Welcome to another installment of You Should Read!
Today’s recommendation is the cult classic anthology Mirrorshades.
Cyberpunk has become an overdone and worn out cliche for media over the last few years but few have read the works that defined cyberpunk as a genre back in the 80’s. Enter, Mirrorshades, the defining collection of 80’s cyberpunk designed to define the, then freshly minted, genre. You won’t find blue and pink bisexual lighting or Johnny Silverhand here. Instead, its a collection of bizarre stories that have far more life in them than anything CD Projekt Red can cook up.
My personal favorites from the collection are The Gernsback Continuum and Freezone. honorable mentions include the strange Till Human Voices Wake Us and Solstice. This collection will be unlike anything you’ve read before, I promise you. From stories about Soviet astronauts desperately trying to save their ancient space station, to tales of burnt out rockers in international waters, to a photographer that has a psychotic break after capturing too many Art Deco buildings, it’ll keep you on the edge of your seat!
Actual copies of Mirrorshades go for large sums on Ebay and ThriftBooks so the original compiler of the anthology has made it freely available as a webpage which I will post at the end of this article for your enjoyment. You can read his own explanation of why he compiled these stories but I’ll give you the gist of it here for those of you just interested in the fiction.
Basically, Bruce Sterling wanted to capture the ethos of the newly formed Cyberpunk genre in one definitive work to set the standard for future sci-fi authors interested in the topic. A lot of things you’d expect from a modern cyberpunk story are here; drugs, rock music, punks, hackers, futuristic technology, sex, and social decay. However, it has none of the cliches you’ve come to expect from the genre. In fact, its a really refreshing read in an era full of overly corporate anti-corporate sci-fi.
I think that about wraps it up! As promised here is Bruce Sterling’s site with the whole anthology available for free:
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