SOURCE: Polan, Dana. Review of Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery. Poetics Today 14, no. 4 (1993): 771-72.

In the following review, Polan calls Storming the Reality Studio “a wonderful introduction to the cyberpunk phenomenon.”

It may seem strange to find reviewed in a journal of poetics a book devoted to fiction, half of which is made up of primary works in that genre. But as the foremost genre of “cognitive estrangement” (in Darko Suvin's nice description), science fiction has always raised compelling questions of and for poetics—questions about the relations between standard and alternative language systems, about the nature of textual representation, about formula and its subversion, and so forth. Not for nothing did Poetics Today editor Brian McHale devote a major portion of his Postmodernist Fiction (1987) to science fiction; not for nothing does he have a follow-up essay...