Book Review: Mirrorshades The Cyberpunk Anthology
By @edent
· Book Review Sci Fi · 1 comment · 200 words
This is a tough little compilation to review. It's a collection of mid-1980s stories all grouped around the loose theme of "Cyberpunk". What is Cyberpunk? Well, I'm not quite sure. And neither is the book. Some of the stories are high-tech tales of people fighting the system and sticking it to the man! Others are... allegories about original sin in gargoyles?
That said, they're all interesting stories. Mostly by men, which is a bit disappointing. But they convey some spectacular predictions about the future - America led by "libertarian fanatics bent on dismantling the government of the United States", the disruption caused by change, drug liberalisation, and the nature of polycrisis.
It is an entertaining curio. Great if you like weird short stories about a future which never quite happened.
The book is free to read but, sadly, has several transcription / OCR errors.
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Bill Mische says:
That takes me back - I remember (and still might have) the white Paladin cover version.
At the time Cyberpunk was a term for a group of new writers doing hard SF very different to the (then) mainstream - it was later it came to mean "a bit like Gibson's Sprawl stories".
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