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octavia_cade 's review for:

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology by Greg Bear, Paul Di Filippo, Tom Maddox, Lewis Shiner, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Marc Laidlaw, James Patrick Kelly, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker
3.0

Cyberpunk is one of the subgenres of science fiction that I've read vanishingly little of, and if this anthology is representative I probably won't be going out of my way to read much more of it, to be honest. There were three or four stories here that I actually liked - they are what dragged my rating up to three stars when it otherwise would have been two. The rest of the stories I was either entirely indifferent to or mildly disliked. Notable (to me at least, with my very vague understanding of what cyberpunk actually is) was that two of the stories I liked best had very little technology in them at all. They read more like fantasy, to me, than anything else. Those stories were "Petra" by Greg Bear, which was outstanding, far and away the pick of the bunch, and "Till Human Voices Wake Us", which had some lovely moments but a weak ending. Of the stories here that matched up with what I perceived cyberpunk to be - tech and body modification and a sort of pervasive misery of surveillance, I liked "Stone Lives" by Paul D. Filippo, for its sympathetic character, and "400 Boys" by Marc Laidlaw, which was enormously weird but had fantastic imagery. The rest... meh.