Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Defining cyberpunk anthology, 1986
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling and first published by Arbor House in December 1986, is the defining document of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. The twelve stories gathered here, by William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Tom Maddox, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, James Patrick Kelly, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, and Sterling himself (in two collaborations), had mostly appeared in magazines between 1981 and 1986. Bringing them together in a single volume gave the movement a coherence and an identity it had previously lacked.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Arbor House, 1986. ISBN: 0877958688. #11286.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Arbor House, 1986. ISBN: 0877958688. #11286.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
By the time Mirrorshades appeared, cyberpunk had already produced its signature novel in Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), but the movement still lacked a clear collective identity. Sterling's preface supplied one. Writing from inside the movement, he traced cyberpunk's roots in the street-level energy of punk rock and new wave, its debt to J.G. Ballard's clinical detachment, and its deliberate rejection of the optimistic technological utopianism that had long dominated science fiction. Where earlier SF imagined technology as the instrument of human progress, cyberpunk treated it as the environment in which human beings were already living, something to be navigated rather than celebrated.
The stories gathered here reflect that sensibility. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum," notably his first professional publication, sets the anthology's tone by turning the retro-futurist aesthetics of 1930s SF into something uncanny and vaguely menacing. Cadigan's "Rock On," Shirley's "Freezone," and Maddox's "Snake Eyes" each take a different angle on the relationship between bodies, technology, and identity. Sterling and Gibson's collaboration "Red Star, Winter Orbit" imagines a decaying Soviet space station as a Cold War metaphor for obsolescence. The range of the collection is one of its strengths, and the contributors all seem to share a sensibility as much as subject matter.
Sterling was candid in the preface that 'cyberpunk' was a label that fit its subjects imperfectly, and that the writers collected here were already pulling in different directions. Within a few years the movement had started to disperse, its writers heading off in their own directions. But Mirrorshades captured it at the moment of maximum coherence, and the anthology remains the best single introduction to what cyberpunk actually was before it became a visual style and a marketing category.
The stories gathered here reflect that sensibility. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum," notably his first professional publication, sets the anthology's tone by turning the retro-futurist aesthetics of 1930s SF into something uncanny and vaguely menacing. Cadigan's "Rock On," Shirley's "Freezone," and Maddox's "Snake Eyes" each take a different angle on the relationship between bodies, technology, and identity. Sterling and Gibson's collaboration "Red Star, Winter Orbit" imagines a decaying Soviet space station as a Cold War metaphor for obsolescence. The range of the collection is one of its strengths, and the contributors all seem to share a sensibility as much as subject matter.
Sterling was candid in the preface that 'cyberpunk' was a label that fit its subjects imperfectly, and that the writers collected here were already pulling in different directions. Within a few years the movement had started to disperse, its writers heading off in their own directions. But Mirrorshades captured it at the moment of maximum coherence, and the anthology remains the best single introduction to what cyberpunk actually was before it became a visual style and a marketing category.