me wanted to move past traditional cyberpunk, and beyond the cast of known cyberpunk characters, to take a look at how the movement has developed since the end of the Cold War, and to pull the veil back on what the future might hold. Cory Doctorow, arguably the new Chairman of Tech, ends the collection by celebrating the heroic sysadmins, a rarely lauded group. Cat Rambo, not usually associated with cyberpunk, beautifully describes how relationships are changed by technology. New-comer Benjamin Parzybok, author of the novel Couch , contributed an original story notable for its authentic re-imagining of low life in the slums, a different kind of low life entirely from that described by the 80s cyberpunk. Jonathan Lethem’s “Interview with the Crab” thrilled me when I read it the first time, and it continues to astound me with its craft. I’ve never heard Lethem described as a cyberpunk, but my favorite of his novels, Gun, with Occasional Music , uses the hardboiled tone common to cyberpunk, and is populated by state-sponsored druggies, external memory devices, a virtual monetary system, and genetically altered animals who speak, love, have sex, and die like humans. The story included here takes up the themes of pop culture and fame, getting deeper into both by using a crustacean, the titular crab, as the prototypical hard-living, idiosyncratic celebrity.
    And finally, in compiling this collection, the writer in me wanted to look at the craft of cyberpunk, and the interesting, innovate forms some of the cyberpunk stories take. The prose of Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On” has a vitality that makes my heart beat faster. Two stories—Bruce Sterling’s “User-Centric” and Paul Tremblay’s “Blog at the End of the World”—co-op new kinds of communication, email and blogging, to weave their tales. Daniel H. Wilson writes what could be called a cyberpunk fairytale, and Mark Teppo pokes at an acronym-heavy future, all while telling a story in the very language he’s lampooning.
    I was five years old when the first issue of Cheap Truth came out, and only eight when The Movement was declared dead. In 1991, when Lewis Shiner renounced his cyberpunk membership, I was wearing neon hair bands, plastic shoes, and bopping my head to Cyndi Lauper. I wasn’t in any way punk, and I’m probably still not. But when you’re holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and when you’re editing cyberpunk, you realize you’re living in a cyberpunk world.
    To wit, last week, the week of Thanksgiving, 2012, as the final edits were being made on this collection, the following items caught my eye: On the radio to the airport, I heard a commentator remarking on Project Glass, the Google initiative focusing on wearable computers; also on the radio, I heard about a scientist who had discovered that jellyfish can reverse the aging process, and that jellyfish stem cells might possess the secret to immortality. The talk around the pre-Thanksgiving dinner table was about California legalizing self-driving cars, and about how the rich/poor income gap in America is wider than it’s been since 1967. Gawker posted a story about a man on family vacation in Florida who found anonymous sex in a theme-park bathroom with the help of an iPhone app. And on Thanksgiving itself, my second cousin told me all about a nonprofit he was starting with a group of like-minded retirees to help spread information about two things, the first being the 911 conspiracy, and the second being a government-operated data-center, Big Brother style, outside Salt Lake City.
    The world seems to keep getting weirder and weirder, with no end in sight.
    Thank you to everybody who helped with story suggestions, with author suggestions, and with new ways to look at the subject. But thank you especially to the authors in this collection, and to the authors who have written and continue to write cyberpunk, knowingly or not. You have given us a new view on the world, and a new voice to the great tech experiment that defines our age. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

JOHNNY MNEMONIC

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    By William Gibson

    I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go