The term “cyberpunk” entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer . Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi "[A] brilliant new compiliation of fiction and nonfiction . . . that you've just "got" to read. . . . [The] thesis is simple as a whitehot razor blade: we don't "read" science fiction, we "live "it. . . . You can't help getting excited about this collection. You just can't." --Lance Olsen," Mondo 2000" Storming the Reality Studio A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction By Larry McCaffery Duke University Press Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-1168-3 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction: The Desert of the Real, Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio, Fiction and Poetry, Beyond the Extinction of Human Life (from Empire of the Senseless), From Crash, Rock On, Among the Blobs, From White Noise, From Neuromancer, Fistic Hermaphrodites, Microbes, Penetrabit: Slime-Temples, Nerve Terminals, Max Headroom, From Straight Fiction, The Toilet Was Full of Nietzsche (from Metrophage), Office of the Future (from Dad's Nuke), I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot (from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist), From Plus, Wire Movement #9, Wire for Two Tims, From Easy Travel to Other Planets, From The Crying of Lot 49, From Software, From Life During Wartime, Stoked, Wolves of the Plateau, Twenty Evocations, The Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu: 2-1-'16 (from Schismatrix), The Indigo Engineers (from The Rainbow Stories), Nonfiction, Before the Lights Came On: Observations of a Synergy, The Automation of the Robot (from Simulations), Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism, From Of Grammatology, Yin and Yang Duke It Out, Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism, From Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Television and the Triumph of Culture (from The Postmodern Scene), Bet On It: Cyber/Video/Punk Performance, The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot, The Postmodern (from The Postmodern Condition), An Interview with William Gibson, Cutting Up: Cyberpunk, Punk Music, and Urban Decontextualizations, POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM, The Wars of the Coin's Two Halves: Bruce Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper Narratives, Frothing the Synaptic Bath, Literary MTV, Preface from Mirrorshades, The Japanese Reflection of Mirrorshades, Bibliography, Contributors, CHAPTER 1 Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio A quick list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape cyberpunk ideology and aesthetics, along with books by the cyberpunks themselves, in roughly chronological order. Frankenstein (Mary Shelle