The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world.

Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structures, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change.

For the cyberpunks [...] technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.

The Eighties were a time where the transformative promise of computers and microchips became apparent. But since then, the pace of changes has, if anything, increased further. Has cyberpunk's treatment of technology stood the test of time? What's been the reaction to technology changes since then?

(This characterisation may suggest why Sterling and Gibson wrote The Difference Engine, set in another time of rampant technological change that caused widespread social change. Are there other parallels?)

And, I noticed a common trope in the book of characters with replacement eyes. What do you think is the subtext of this change? Something about the mechanisation of the windows to the soul?

The technical revolution reshaping our society is based not on hierarchy but in decentralization, not in rigidity but in fluidity.

The Eighties are an era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridizised influences, of old notions shaken loose an reinterpreted with a new sophistication, a broader perspective. The cyber punks aim for a wide-ranging, global point of view.

The tools of global integration—the satellite media net, the multinational corporation—fascinate the cyberpunks and figure constantly in their work. Cyberpunk has little patience with borders.

Cyberpunk made some predictions about what a globalised world would be like to live in. Decentralisation and movement, but also deregulation and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. How much of these predictions came to pass? How does the freedom to travel balance against the freedom to starve?

Globalisation was reaching a high point in the 80s and 90s, but has receeded since then with a resurgence of nationalism and populism. How much of this is a reaction to the excesses predicted by cyberpunk?

The term [cyberpunk] captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.

Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap.

On the one hand, artists have always been eager to adopt new technology to bring new art (for instance, the Impressionist painters). But art creation has rarely been so easily and widely communicated. Is cyberpunk the true spirit of the Tiktok generation?

The cyberpunks as a group are steeped in the lore and tradition of the SF field.

Many of the cyberpunks write in a quite accomplished and graceful prose; they are in love with style, and are (some say) fashion-conscious to a fault.

Cyberpunk work is marked by is visionary intensity. Its writers prize the bizarre, the surreal, the formerly unthinkable.

It favours "crammed" prose: rapid, dizzying bursts of novel information, sensory overload that submerges the reader in the literary equivalent of the hard-rock "wall of sound".

Do you agree with these sentiments? Is this an accurate description of the work here, and is it distinct from other work of the same time? Has this style remained distinct, or is it now part of the general discourse?

His nonfiction works include THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (1992), TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2003), and SHAPING THINGS (2005).

He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine and writes a weblog. During 2005, he was the "Visionary in Residence" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy, and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2011 he returned to Art Center as "Visionary in Residence" to run a special project on Augmented Reality.

He has appeared in ABC's Nightline, BBC's The Late Show, CBC's Morningside, on MTV and TechTV, and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La Stampa, La Repubblica, and many other venues.

A reviewer's comments
Bruce Sterling's "Mirrorshades" represents the first anthology of the nascent movement known as cyberpunk. It is also a coming of maturity for science fiction as the dominant form of postmodern literary expression. This is illustrated most vividly by Darren Harris-Fain's critique of the first story in the anthology, "The Gernsback Continuum". The story by William Gibson is a denunciation of the ideals of Gernsback, the founding principles of American science fiction, and Modernism through the adventures of a photographer on assignment to catalog the remaining architectural remnants of "American Streamlined Moderne" described by the character's employer "...as a kind of alternative America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams." As Harris-Fain explains "This futuristic yet historical architecture is explicitly connected with science fiction stories, pulp-magazine artwork...and movies such as Metropolis (1926) and Things to Come (1936)..." The Gibsonian character's immersion into this results in his timeslipping into Gernsback's time-space continuum and seeing the following visions of this Modernist conception of the future world and its inhabitants:

"they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American....the Future had come to America first...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 fuels, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world."

The character finds this a nightmarish experience due to the connection he has already made with the architecture that "...Albert Speer built for Hitler". He equates it to "...the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda".

While most of the rest of the collection does not reach as direct a level of societal critique they do illustrate strongly why cyberpunk was more than just a science fiction subgenre but rather the vanguard of literature in late capitalist society.

And frankly, like much science fiction it is easy to read and damn good fun.