SOURCE: Jonas, Gerald. Review of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling. New York Times Book Review (18 January 1987): 33.

In the following review, Jonas characterizes the stories comprising the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.

Mirrorshades is subtitled “The Cyberpunk Anthology.” The editor, Bruce Sterling, explains in a brief preface that, “cyberpunk” is a new science-fiction esthetic for our time, born of “an unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy. … Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap, a cultural Petri dish where writhing gene lines splice.” A few pages of this word-hype and it is a relief to turn to the stories themselves, 12 in all, the earliest originally published in 1981, the most recent in 1986.

What we find is a science fiction that takes the runaway power of science and...