The Big Book of Cyberpunk

By Jared Shurin, Madeline Ashby, Maurice Broaddus and 7 more

A genre-defining—and redefining—collection of the boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient speculative fiction, featuring stories from all over the globe.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Almost forty years ago, William Gibson wrote the line that began Neuromancer—and a movement that would change the face of science fiction.
Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic—from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There’s dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AI, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.

We live in an increasingly cyberpunk world—packed with complex technologies and globalized social trends. A world so bizarre that even futurists couldn’t explain it—though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk offers a hundred ways to understand where we are and where we’re going.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9780593467244

Book preview

Cover for The Big Book of Cyberpunk

ALSO EDITED BY JARED SHURIN

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

(with Mahvesh Murad)

The Outcast Hours

(with Mahvesh Murad)

Irregularity

The Lowest Heaven

(with Anne C. Perry)

Book Title, The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Author, Jared Shurin, Imprint, Vintage

Introduction and compilation copyright © 2023 by Jared Shurin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593467237

Ebook ISBN 9780593467244

Cover design by Joe Montgomery

Cover images: android © Ociacia/iStock/Getty Images; glitch background © Vitmann/iStock/Getty Images; turtleneck © AaronAmat/iStock/Getty Images"/

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Note

Introduction

The Gernsback Continuum

William Gibson

Self

The Girl Who Was Plugged In

James Tiptree Jr.

Pretty Boy Crossover

Pat Cadigan

Wolves of the Plateau

John Shirley

An Old-Fashioned Story

Phillip Mann

The World as We Know It

George Alec Effinger

Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

Gwyneth Jones

Lobsters

Charles Stross

Surfing the Khumbu

Richard Kadrey

Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars

Cat Rambo

The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One

Justina Robson

The Completely Rechargeable Man

Karen Heuler

File: The Death of Designer D.

Christian Kirtchev

Better Than

Jean Rabe

Ghost Codes of Sparkletown (New Mix)

Jeff Noon

Choosing Faces

Lavie Tidhar

I Tell Thee All, I Can No More

Sunny Moraine

Four Tons Too Late

K. C. Alexander

Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points

Neon Yang

RealLife 3.0

Jean-Marc Ligny

wysiomg

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

The Infinite Eye

J. P. Smythe

The Real You™

Molly Tanzer

A Life of Its Own

Aleš Kot

Helicopter Story

Isabel Fall

Lena

qntm

Society

Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones

Samuel R. Delany

Cyberpunk

Bruce Bethke

Hostile Takeover

Craig Padawer

Rat

James Patrick Kelly

Arachne

Lisa Mason

Axiomatic

Greg Egan

Consumimur Igni

Harry Polkinhorn

Gene Wars

Paul J. McAuley

Britworld™

James Lovegrove

Ripped Images, Rusted Dreams

Gerardo Horacio Porcayo

The Great Simoleon Caper

Neal Stephenson

Immolation

Jeffrey Thomas

0wnz0red

Cory Doctorow

Time of Day

Nick Mamatas

Branded

Lauren Beukes

P

Yun Ko-eun

I Can Transform You

Maurice Broaddus

Be Seeing You

Madeline Ashby

Keeping Up with Mr. Johnson

Steven S. Long

Flyover Country

Tim Maughan

Darkout

E. Lily Yu

2045 Dystopia

Ryuko Azuma

Thoughts and Prayers

Ken Liu

Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of S**T

Minister Faust

The Life Cycle of a Cyber Bar

Arthur Liu

Culture

Coming Attraction

Fritz Leiber

With the Original Cast

Nancy Kress

Dogfight

William Gibson and Michael Swanwick

Glass Reptile Breakout

Russell Blackford

[Learning About] Machine Sex

Candas Jane Dorsey

A Short Course in Art Appreciation

Paul Di Filippo

D.GO

Nicholas Royle

SQPR

Kim Newman

Gray Noise

Pepe Rojo

Retoxicity

Steve Beard

Younis in the Belly of the Whale

Yasser Abdellatif

Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

Suzanne Church

The White Mask

Zedeck Siew

Degrees of Beauty

Cassandra Khaw

Alligator Heap

E. J. Swift

Glitterati

Oliver Langmead

Rain, Streaming

Omar Robert Hamilton

Found Earworms

M. Lopes da Silva

Electric Tea

Marie Vibbert

Exopunk’s Not Dead

Corey J. White

Études

Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Apocalypse Playlist

Beth Cato

Act of Providence

Erica Satifka

Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast

Sam J. Miller

Challenge

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

Philip K. Dick

Speed

Misha

Computer Friendly

Eileen Gunn

I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer

Nisi Shawl

The Gene Drain

Lewis Shiner

Deep Eddy

Bruce Sterling

The Yuletide Cyberpunk Yarn, or Christmas_Eve-117.DIR

Victor Pelevin

Wonderama

Bef

comp.basilisk.faq

David Langford

Spider’s Nest

Myra Çakan

The Last American

John Kessel

Earth Hour

Ken MacLeod

Violation of the Truenet Security Act

Taiyo Fujii

Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang

T. R. Napper

Operation Daniel

Khalid Kaki

fallenangel.dll

Brandon O’Brien

CRISPR Than You

Ganzeer

Wi-Fi Dreams

Fabio Fernandes

Juicy Ghost

Rudy Rucker

Aboukela52

Wole Talabi

Keep Portland Wired

Michael Moss

Do Androids Dream of Capitalism and Slavery?

Mandisi Nkomo

The State Machine

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

The Tin Pilot

K. A. Teryna

The Memory Librarian

Janelle Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson

Post-Cyberpunk

Petra

Greg Bear

The Scab’s Progress

Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo

Salvaging Gods

Jacques Barcia

Los Piratas Del Mar de Plastico

Paul Graham Raven

Cat Pictures Please

Naomi Kritzer

The Day a Computer Wrote a Novel

Yurei Raita

The Endless

Saad Hossain

Ghosts

Vauhini Vara

About the Authors and the Translators

About the Editor

Acknowledgments

Permissions Acknowledgments

_148359411_

I’m an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.

—Tim Berners-Lee

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Big Book of Cyberpunk is a historical snapshot as much as a literary one, containing stories that span almost seventy-five years.

Cyberpunk, at its inception, was ahead of many other forms of literature in how it embraced (and continues to embrace) progressive themes. Cyberpunk, at its best, has strived for an inclusive vision of the present and future of society. Accordingly, the stories within The Big Book of Cyberpunk discuss all aspects of identity and existence. This includes, but is not limited to, gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture.

Even while attempting to be progressive, however, these stories also use language, tropes, and stereotypes common to the times and the places in which they were originally written. Even as some of the authors challenged the problems of their time, their work still includes problematic elements. To pretend otherwise would be hypocritical; it is the essence of cyberpunk to understand that one can simultaneously challenge and deserve to be challenged.

Cyberpunk is also literature that exists in opposition, and the way it expresses its rebellion is very often shocking, provocative, and offensive. It is transgressive by design, but not without purpose, and I tried to make my selections with that principle in mind.

—Jared Shurin

INTRODUCTION

THE DAY OF TWO THOUSAND PIGS

There once lived a man who was naked, raving, and could not be bound. According to the Gospel: He tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. It turns out (spoiler) he was possessed. The demons were exorcised and cast out of the man. Lacking a human host, the demons possessed an entire herd of pigs (two thousand of them, says Mark!). They then ran straight into the ocean.

The man, liberated of foul influences, sat there dressed and in his right mind. The people around him were comforted. The day of demons was behind them. After a brief period of naked, raving chaos, order had been restored.

Or so they thought.

The biblical story of Legion is an iconic one, perhaps the most well-known exorcism in Western culture.[*1] It is also, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for cyberpunk. It is literature unchained, naked, and raving…but only briefly. Depending on which expert source you read, this day of demons lasted a decade or a few short years—or, according to some, it died even before it was born. The pigs went straight into the sea. Order restored.

There’s no question that cyberpunk had a shockingly brief existence as a cohesive entity. Born out of science fiction’s new wave, literary postmodernism, and a perfect storm of external factors (Reaganism, cheap transistors, networked computing, and MTV), the genre cohered as a tangible, fungible thing in the early 1980s, most famously exemplified by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the themes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The term cyberpunk itself, as coined by Bruce Bethke,[*2] came into being in 1983. The neologism captured the zeitgeist: the potential of, and simultaneous disillusionment with, techno-capitalism on steroids.

Cyberpunk was born of the punk ethos. A genre that, in many ways, existed against a mainstream cultural and literary tradition, rather than for anything definable or substantive in its own right. This is, at least, an argument posited by those who believe the genre peaked—and died—with Bruce Sterling’s superb anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Accepted as the definitive presentation of cyberpunk, Sterling had pressed a Heisenbergian self-destruct button. Once it was a defined quality, cyberpunk could no longer continue in that form.

Although this is a romantic theory (and cyberpunk is a romantic pursuit, despite—or perhaps because of—the leather and chrome), it is not one to which I personally subscribe. While collecting for this volume, I found that the engine of the genre was still spinning away, producing inventive and disruptive interpretations of the core cyberpunk themes through to the start of the next decade. These include novels and collections such as Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), Misha’s Prayers of Steel (1988), Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage (1988), Lisa Mason’s Arachne (1990), and Richard Paul Russo’s Destroying Angel (1992); as well as movies, television programs, and games such as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), the Max Headroom series (1985), FASA’s Shadowrun (1989), and Bullfrog’s Syndicate (1993). Meaningful social commentary was still being produced as well: Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, for instance, as well as the cypherpunks and even the first steampunks.[*3]

By the mid-1990s, however, the hogs had well and truly left for the ocean. The mundanity of the technocratic society had been firmly realized—as expressed, for example, in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995). And at the other extreme, the visual aesthetic had proved overwhelmingly popular, thriving independently of the ideas (or even the material) that spawned it. Johnny Mnemonic (1995) serves as a painful example of how the visual tropes of cyberpunk no longer bore any connection to its original themes. A bit like Frankenstein’s monster, the cyberpunk style had gone lumbering off on its own, inadvertently appropriating the name of its creator.[*4] Cyberpunk slouched along in increasingly glossy and pastiche-ridden forms, but its frenetic glory days were now truly behind it. Cyberpunk qua cyberpunk had been pulled apart by the twin poles of banal reality and hyperactive fantasy.

Why would a Big Book be given over to something that lived, thrived, and died in such a short period of time? Because, in this case, the pigs took the long way round.

Cyberpunk’s manifestation in a single and singular form was indeed brief. But it left quite an impression. A lingering dissatisfaction that being well-dressed and well-behaved is a bit, well, dull. The realization that chains aren’t the nicest things to wear. A dawning awareness that there are a lot of extremely valid reasons to run around and scream (clothing optional). People understood that the world itself was not in its right mind, and maybe the demons had the right idea.

Even as the brief golden era of cyberpunk—the day of Legion—slips further into nostalgia, the legacy of cyberpunk remains not only relevant but ubiquitous. We now live our lives in a perplexing mix of the virtual and the real. At no time in human history have we ever been exposed to more messages, more frequently, from more and varied sources. Civilians using bootstrap technology are guiding drones in open warfare against marauding professional mercenaries. Protesters use umbrellas and spray paint to hide from facial recognition technology. Battles between corporations are fought in the streams of professional video game players. Algorithmically generated videos lead children down the rabbit hole of terrorist recruitment. The top touring musical act is a hologram. Your refrigerator is spying on you.

Perhaps the madman in the cave was not possessed but an oracle. Cyberpunk, however brief its reign, gave us the tools, the themes, and the vocabulary to understand the madness to come. It understood that the world itself was raving and undressed—irrational, unpredictable, and ill behaved. This is how we live, and Legion saw it coming.

WHAT IS CYBERPUNK?

It is impossible to collect The Big Book of Cyberpunk without actually defining cyberpunk. Unless we dare to name Legion, we can’t track the two thousand feral hogs and the spoor they left behind.

Unsurprisingly, given cyberpunk’s robust academic and critical legacy, there are many definitions to draw upon. With a genre so nebulous and sprawling, it is possible for each editor, artist, author, academic, or game designer to find in it what they want.

Cyberpunk is a land of definitional opportunity, but there are some rigid principles to uphold.

Cyberpunk has clear origins in both the genre and literary worlds. The division between these worlds is a false tension that has been remarked on, with their trademark directness, by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in their introduction to The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016). From its start, cyberpunk stories and cyberpunk authors were weaving and bobbing between both literary and genre outlets, as well as commercial and academic presses, traditional and experimental presses, and formal and informal modes of publishing. Cyberpunk has now been claimed by science fiction (or, more controversially, science fiction has been consumed by cyberpunk). But it would be a narrow and inaccurate view of the genre to see it as a wholly science-fictional endeavor.

Cyberpunk is inextricably linked with the real experience of technology. Technology in cyberpunk is not a hypothetical but a fundamental, tangible, and omnipresent inclusion in human life. Cyberpunk’s predecessors largely dealt with technology as an abstract possibility: a controlled progress in the hands of a scientific elite, with visionary, but entirely rational, outcomes. But the reality of the computing explosion is that irrationality reigned, science became decentralized and personalized, and utopian visions were subsumed by capitalism, politics, and individual whim. Technology outpaced not only its expectations but its limitations.

As a genre about technology, and not science more broadly, there are limits to cyberpunk’s scope. Technology, in this context, is manufactured. Cyberpunk is not science fiction that explores the ramifications of something inherent (such as the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin), innate (such as fiction that focuses on xenobiology, mutation, psychic powers, or other flukes of biology stories), or encountered (such as stories about discovering or exploring alien civilizations, lost worlds, or strange artifacts). By focusing on technology as a product, cyberpunk is about agency: it speaks about change that we are attempting to bring upon ourselves.

Cyberpunk exists in opposition to its predecessors. The -punk of cyberpunk is unavoidable: cyberpunk contains a fundamental sense of challenge. The man in the cave wasn’t raving blindly; he was raving against. Cyberpunk pushes boundaries; it is provocative. It tries to find and break conventions. This need to rebel is intrinsic to the genre, leading to experimentation with both theme and form. As noted previously, it also connects to the possible death of cyberpunk: once the genre was absorbed by the mainstream, it could no longer exist as a single cohesive rebellion, and fragmented.

Cyberpunk is neither static nor teleological. Cyberpunk is literature about change. That change can take the form of progress or regress; evolution or revolution; or even degradation. It is not epic in the sense of a grand and ultimate destination. There are no final and decisive conclusions, only, at most, incremental movement. Cyberpunk is often described as dystopian, but dystopia implies a final and established system. Even in its grimmest worlds, cyberpunk presents the possibility of dynamism and of change. (And, similarly, even when set in the most scintillating futures, cyberpunk seeds the potential for regression or disruption.)

This final principle also hints at the limitations of technology. Cyberpunk is not about technological supremacy. In fact, the reverse is true: cyberpunk is about the perseverance of humanity. Cyberpunk accepts that irrationality and personality cannot be subsumed. This recognition is for good and for ill: techno-utopian outcomes are impossible because of our core, intractable humanness. But nor should those outcomes even be desirable: our irrepressible need for individuality may keep us from paradise but is, ultimately, the most essential part of our nature. In theme, and often in form, cyberpunk embraces chaos and irrationality, perpetually defiant of sweeping solutions, absolutist worldviews, or fixed patterns.

Marshall McLuhan, one of the great scholars of technology and society, described the same dynamics that led to the development of cyberpunk. McLuhan suggested that, in order to study technology, we step away from admiring the technology itself and instead examine how it shapes or displaces society. This quasi-phenomenological approach finds meaning not in the thing itself, but in our response to it. McLuhan concludes that the message of any medium or technology is the scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.[*5] Applying this same concept to cyberpunk: it is not the fiction of technology but that of our reaction to it. The technology itself matters only in how it affects human affairs.

Cyberpunk fiction is therefore an attempt, through literature, to make sense of the unprecedented scale and pace of contemporary technology, and also of the brutal and realistic acknowledgment that there may be no sense to it at all. As a working definition, therefore, it means cyberpunk is speculative fiction about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs. Technology may accelerate, promote, delay, or even oppose these affairs, but humanity remains ultimately, unchangeably, human. It is the fiction of irrationality. Science fiction looks to the stars; cyberpunk stares into a mirror.

It seems tautological, but a definition is only as good as its ability to define. I crawled through almost two thousand works for this book, and, as Big™ as this book is, a mere hundred or so made it in. How did this definition work as a set of practical selection criteria? More importantly, what should you expect to find within these pages?

Cyberpunk is fiction—a self-serving selection requirement, and a controversial one at that. There’s a wealth of cyberpunk-adjacent nonfiction that fully merits a Big Book of its own. From the reviews of Cheap Truth to the ads in the back of Mondo 2000, there are essays, travelogues, manifestos, articles, and memoirs that are immensely important to cyberpunk. But cyberpunk is speculative, not descriptive. The nonfiction inspires the genre, and is inspired by it, but is not the genre itself.

The protagonist needs to be recognizably human. As stated, cyberpunk is about human affairs. Protagonists that are aliens, robots, or artificial intelligence (AI) shift the focus from human social relationships to the relationship between humanity and the other. Human/other relationships can be an insightful way of exploring what makes us human (as seen in great science fiction ranging from Mary Doria Russell to Becky Chambers), but cyberpunk eschews that additional layer of metaphor. To be about human affairs, the story needs to be about humans.

The story is set in the present, the near present, or an easily intuited future. As we project further and further out, deciphering the scale, the pace, or the pattern requires more and more assumptions on the part of the author. Again, this is about the point of focus: the more speculation involved, and the less the manufactured technology is immediately recognizable, the more the story becomes about exploring the wondrous, rather than investigating the real. The present, of course, is relative. (Objectively speaking, most of cyberpunk is now, disturbingly, alternate history.)

Given the stagnant state of space exploration, this also excludes virtually all stories that take place off-planet or in deep space.[*6] (Again, exceptions could be made for films such as Alien, 1979, that take place in deep space, but with oddly minimal evidence of human scientific or social progress.) Similarly, there are very few examples of cyberpunk in secondary worlds or of cyberpunk with magic. As the fantastical becomes more and more necessary to the story, the focus shifts away from human affairs and toward the story’s imaginative underpinnings.

Technology is mediative, not transformative. This is a deeply subjective divide but one critical to what makes cyberpunk a distinct genre or subgenre of science fiction. A story in which technology fundamentally transforms, replaces, or subsumes human relationships is exciting, intriguing, and wildly imaginative…but not cyberpunk. A cyberpunk story is one that examines the way technology changes the way humans relate to other humans but still leaves that relationship fundamentally intact. The underlying resilience of human social relationships, for better or for worse, remains the key theme—not the transformative potential of technology.

In the spirit of cyberpunk, it is fair to note that these rules are in no way consistently consistent. There are notable exceptions to each contained within this book, including AI protagonists, alien encounters, and even the overt use of magic.

The eagle-eyed will also note that I’ve tried to avoid the vocabulary that normally surrounds cyberpunk. As mentioned above, cyberpunk needs not be dystopian, for example. In fact, because of its focus on the resilience of human relationships, cyberpunk is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but brutally realistic. If that realism is often read as dystopic, that is more a commentary on the nature of humanity.

Nor does cyberpunk have to be set in a city, or under neon lights, or wearing sunglasses, or in the rain, or (god forbid) in a trench coat. These tropes demonstrate the lingering appeal of the aesthetic that stemmed from cyberpunk but have little to do with its underpinning themes. Indeed, some of the most spectacularly non-cyberpunk works can masquerade as cyberpunk. The presence of a parsley garnish does not mean there’s a steak beneath.

The last word commonly applied to cyberpunk is noir, and there is much merit to it. Unfortunately, in noir, we find a genre that is somehow even more commonly misinterpreted, misapplied, and confused with an aesthetic than cyberpunk itself. Noir is, like cyberpunk, about human relationships, whether the protagonist’s troubled relationship with their own identity (Dark Passage, 1947) or their conflict with a claustrophobic broader society (Chinatown, 1974). There is even a McLuhan-esque technological change at the center of most noir stories: the modern industrial city and its resultant impact on the pace, the scale, and the pattern of human affairs. Cyberpunk as science fiction noir can be a fairly apt description, but only when used in the thematic sense. It is, however, too often applied in the sense of two genres that both feature rain and trench coats, which is why I have strenuously avoided noir here.

Since cyberpunk is posited in this collection as the speculative examination of technology on human affairs, The Big Book of Cyberpunk is structured to examine the genre along the dimensions upon which those affairs exist: self, society, culture, and challenge. These sections also nod to McLuhan’s concept of the global village—a world in which media and technology have made the pace and the scale of human affairs instantaneous and global.[*7] This global village, for better or for worse, is a world that McLuhan envisioned, that cyberpunk speculated upon, and in which we now live.

Each section begins with a (much briefer) introduction, followed by a pre-cyberpunk story. As tidy as it would be to divide the world into an orderly, rationalist, technophilic Golden Age and then the raving of demons, that would be a false dichotomy. Like all cultural trends, cyberpunk has its harbingers, more easily identified with the benefits of hindsight and distance. For each theme, I’ve included a story that, in its own way, predicts, pioneers, or inspires the cyberpunk that followed.

From there, the stories within each section are ordered chronologically, up to—as much as possible—the present day. The sole caveat here is that publication order is an arbitrary metric: a story may have been conceived, written, or even submitted long before its publication. But this rough chronological ordering shows how the central themes of cyberpunk stayed consistent, even as the technology or media shifted over time. This ordering also demonstrates, in many ways, how cyberpunk has always been self-reflexive, with stories often in gleeful conversation with their forbearers both within and outside the core genre.

Finally, The Big Book of Cyberpunk concludes with a section on post-cyberpunk. The stories here showcase the What next?—a question that has been asked since even before the genre began.

THE SOURCE CODE OF TWO THOUSAND PIGS

For those interested in deciphering the construction of this anthology, there were some functional—if idiosyncratic—rules in place.

Respect antecedents. Notable cyberpunk anthologies include Bruce Sterling’s formative Mirrorshades; Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson, and Peter Lamborn Wilson’s groundbreaking Semiotext(e) SF (1989); Larry McCaffery’s equally important Storming the Reality Studio (1991); Pat Cadigan’s The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002); James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s Rewired (2007); Victoria Blake’s Cyberpunk (2013); and Jason Heller and Joshua Viola’s Cyber World (2016).

Each of these editors had their distinct (and occasionally contradictory) vision of the genre, and these anthologies are all, in my opinion, required reading. Rather than imitate their vision, or worse, subsume it, I have kept repetition to a bare minimum. That same respect also applies to all other anthologies, including the Big Book series. Although some authors rightfully appear in this volume and previous Big Books, there are no overlapping stories.

Showcase varying perspectives. Although peak or core cyberpunk was demographically homogeneous (something of which the cyberpunks were, to their credit, fully aware), its legacy is astoundingly and brilliantly diverse. I have attempted to capture how writers from many different backgrounds—demographic, geographic, and artistic—took on the challenge of writing about our relationship with technology and one another. Cyberpunk is a truly global phenomenon. Storytellers all over the world have used the genre as a means of addressing and discussing their concerns. This is not a recent development; cyberpunk has been a global genre since its earliest days. I’ve sought out stories that show both cyberpunk’s global contemporary presence and its roots. This book includes multiple translations, including five commissioned specifically for this volume—among them the first English-language appearances of classic cyberpunk stories by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo and Victor Pelevin, two undisputed masters of the genre.

It is also worth noting that Afrofuturism is not Black cyberpunk, although the two are often conflated. Afrofuturism is an important genre unto itself, with its own unique cultural evolution, and treating it as a subset of cyberpunk does both genres an immense disservice. There are undeniable parallels; both genres, for example, present alternative views to a mainstreamed culture, and both are robustly transmedia in their creative expression. There has also been some intersection over time, perhaps most notably with the music, videos, and writing of Janelle Monáe. Their novella, cowritten with Alaya Dawn Johnson, features in this volume.

As a corollary to the principle of diverse perspectives: the de facto Big Book rule is that no author can appear twice in a volume—and this has been mostly maintained. However, cyberpunk has always been a collaborative genre. Some of its most impressive and defining works were cowritten, creating results that neither could achieve independently. Although a very slight loophole, I’ve exploited it, meaning a few names do have the audacity to repeat.

Celebrate the experimental. Cyberpunk media included film and television, albums and art, software and games. Many of these formats are impossible to capture on the printed page, certainly not without doing them a massive disservice—although there are some visual stories inside this collection. I attempt to pay tribute to the original cyberpunks by gathering materials from a wide variety of sources: a reflection of the nontraditional publishing journey taken by many of these writers. Inside are stories first published in magazines, anthologies, and websites, but also as zines, liner notes, and fleeting social media posts. Cyberpunk is not solely the province of science fiction, and herein are stories first published by newspapers, in science journals, in literary magazines, and as role-playing game tie-ins. Due to the combination of provocative content and technologically savvy authors, cyberpunk has always been at the forefront of self-publishing—a trend also reflected here.

Continuing the experimental theme, all the stories in The Big Book of Cyberpunk are self-contained holistic works. There are many great stories that require the reader to have preexisting knowledge of the setting or the characters. There is a wealth of fantastic cyberpunk novels that could have provided extracts. Restricting this anthology solely to short fiction was necessary for my own sake.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

The first story, William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum (1981) stands outside the five main sections. It is the boot-up sound for the hundred-odd stories that follow.

William Gibson is the figure most closely connected with cyberpunk, not only through Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy, but also through his short stories and nonfiction, all of which encapsulated the fledgling genre in its fragile early years. There is no author more appropriate to open this volume.[*8]

The Gernsback Continuum defines the problem that cyberpunk would then go on to solve. It shows the fantasies of scientific aspiration, and it repositions visions of progress as the ghosts of value. The story is achingly, poignantly sad. Not because it is set in a dystopian hellscape but because the world is so painfully ordinary. It shows where we are, but through the lens of where we thought we’d be. By setting the recognizable against the aspirational, Gibson shows the gap between imagination and reality and sets out the challenge for future writers to fill it—including, as it turns out, Gibson himself. The Gernsback Continuum refuted the science-fictional tradition that had prevailed since the 1930s and made space for a new form of storytelling.

Above all else, The Gernsback Continuum is simply a beautiful story, perfectly constructed and gloriously atmospheric. Although all stories in this anthology were chosen for their historical and thematic significance, the most important selection criterion was that they are enjoyable to read, and I hope you find as much pleasure in them as I have.

Skip Notes

*1 It also inspired one of the best X-Men characters.

*2 Bethke’s story—found in this volume—was written in 1980 and first published in 1983. The term was quickly adopted by the legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois, who used it to describe the movement he was seeing in the pages of his Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

*3 This is a larger discussion, but steampunk, even more than cyberpunk, is a genre in which the aesthetic rapidly subsumed its original themes. It has, however, regained its footing as a platform for discussing postcolonialism. Also, airships.

*4 In Storming the Reality Studio (1991), Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery make a compelling argument for Frankenstein (1818) as a cyberpunk work, therefore increasing the lifespan of the genre by approximately 170 years.

*5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

*6 Is there anything more emblematic of cyberpunk than the corporatization of the space race? When John F. Kennedy announced the ambition of a manned mission to the moon, he declared: We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. Sixty years later, egocentric billionaires are farting radioactive garbage over the south Texas landscape in the rush to get billboards into orbit.

*7 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

*8 The Gernsback Continuum was also the first story in the now oft-mentioned Mirrorshades. This is a coincidence, but I like it.

WILLIAM GIBSON

THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM

(1981)

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy trade paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-Glo jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes This Way Lies Madness in huge sans serif capitals.

Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called American Streamlined Moderne. Cohen called it raygun Gothic. Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.

Sometimes they’d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. You’d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and you’d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes’s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of futuristic Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp Utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat, symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

This thing couldn’t have flown…? I looked at Dialta Downes.

Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve giant props; but they loved the look, don’t you see? New York to London in less than two days, first-class dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz in the evening…The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

I’d been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent. While I’m not bad at it, I’m not exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my Nikon’s credibility. I got out depressed because I do like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because I did make sure I’d gotten the check for the job, and I decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me some books on Thirties design, more photos of streamlined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes’s fifty favorite examples of the style in California.

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought of myself in Dialta Downes’s America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky; ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way.

During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo, he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style and which made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm if you could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing and cheap concrete.

Think of it, Dialta Downes had said, as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams.

And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota—as I gradually tuned in to her image of a shadowy America-that-wasn’t, of Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal….

And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of Ming’s martial architecture, I penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability….

Ever so gently, I went over the Edge—

And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear—maybe—the echo of jazz.

I took it to Kihn. Merv Kihn, freelance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactées, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind.

It’s good, said Kihn, polishing his yellow Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian shirt, "but it’s not mental; lacks the true quill."

But I saw it, Mervyn. We were seated poolside in brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader received messages from Them on her microwave oven. I’d driven all night and was feeling it.

Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You’ve read my stuff; haven’t you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It’s simple, plain and country simple: people—he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare—"see…things. People see these things. Nothing’s there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You’ve read Jung, you should know the score….In your case, it’s so obvious: You admit you were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies….Look, I’m sure you’ve taken your share of drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when—"

But it wasn’t like that.

"Of course not. It wasn’t like that at all; it was ‘in a setting of clear reality,’ right? Everything normal, and then there’s the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren’t even crazy. You know that, don’t you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside his deck chair.

"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade."

A what?

"A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears." He burped.

It assaulted her? How?

You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’ —he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—" ‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph."

I must have looked pained, because he set his beer down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.

If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactée stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that’s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.

I did worry about it, though.

Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off to hear what They had had to say over the radar range lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor (muties, he called them; another of his journalistic specialties).

I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shaving kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles.

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota’s headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind’s eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn’s opinion of what I was already thinking of as my sighting rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota’s slipstream.

I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum beer cans winked goodnight as I killed the headlights. I wondered what time it was in London, and tried to imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hampstead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines and books on American culture.

Desert nights in that country are enormous; the moon is closer. I watched the moon for a long time and decided that Kihn was right. The main thing was not to worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were more normal than I’d ever aspired to be saw giant birds, Bigfeet, flying oil refineries; they kept Kihn busy and solvent. Why should I be upset by a glimpse of the 1930s pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattlesnakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the morning I’d drive down to Nogales and photograph the old brothels, something I’d intended to do for years. The diet pill had given up.

The light woke me, and then the voices. The light came from somewhere behind me and threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were calm, indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversation.

My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their sockets. My leg had gone to sleep, pressed against the steering wheel. I fumbled for my glasses in the pocket of my work shirt and finally got them on.

Then I looked behind me and saw the city.

The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters…

I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat. When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic dashboard, the overflowing ashtray.

Amphetamine psychosis, I said. I opened my eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed filter tips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on.

And saw them.

They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child’s toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.

They were the children of Dialta Downes’s ’80-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.

Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars.

It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.

I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until the bumper was within three feet of them. They still hadn’t seen me. I rolled the window down and listened to what the man was saying. His words were bright and hollow as the pitch in some chamber of commerce brochure, and I knew that he believed in them absolutely.

John, I heard the woman say, we’ve forgotten to take our food pills. She clicked two bright wafers from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. I backed onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing and shaking my head.

I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and didn’t seem to mind the call.

"Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an interesting frisson to your story, not having the pictures turn out…."

But what should I do?

"Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They’ve got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need."

What was he talking about?

Quit yelling and listen to me. I’m letting you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcize your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose?

Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning date with the Elect.

The who?

These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the microwaves.

I considered putting a collect call through to London, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him his photographer was checked out for a protracted season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine mix me a really impossible cup of black coffee and climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a stretch of overpass near Disneyland when the road fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome teardrops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the couple I’d seen in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he made prints of all the negatives I’d accumulated on the Downes job. I didn’t want to look at the stuff myself. It didn’t seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that was showing Nazi Love Motel and kept my eyes shut all the way.

Cohen’s congratulatory wire was forwarded to me in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pictures. He admired the way I’d really gotten into it, and looked forward to working with me again. That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as if it were only half there. I rushed to the nearest newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I’d just decided to buy a plane ticket for New York.

Hell of a world we live in, huh? The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near dystopia we live in. But it could be worse, huh?

That’s right, I said, or even worse, it could be perfect.

He watched me as I headed down the street with my little bundle of condensed catastrophe.

SELF

The notion of identity—and the many and heated discussions around it—has long been explored through fiction. Cyberpunk is no exception. Of the many different relationships that constitute human affairs, the self—how we see, perceive, and define our individual identity—is perhaps the most complex. Without knowing who we are, how can we understand our place in the world?

Cyberpunk has always understood that technology has the power to affect even this most intimate and individual relationship. Who we are—who we think we are—is, like every other social construct, mediated by technology. In the early days of the genre, cyberpunk fiction was rightfully fascinated by the idea of our virtual selves. The existence of cyberspace presupposes our cyber-selves. Is our online presence a projection? A twin? A shadow? What is the tenuous connection between these planes—are there physical or moral repercussions for how we act in this new world? Decades later, we are no closer to answering the questions that cyberpunk was the first to ask.

Cyberpunk also looked at technology’s broader potential for personal transformation: how much it can change us; what we can become; what we can and can’t leave behind. Modern understanding of identity is that it is a layered and dynamic concept. Humans are not one thing. Who we are can shift depending on the context we’re in, the company we keep, the choices we make, or that are made for us. Cyberpunk fiction is a way of exploring the tension between the fluidity (lubricated by technology) and the immutable essence of what makes us human.

This section opens with James Tiptree Jr.’s excellent The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973). In terms of vocabulary and technology, it sets the tone for much of the cyberpunk fiction that would follow. It also raises questions about the impact of virtuality on identity: Will it be liberating to depart ourselves for another body, or is there something damaging about severing that connection? What harm is caused by a society that makes that possible or, in fact, encourages it?

This discussion of freedom (and the curse of anchoring to physicality) is found through many of the stories in this section. Pat Cadigan’s Pretty Boy Crossover (1986) describes a world where physical beauty is upheld to the point that the body is itself made the ultimate sacrifice. The criminals of John Shirley’s Wolves of the Plateau (1988) use the power of the virtual plane to free themselves and become something more. In The World as We Know It (1992), George Effinger’s sleuth, Marîd Audran, encounters communities that prefer virtual worlds to physical ones, despite the high cost of maintaining the suspension of disbelief. Gwyneth Jones’s Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland (1996) uses the virtual world as a form of psychotherapy: online identities allowing repressed appetites to run free.

Once plugged in to Jean-Marc Ligny’s RealLife 3.0 (2014) (appearing here for the first time in English), our protagonist experiences the reality and the virtual fantasy side-by-side, with predictable dispiriting results. In Aleš Kot’s A Life of Its Own (2019), the virtual becomes a prison, with those same dreams used to keep you entombed (thanks, in no small part, to the fine print). Charles Stross’s madcap satire, Lobsters (2001) features a MacGuffin (or is it?) based on the profit potential of digital crustaceans. Surrounding that central conceit is a whirlwind of influences: our protagonist attempting to maintain his own self-identity while being buffeted by political, financial, technological, and romantic winds.

In Sparkletown, the setting of Jeff Noon’s Ghost Codes of Sparkletown (2011), the self can be endangered by cultural ghosts: fragments of music that float through a haunted graveyard of burned-out CPUs.[*1]

J. P. Smythe’s The Infinite Eye (2017) is a story that descends in a direct line from Tiptree’s, again describing a corporate world where the desperate sell themselves to stay afloat. But in The Girl Who Was Plugged In, our protagonist receives an ecstatic reward, and a chance to live the fantasy. In The Infinite Eye, they merely receive a paycheck (and, presumably, no health care). In the final story in this section, qntm’s Lena (2021), a man is blessed/cursed with virtual immortality, give or take some messy version control.

The fluidity of the self is not solely contained in the virtual realm. Anna, in Richard Kadrey’s Surfing the Khumbu (2002), is living in machines and flesh at the same time, a scenario that will leave the reader quivering in both fear and jealousy. In Cat Rambo’s Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars (2006), technology—in this case memory both biological and computational—is embedded in the body, both a resource and a drug.

Karen Heuler’s The Completely Rechargeable Man (2008) reads more like a fairy tale than your average cyberpunk short. It describes a lonely individual whose life is so technological that he has become a form of entertainment.

The titular character in Christian Kirtchev’s File: The Death of Designer D. (2009) is the source of mystery