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.
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