I'm the one who put MIRROR SHADES online for free. All the others agreed. And why would we go asking for permission? We're cyberpunks! You might like to check out out my story anthology with Bruce Sterling, TRANSREAL CYBERPUNK. Existing in audio as well. And my recent JUICY GHOSTS novel, about toppling an evil US president.
Thanks for this Rudy. I remember enjoying reading the Ware Tetralogy as a teen in the 90s. I wonder how well it holds up today. Might have to put that on my re-read list.
I appreciate it. Are you thinking about applying a Creative Commons license to it so other people can keep it online for free after you're as dead as a TV channel that's the color of the sky over the harbor?
Rudy, thanks for putting this up! I have a paper copy in my library, but digital is great, and now the panopticon AIs can admit in public they've read it, rather than secretly torrented it in their training data. Immortality of a sort.
Question - is Bruce still writing? Or at least theorizing / predicting / critiquing anywhere? If I think about his near term spec fiction from the 90s through 2000s, it was truly excellent. I'd be interested to hear what he's thinking about now.
So cool! I pasted this discussion thread into Grok 4 Heavy and asked it to markdown a table of all recommends made here, their years, detail and who suggested. Hope this gist is useful for all here looking to read:
Oh man, assuming this is really Rudy, how fucking cool is that?!?? Rudy Rucker posting on HN! Totally gnarly.
Mr. Rucker, if that really is you, I hope you decide to hang around and participate in this little community a bit. It's a cool place (most of the time) and cyberpunk is perpetually a favored topic.
This one wasn't the one that converted me (Gibson ftw) but Mirrorshades expanded what I thought the genre could be.
Not every story is a winner, but enough try to stretch a bit that it's worth the read.
Helps to put your mind in the time, just before the 90s, before The Matrix but after Blade Runner, before "the metaverse" but after "the net" and "going online" were starting to enter conversations.
Does the "post-cyberpunk" in the title imply it's not about low-life people in a high tech environment but instead about the less criminally inclined, or do it mean something else?
Can't believe I'm a reader and didn't realize this was a book genre. For some reason I always associated it with comic books, graphic novels, and movies. Not that there's anything wrong with those mediums. I'm just more of a book guy.
All of this is to say, these and some of other recommendations in this thread are recommendations I didn't know I needed.
HN isn't perfect, but neither am I. I really appreciate the breadth of topics and interests. Big shoutout to PG for starting it, to Dang and all of the other moderators, and to everyone that contributes. I've learned a lot over the years.
They say to never be the smartest person in the room. I'm not even in the top 100 here and totally fine with it.
To be honest, I'm a little envious of you. The tradition of cyberpunk in books is deep and extensive, and you'll start seeing how the books written in the late 70s and 80s are still SO influential today.
Since we're talking Cyberpunk here, I'll throw in a recommendation for a novel that isn't widely recognized as "Cyberpunk" per-se, but is probably "proto-Cyberpunk" at least. That novel being The Shockwave Rider[1] by John Brunner.
It has some elements in common with Cyberpunk and is just a plain fun read regardless of what genre label you apply.
Gernsback Continuum is still my favorite story since Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Physical reality seems pretty solid, but social reality is certainly "flexible." And all the tech I work with is a continuum of different ages smushed together; javascript client apps embedding COBOL apps complied to wasm bytecodes. SQL databases whose schemas predate some of the developers working on the apps that use them. Instruction Set Architectures that were invented when we still thought Raymond Lowey-esque fins and gills were the height of material design.
In a bit of synchronicity, I found my copy of Islands in the Net last week and am re-reading it after 35 years. It's pretty interesting to see which bits Bruce Sterling accurately predicted and which were a bit off the mark.
I think he was generally just excellent at getting near term predictions right and interesting. To pick a small one of many there's a moment in Heavy Weather where they have trouble with their PBX, and he mentions that it's basically a shrunk-to-digital 20th century phone company in a box, and so it requires negotiation, rebooting, kicking, etc. Love that take on modern software layers.
Yup. I noticed a line in Islands in the Net where one of the characters waits until evening to make a phone call when the rates are low. I had a chuckle, but it didn't detract from the rest of the story that was definitely good. Though I should talk to my offspring about making sure they only call me in the evenings so the long distance fees aren't exorbitant, just to see if they try to take away my car keys.
It's hosted on one of the author's sites. The collection itself is (as far as I can tell) out of print. It's falling through the cracks of "too complicated for a publisher to figure the rights out of" and "not lucrative enough for anyone to care".
It’s possible that it’s being distributed with permission of the copyright holders. Given the number of different people involved that seems kind of unlikely, but “free” doesn’t have to imply a permissive license.
He drew hard on his cigarette. Annoyance flickered across his face, like an artefact in the poorly-compressed bootleg movies he sold to his fellow low-lifes at The Pig and Drum.
Some Corpo-type, no doubt. Can't help seeing something good scroll across their feed tube without calling Legal.
He'd worked with a few in the past. Not bad all-in-all, at least they paid on time. That said, he could think of few he'd drink with.
He toyed with the idea of leaving a bitchy comment. Probably get downvoted to oblivion.
The dogs in the yard barked at a passing vehicle.
Irritated by the animal noise and the corpo whining, he thrashed something out. Pulling another cigarette from his pack, he hit "reply".
It's free to read, not free to use. As it's from one of the involved authors, they probably got permission for this release. The problem with piracy is lack of permission/consent, not the act itself.
People are making books freely available all the time, even those they sell on other platforms. Nothing wrong with this.
Consider the popular cliche, "free as in beer vs free as in speech".
The rights copyright gives you, briefly, includes: copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work. What suggests there is piracy is going on?
In 1986, it was unlikely that the original contract for the book mentioned anything about electronic rights. As it was a reprint anthology, the rights purchased would have only covered the use in the anthology as long as it was in print. Which means that to post the book online, Rucker would have to contact the individual contributors and get new permissions. Did he do that? I make a guess that he did not. It is not clear from what is stated here.
This is from back when it was intellectual, and not a bunch of annoying people stapling circuit boards to their jackets and trying to be some sort of electrogoth. Content before the hollowing out.
Another great one is the Semiotext(e) SF anthology. I can't believe I was such a sucker to think cyberpunk was going somewhere interesting. It peaked 5 minutes in.
edit: in retrospect, I always felt that cyberpunk was just New Worlds going out with a (mostly American) bang.
I just checked for my copy of this and its missing. : (
Great book. I like seeing how expansive the original cyberpunk was. I love William Gibson (and Bladerunner) but modern cyberpunk is but a hollow shell of Gibson's aesthetic.
I have find memories of this anthology! got into cyberpunk via gibson's "burning chrome" and sterling's "a good old-fashioned future", and I still think short stories were the best of the genre. I remember them a lot more vividly than I do the novels.
I must be a few years older than you are. It was the original Cyberpunk (set in 2013, published in 1988) that did it for me.
One of the things I remember about the game was that it came with a suggested book and film list. Reading all those books, and tracking down the recommended films was something of a quest for me and my friends. That last part sounds trivial, but if your local video rental store didn't happen to have a copy of 1982's art-house weirdo indie film Liquid Sky, it was a real challenge.
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
The first cyberpunk novel I read was True Names by Rudy Rucker. John Shirley has been called 'patient zero of cyberpunk' for his novel Eclipse.
(I published a collection of Cyberpunk stories called Error Message Eyes Release 3.0 and it will be a free download on Kindle on August 24th. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5CCRRSB I apologize for the blatant self promotion.)
I didn't particularly enjoy neuromancer. I love the world building and the subject but I realized after a few books I just don't like Gibson's style, I struggle to get through the reading.
But! If you like it, the rest of the sprawl trilogy is just as good, and the bridge trilogy is probably better.
I still have my faded paperback copy of this book, from 1986. I pulled it down off the shelf and got a jolt of nostalgia, thinking about reading it when I was kid and just being blown away by such a weird vision of the future. The cover was neat, the shades on were actually mirrored.
I'm the one who put MIRROR SHADES online for free. All the others agreed. And why would we go asking for permission? We're cyberpunks! You might like to check out out my story anthology with Bruce Sterling, TRANSREAL CYBERPUNK. Existing in audio as well. And my recent JUICY GHOSTS novel, about toppling an evil US president.
Thanks for this Rudy. I remember enjoying reading the Ware Tetralogy as a teen in the 90s. I wonder how well it holds up today. Might have to put that on my re-read list.
oh man, flashbacks to feeling slightly squicked at the sentient plastic sex toys. lol
I appreciate it. Are you thinking about applying a Creative Commons license to it so other people can keep it online for free after you're as dead as a TV channel that's the color of the sky over the harbor?
The port, goddammit.
Rudy, thanks for putting this up! I have a paper copy in my library, but digital is great, and now the panopticon AIs can admit in public they've read it, rather than secretly torrented it in their training data. Immortality of a sort.
Question - is Bruce still writing? Or at least theorizing / predicting / critiquing anywhere? If I think about his near term spec fiction from the 90s through 2000s, it was truly excellent. I'd be interested to hear what he's thinking about now.
So cool! I pasted this discussion thread into Grok 4 Heavy and asked it to markdown a table of all recommends made here, their years, detail and who suggested. Hope this gist is useful for all here looking to read:
https://gist.github.com/o0101/a40d09dab60f69a5f37cbcb751fdfd...
Oh man, assuming this is really Rudy, how fucking cool is that?!?? Rudy Rucker posting on HN! Totally gnarly.
Mr. Rucker, if that really is you, I hope you decide to hang around and participate in this little community a bit. It's a cool place (most of the time) and cyberpunk is perpetually a favored topic.
Thanks for your contributions to generations of thinkers.
This one wasn't the one that converted me (Gibson ftw) but Mirrorshades expanded what I thought the genre could be.
Not every story is a winner, but enough try to stretch a bit that it's worth the read.
Helps to put your mind in the time, just before the 90s, before The Matrix but after Blade Runner, before "the metaverse" but after "the net" and "going online" were starting to enter conversations.
If you are looking for a recent anthology of cyberpunk you could do worse than rewired
Rewired: The Post-cyberpunk Anthology
Some great stories in there and no bad ones at all. IMO
I recently picked up Mirrorshades and The Big Book of Cyberpunk (edited by Jared Shurin) [1]
Will check this one out too!
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576/the-big-book...
Thanks for the recommendation. I just ordered a copy of "The Big Book of Cyberpunk".
Thanks, picked up the big book, but I got it as 2 volumes. So not quite so big perhaps
Does the "post-cyberpunk" in the title imply it's not about low-life people in a high tech environment but instead about the less criminally inclined, or do it mean something else?
Can't believe I'm a reader and didn't realize this was a book genre. For some reason I always associated it with comic books, graphic novels, and movies. Not that there's anything wrong with those mediums. I'm just more of a book guy.
All of this is to say, these and some of other recommendations in this thread are recommendations I didn't know I needed.
HN isn't perfect, but neither am I. I really appreciate the breadth of topics and interests. Big shoutout to PG for starting it, to Dang and all of the other moderators, and to everyone that contributes. I've learned a lot over the years.
They say to never be the smartest person in the room. I'm not even in the top 100 here and totally fine with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives - the genre has had its ups and downs since its high point. Note Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.
To be honest, I'm a little envious of you. The tradition of cyberpunk in books is deep and extensive, and you'll start seeing how the books written in the late 70s and 80s are still SO influential today.
Check the Neuromancer trilogy.
Since we're talking Cyberpunk here, I'll throw in a recommendation for a novel that isn't widely recognized as "Cyberpunk" per-se, but is probably "proto-Cyberpunk" at least. That novel being The Shockwave Rider[1] by John Brunner.
It has some elements in common with Cyberpunk and is just a plain fun read regardless of what genre label you apply.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
400 Boys by Marc Laidlaw was turned into an episode of Love, Death & Robots (volume 4) — released this year on Netflix.
And is perhaps best known as the writer behind the Half-Life story.
Gernsback Continuum is still my favorite story since Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Physical reality seems pretty solid, but social reality is certainly "flexible." And all the tech I work with is a continuum of different ages smushed together; javascript client apps embedding COBOL apps complied to wasm bytecodes. SQL databases whose schemas predate some of the developers working on the apps that use them. Instruction Set Architectures that were invented when we still thought Raymond Lowey-esque fins and gills were the height of material design.
In a bit of synchronicity, I found my copy of Islands in the Net last week and am re-reading it after 35 years. It's pretty interesting to see which bits Bruce Sterling accurately predicted and which were a bit off the mark.
I think he was generally just excellent at getting near term predictions right and interesting. To pick a small one of many there's a moment in Heavy Weather where they have trouble with their PBX, and he mentions that it's basically a shrunk-to-digital 20th century phone company in a box, and so it requires negotiation, rebooting, kicking, etc. Love that take on modern software layers.
Yup. I noticed a line in Islands in the Net where one of the characters waits until evening to make a phone call when the rates are low. I had a chuckle, but it didn't detract from the rest of the story that was definitely good. Though I should talk to my offspring about making sure they only call me in the evenings so the long distance fees aren't exorbitant, just to see if they try to take away my car keys.
> Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons.
How is this "free online edition" distinct from piracy, in that case?
It's hosted on one of the author's sites. The collection itself is (as far as I can tell) out of print. It's falling through the cracks of "too complicated for a publisher to figure the rights out of" and "not lucrative enough for anyone to care".
It’s possible that it’s being distributed with permission of the copyright holders. Given the number of different people involved that seems kind of unlikely, but “free” doesn’t have to imply a permissive license.
1 reply →
But it’s a published work. I wouldn’t expect the author to have rights to post it.
2 replies →
He drew hard on his cigarette. Annoyance flickered across his face, like an artefact in the poorly-compressed bootleg movies he sold to his fellow low-lifes at The Pig and Drum.
Some Corpo-type, no doubt. Can't help seeing something good scroll across their feed tube without calling Legal.
He'd worked with a few in the past. Not bad all-in-all, at least they paid on time. That said, he could think of few he'd drink with.
He toyed with the idea of leaving a bitchy comment. Probably get downvoted to oblivion.
The dogs in the yard barked at a passing vehicle.
Irritated by the animal noise and the corpo whining, he thrashed something out. Pulling another cigarette from his pack, he hit "reply".
> Some Corpo-type, no doubt.
The opposite. Consider Harlan Ellison's views on piracy: "If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump."
6 replies →
You perfectly articulated how I felt about this thread.
Man I can only hear this in Keanu's voice.
I gigglesnorted.
The Pig and Drum.
Please tell me that is a real place! :=)
1 reply →
It's free to read, not free to use. As it's from one of the involved authors, they probably got permission for this release. The problem with piracy is lack of permission/consent, not the act itself.
People are making books freely available all the time, even those they sell on other platforms. Nothing wrong with this.
Consider the popular cliche, "free as in beer vs free as in speech".
The rights copyright gives you, briefly, includes: copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work. What suggests there is piracy is going on?
In 1986, it was unlikely that the original contract for the book mentioned anything about electronic rights. As it was a reprint anthology, the rights purchased would have only covered the use in the anthology as long as it was in print. Which means that to post the book online, Rucker would have to contact the individual contributors and get new permissions. Did he do that? I make a guess that he did not. It is not clear from what is stated here.
1 reply →
The 'punk' in cyberpunk is intended to be punk.
This is from back when it was intellectual, and not a bunch of annoying people stapling circuit boards to their jackets and trying to be some sort of electrogoth. Content before the hollowing out.
Another great one is the Semiotext(e) SF anthology. I can't believe I was such a sucker to think cyberpunk was going somewhere interesting. It peaked 5 minutes in.
edit: in retrospect, I always felt that cyberpunk was just New Worlds going out with a (mostly American) bang.
The Information Society song "Mirrorshades" would pair well with this.
As would the Clipping song by the same name on their latest album that is heavily inspired by these stories as well!
That whole album is an absolute banger.
I just checked for my copy of this and its missing. : (
Great book. I like seeing how expansive the original cyberpunk was. I love William Gibson (and Bladerunner) but modern cyberpunk is but a hollow shell of Gibson's aesthetic.
Can you go into more detail about why you think it is a hollow shell?
Cyberpunk in popular media tends to focus on and glamorize the aesthetic of early gibson novels without having anything interesting to say or explore.
also available in mobi and epub formats (for Kindle and other ebook readers):
https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/mirrorshades.epub https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/mirrorshades.mobi
I have find memories of this anthology! got into cyberpunk via gibson's "burning chrome" and sterling's "a good old-fashioned future", and I still think short stories were the best of the genre. I remember them a lot more vividly than I do the novels.
Unfortunately for all of us, it turns out that cyberpunk dystopias are a lot more fun to read about than to live in.
* Dense, walkable cities
* No red tape stopping people from opening small businesses
* Cheap medical procedures available on demand
* Lax immigration rules allowing the free flow of the labor market
Idk just sounds like Bangkok to me
As cool as that would be, most cyberpunk settings don't include a military government ruling the cities.
...note to self, move to Bangkok.
6 replies →
All the corporate take over and impunity, none of the advanced cybernetics.
I really should rename my wifi network to something other than dystopia….
Isn't that true for just about any movie, book or genre?
An interesting point, I'll see if I can think up any counterexamples.
This book and the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG ignited my love for Cyberpunk in general when I was a kid and it hasn't waned since :)
I must be a few years older than you are. It was the original Cyberpunk (set in 2013, published in 1988) that did it for me.
One of the things I remember about the game was that it came with a suggested book and film list. Reading all those books, and tracking down the recommended films was something of a quest for me and my friends. That last part sounds trivial, but if your local video rental store didn't happen to have a copy of 1982's art-house weirdo indie film Liquid Sky, it was a real challenge.
Liquid Sky soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5UxwohjhHw&list=PL9F0ACA601...
Synth genius. I actually have it on vinyl.
1 reply →
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
When The Matrix came out and before I saw it, I thought it was a Shadowrun aware reference to cyberspace rather than the twist of it being 'reality'.
Shadowrun's world is in my top5 favourite RPG worlds ever
But the system... A Physical Adept rolling like 42 d6's is just redonkulous :D
just ordered a physical copy from 1994, excited to read the stories :)
what are y'alls recommendations for cyberpunk-y books?
mine are,
• Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
• Daniel Suarez - Daemon
• Daniel Suarez - Delta-V
• Shamus Young - Free Radical
niche tip for german-understanding people is 'Reda El Arbi - [empfindungsfæhig]'.
didn't finish Neuromancer yet, but i gotta start over because it's been too long.
The first cyberpunk novel I read was True Names by Rudy Rucker. John Shirley has been called 'patient zero of cyberpunk' for his novel Eclipse. (I published a collection of Cyberpunk stories called Error Message Eyes Release 3.0 and it will be a free download on Kindle on August 24th. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5CCRRSB I apologize for the blatant self promotion.)
The True Names I remember was by Vernor Vinge [0]. Cory Doctorow riffed on it in 2008. But not Rudy R, as far as I know.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
I didn't particularly enjoy neuromancer. I love the world building and the subject but I realized after a few books I just don't like Gibson's style, I struggle to get through the reading.
But! If you like it, the rest of the sprawl trilogy is just as good, and the bridge trilogy is probably better.
And Blue Ant is required reading for modern marketing. Also its awesome
* alec effinger: when gravity fails
* pat cadigan: synners
* neal stephenson: the diamond age
and two books that bring cyberpunk elements into a larger sphere
* greg egan: zendegi. a dying engineer wants to make an AI version of himself to raise his son
* c s friedman: this alien shore (beautiful meld of far future space based sf and cyberpunk)
I still have my faded paperback copy of this book, from 1986. I pulled it down off the shelf and got a jolt of nostalgia, thinking about reading it when I was kid and just being blown away by such a weird vision of the future. The cover was neat, the shades on were actually mirrored.
Have the original 86 on my bookshelf, close to some of your 'ware' books. Thx for writing!
Rudy Rucker - that's a name I've not heard in a while. I still have a copy of White Light kicking about, not sure I understood it mind you...
Now I remember really liking his novel "Software" as a kid. I had completely forgotten the name of the author.
I love Gibson, but I can't get past more than a few pages of Rucker, and I have no idea why
I got the UK version with foil cover to make the “mirrorshades” shiny and I love it so much. One of the definitive anthologies of the genre
Yep me too. Great to see it freely availible online.
IMHO by far the stangest, most mind bending story in it isn't really cybperpunk though but it's still flipping brilliant.
Petra by Greg Bear. It's about what happens when God dies...
https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/HTML/#calibre_link-2...
Yeah... Petra haunts me still, 40 years after reading it.
Yes! I had that one too. Remembering it and the cover was what prompted me to post.
Not strictly targeting Cyberpunk, but overlapping quite nicely is the "Armoured" anthology.
What's the best way to read this? On my wide desktop it is obviously insane.
Make your browser window narrower. Or try a tablet or an ebook reader, most of them should display html just fine. Or buy the printed book.
Absolutely brilliant collection of stories from some really great authors!
Formative for me. I read it in 1994ish when I was a smol.
Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by.
Love the vague randomly applicable prophetic lines in Gibson's work.
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