Rudy Rucker's 1986 Cyberpunk Sci-fi Collection Mirrorshades

November 29, 2023 12:34 PM

=== This is a free online edition of
Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. ===
via boingboing.

I had forgotten

The upper and lower nave shimmered with reflected glories, with dream figures and children clothed in baubles of light. Saints and prodigies dominated. A thousand newly created youngsters squatted on the bright floor and began to tell of marvels, of cities in the East, and times as they had once been. Clowns dressed in fire entertained from the tops of the market stalls. Animals unknown to the Cathedral cavorted between the dwellings, giving friendly advice. Abstract things, glowing balls in nets of gold and ribbons of silk, sang and floated around the upper reaches. The Cathedral became a great vessel of all the bright dreams known to its citizens.

Petra
Greg Bear

That is not so much cyberpunk as Cordwainer Smith meets The Book of the New Sun. I quite liked it.

Ah, back in the day when cyberpunk sci-fi was new, bright and shiny. How things have and haven't changed...

posted by y2karl (23 comments total)

I can't seem to plug this into the USB-C port in my skull...do I need to downgrade to SCSI?
posted by mittens at 12:40 PM on November 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

omit needless cat hair
posted by y2karl at 12:52 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

We are so close to living in a cyberpunk future corporatocracy hellscape with no social safety net! Keep at it sci-fan fans of Congress and the Courts!
In other news, I wonder how much my copy of Mirrorshades just dropped in value :)
posted by indexy at 12:54 PM on November 29, 2023

The whole thing is terrific, but boy do I love Rucker's own story in this, "Tales of Houdini". It maaaaybe stretches the definition of cyberpunk, but it the first thing I think of when this anthology comes up.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 1:07 PM on November 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

This book showcases writers who have come to prominence within this decade. Their allegiance to Eighties culture has marked them as a group—as a new movement in science fiction.
This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group.
But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one has stuck: cyberpunk.

My fave is Mozart in Mirrorshades - there’s some seeds of The Peripheral in there.
posted by Artw at 1:14 PM on November 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

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.
posted by doctornemo at 1:16 PM on November 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

That is not so much cyberpunk as Cordwainer Smith meets The Book of the New Sun. I quite liked it.

Hope you’ve discovered the Shelved by Genre podcast.

Also, yes, there’s way, way,waaay less cyberpunk than you’d expect in this thing, even taking account for the tropes not really being codified back then.
posted by Artw at 1:22 PM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was just thinking recently about how odd it was that this book was so hard to get your hands on.
posted by praemunire at 1:33 PM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I appreciate this a ton, but it’s really not the same without the actual foil mirror shades on the dust jacket.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:38 PM on November 29, 2023 [13 favorites]

By the way, Rucker also released epub and mobi versions for ebook readers.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:39 PM on November 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

I still remember reading this as I walked home from the public library, and parts of it really blew me away.

(Can anyone make an EPUB from this? I tried yesterday and couldn't manage it.)
posted by wenestvedt at 2:01 PM on November 29, 2023

See my comment just above yours, wenestvedt.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:03 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was a young English major when this was fresh and new and I was in Austin. I decided to write a paper on Cyberpunk for my Genres seminar.

So I went to ArmadilloCon and met Bruce and Lew and Rudy and Pat and a few more.

The main takeaways I had were:
1: I didn’t know how to interview authors for a scholarly paper
2: Bruce felt that “Cyberpunk is like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: by the time anyone had heard of it, it was over”
3: Lew Shiner didn’t feel like he belinged to a movement, but Bruce was sure he did.
4: Lew gave me the best advice on how to interview him: “When I need to ask someone about what they do, I just tell them ‘I just want to get it right’.”

All of the authors I talked to were generous to a 20 year old kid who ended up with a better understanding of writers by actually meeting them.
posted by Mad_Carew at 2:26 PM on November 29, 2023 [21 favorites]

Rudy Rucker has also released several of his own books online for free. Infinity and the Mind stands out as an unusually in-depth pop-sci exploration of infinity as conceived by modern mathematics, and in the spirit of the post there's two of his cyberpunk novels too.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 2:47 PM on November 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

In related news, The Big Book of Cyberpunk, edited by Jared Shurin, came out in September--108 stories, 1152 pages, just in time for Xmas.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:50 PM on November 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

This is great, thanks! I've been a fan of Gibson & Sterling and have quite a few of their works (especially Gibson) but a copy of Mirrorshades hadn't crossed my path. Til now.
posted by Artful Codger at 3:07 PM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is it wise to release a shitton of cyberpunk stories into the wild like this right while there's a segment of the population running wild with cyperfuturism sparkles in its eyes due to GPT and Q-star? Are we going to find that 2 years from now we're flooded with a whole new raft of dystopic internet offerings inspired by reading this collection?

After the whole Torment Nexus problem, I'm genuinely not sure how wise it is to have any of these stories at all.
posted by hippybear at 3:36 PM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nah, it's fine, the book has been out since the mid-80s, its ideas are pretty well percolated through our culture by this point. Now we just have to fear a mass-release of Colleen Hoover epubs catching the attention of lovelorn AI developers.
posted by mittens at 3:46 PM on November 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

I still have the paperback around somewhere. Grabbing the epub...I haven't read this since it was new.
posted by lhauser at 7:38 PM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

A++ for releasing this for free into the wild.

Paying Amazon for the ebook version of The Big Book Of Cyberpunk is a fine gesture to our dystopian present but is really the least cyberpunk possible move here.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:35 PM on November 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

By the way, Rucker also released epub and mobi versions for ebook readers.

Thanks!
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:50 AM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

While I'm happy to have this, it seems to include a lot of typos resulting from OCR. For instance, in just a couple sentences of Tom Maddox's Snake Eyes:

…You've put yourself into some kind of no-return trajectory So you just coot everything and call for help, which should arrive in the torm of Aleph taking control of your suit tunctions and then you relax and don't do a damned thing."

He flew the first in a lighted dome in the station, his taceptate open…

(The underlining is a poor attempt to highlight the missing period/full stop between the first two sentences in the epub.)
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 2:08 AM on December 1, 2023

Skynet is waking up...
posted by y2karl at 4:05 PM on December 3, 2023