SOURCE: McCaffery, Larry. “Introduction: The Desert of the Real.” In Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, pp. 1-16. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

In the following introduction to his Storming the Reality Studio, McCaffery explores “the way in which cyberpunk and other innovative forms of SF are functioning within the realm of postmodern culture generally.”

But how could we know when I was young

All the changes that were to come?

All the photos in the wallets on the battlefield

And now the terror of the scientific sun?

—The Clash, “Something About England”

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

—Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of the Simulacra”

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