The Big Book of Cyberpunk

The Big Book of Cyberpunk #1-2

by Jared Shurin (Editor), William Gibson (Contributor), James Tiptree Jr. (Contributor)

A genre-defining--and redefining--collection of fiction's boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient genre, featuring a smorgasbord of stories from all over the globe.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Almost forty years ago, William Gibson wrote the line that began Neuromancer and, more importantly, cyberpunk--a movement that would change the face of science fiction.

Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic--from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There's dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AIs, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.

We live in an increasingly cyberpunk world--packed with complex technologies and globalized social trends. A world so bizarre than even the futurists couldn't explain it--though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk offers a hundred ways to understand where we are, and where we're going--or simply venture down some dazzling, neon-slicked streets.

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Short Stories, Anthologies, Fiction, Fantasy

1116 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2023

About the author

Jared Shurin has edited or co-edited over two dozen anthologies of original and reprint fiction, including The Djinn Falls in Love, The Lowest Heaven, The Outcast Hours, the Best of British Fantasy series, and The Big Book of Cyberpunk.

He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy (twice!), Shirley Jackson (twice!), and Hugo Awards (twice!), and won the British Fantasy Award (twice!).

He currently writes about strategy, books and pop culture at Raptor Velocity.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rec. by: MCL, theme and sheer heft
Rec. for: The jacked-in

Despite its childishly literal title and slightly wonky layout (two columns per page, to fit all of the words into this floppy oversized paperback), The Big Book of Cyberpunk definitely delivers the good stuff, the pure quill, mainlining the signal straight into your brain stem. Editor Jared Shurin's new anthology (released in the futuristic year 2023) contains more than 1,100 pages of fiction and commentary, all (or almost all) slotting in quite neatly to the aesthetic stance or subgenre of speculative fiction that has been known since the 1980s as "cyberpunk."

This thing is amazing, frankly. Shurin did a lot of work, and it pays off.

Now, one of the worst things about cyberpunk in general—and you'll recognize this if you've dipped even a toe into the field—is that it tends to spawn manifestos. But even so I found myself getting into Shurin's lengthy Introduction, in which he lays out the framework for his project in great and sometimes disconcerting detail. (The New Testament's "Miracle of the Gadarene Swine" is not what I would have expected to encounter in this context!)

I am not going to try to review—or even list—every story in The Big Book of Cyberpunk. You can peruse a full Table of Contents via Google Books if you like, though, and marvel at the sheer scope of this anthology.

Shurin divides the book into four main sections: "Self," "Society," "Culture" and "Challenge." Introductions for each helpfully synopsize the stories to come. There's also a fifth quadrant of sorts, a "Post-Cyberpunk" section at the end.


The fiction in The Big Book of Cyberpunk begins with William Gibson's subversive classic "The Gernsback Continuum"—which, while I wouldn't exactly call it "cyberpunk," does rather set the tone for things to come (heh). Gibson's tale also kicks off Bruce Sterling's classic anthology Mirrorshades, by the way—and The Big Book of Cyberpunk receives a shoutout in a Metafilter thread about Sterling's ur-anthology.

It's all connected, you see...

The idea that art thrives on creative flamboyance has long been torpedoed by proof that what art needs is computers.
—from "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," by James Tiptree, Jr.... written in 1973.

And speaking of prescience, it's funny (or, well, not) how often the name Trump appears in Lavie Tidhar's 2012 story "Choosing Faces," as well.

Neon Yang's story "Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points" (2014) was new to me, and impressive—about a learning system that actually learns.

"Helicopter Story" (2020), by Isabel Fall, subverts a ridiculous and hateful meme, in a way I found solidly congruent with my own NSFW thoughts on such algorithmic exploitation. And this bit hit home for me too:

When America declared war on Pear Mesa, their AIs identified a useful diagnostic criterion for hostile territory: the posting of fifty-star American flags. Without ever knowing what a flag meant, without any concept of nations or symbols, they ordered the destruction of the stars and stripes in Pear Mesa territory.
—p.222

The title of qntm's story "Lena" (2021), which concludes the section on Self, is a nod to how an earlier test image was also exploited.


Next, the Society section opens with another classic of SF. Shurin's right; this one is a precursor to cyberpunk, written decades before the word had even drifted across the consciousness of a single writer, and still with one of the best titles ever: Samuel R. Delany's "Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1968)—in which the media are accused of having "spread a sense of alienation from firsthand experience" (p.247)—a truth that's even more true today.

Despite some elements that seemed like copaganda to me ("can we skip all the cliché cop bullshit?"—p.398), Maurice Broaddus' "I Can Transform You" (2013) is a pretty intense noir tale.

Privacy was something no one could afford anymore, so it had to be given.
—p.406

It was really good to see Minister Faust again, with "Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of S**t" (2021), in which a psychopathic pharma pioneer named Marvin Shkully (who? nobody we know...) gets bit right in his—awoo!

Arthur Liu's "The Life Cycle of a Cyber Bar" (2021) rounds off Society. A man walks into a bar... and then things get weird.


The third section of The Big Book of Cyberpunk is about Culture. Shurin observes,

While Golden Age science fiction worked out how we fly to Venus, cyberpunk fretted over the playlist.
—p.505

This may be the strongest section of the book, starting out with Fritz Leiber's dark vision of America on the skids in "Coming Attraction" (1974).

"With the Original Cast" (1982) by Nancy Kress is powerful and (heh) dramatic, even before the frisson of seeing "King Charles of England" on p.529.

And then comes William Gibson and Michael Swanwick's unforgettable "Dogfight" (1985), and the dark power of "[Learning About] Machine Sex" (1988) by Candas Jane Dorsey, another cautionary tale about the hazards of cybernetic superstimuli.

Now, you mustn't think I'm snubbing the host of stories and authors I'm just not mentioning by name... I enjoyed those too! But I do want to make particular note of local (Portland) luminary Erica Satifka's "Act of Providence" (2021; pp.704-712), which matches up an unlikely environmental catastrophe (in the sense that it's too much of a singular event) with an entirely plausible immersive scenario—yes, it's cyberpunk.


The fourth section of Shurin's book is called Challenge, and although "I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer" (1989) by Nisi Shawl is very short, it's also wise:

The will of the state automatically engenders a counter-will.
—p.758

I also have to include a shout-out to "Keep Portland Wired" (2020), by Michael Moss, with its clever title, funny twist ending and intense local color, sprawling from the Couv (which is a sardonic nickname, please note—actual residents of "the other Vancouver" don't use it much) all the way to Hillsbureau (heh—I'd never heard that one before)!

Sri Lankan Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's quietly chilling "The State Machine" (2020) hit hard for me too, like a modern-day "With Folded Hands" but with even more adaptable algorithmic overlords.

{...} the hard, old way of forgetting, which is remembering with grief.
—from "The Memory Librarian," by Janelle Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson, p.995

And then, the fifth quadrant of The Big Book of Cyberpunk: Post-Cyberpunk, in which Shurin asserts, believably, that

Cyberpunk has gone from software to operating system: a platform upon which other narratives can be built.
—p.997

This final section contains more experimental stories, some written with the assistance of LLMs (large language models, which I won't call "artificial intelligence") and at least one that's really about AI (Naomi Kritzer's instant classic "Cat Pictures Please")—all about the machine gazing back at itself. And how cyberpunk is that?


It took me a couple of weeks to read The Big Book of Cyberpunk the old-fashioned way, using my unmodified eyeballs to scan printed page after printed page. I know, I know: I should've just transferred it using my Direct Brain Interface™... but I actually enjoyed my low-bandwidth journey through Jared Shurin's anthology, a lot.

Cyber Week may be over (pro tip: Cyber Week is never over), but if you're good anyway, you may get a copy of this one under the tree yourself...

[Yev · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Big Book of Cyperpunk has 108 stories. Its details say it's ~1,100 pages, but it has ~643k words, which is closer to being ~2,200 pages normally. Each page has two columns of text, which explains the doubling. That's a lot of content. The scope and range of this anthology is immense. There were so many authors that I read for the first time and so many different concepts and ideals that I hadn't seen before. Each story is different in its presentation. I didn't notice any repetition despite this being a themed anthology. If you read every story in this anthology then your view on what cyberpunk is will be greatly expanded. There were several stories that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed them, often because their content was something that I initially thought that I wouldn't like. If this anthology was only composed of the stories I thought were good and great, it'd still be a full length anthology. There's even a few that I'm considering whether they're among the best of the 1000s of short fiction stories I've read. That may be enough by itself.

Translations
15 Translated
3 Japanese
3 Spanish
2 Arabic
2 Russian
1 Chinese
1 French
1 German
1 Korean
1 Portuguese

102 of the 108 stories have been previously published in English. This is the first appearance in English for 6 that have been translated. No story that was originally written in English appears in this anthology for the first time. I expected there to be more stories from Chinese authors because the Chinese science fiction anthologies I've read have had several stories that could be arguably described as cyberpunk as defined by this anthology. There are several that I would've included, though including what I prefer wouldn't necessary have made it any better. Unfortunately, there are doubtlessly many logistical issues that make the inclusion of anything difficult. An anthology of this size is a grand undertaking and even so in many ways it's still a survey rather than anything even pretending to be fully representative of its theme.

Shurin argues the world itself has become much more cyberpunk which in turn has made science fiction itself more cyberpunk. I completely agree with that assessment and as he notes it's probably the most important reason why cyberpunk barely has a discrete identity. The stories that can be most readily identified as cyberpunk are those that could now be considered as alternate histories. They're futures that never came to pass, at least not in the iterations presented for the most part. I find that especially interesting considering that the story which opens this anthology, “The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson is all about that. Even as cyberpunk was born it had contained the death of its identity. There are many nonfiction books that describe the assimilation of the counterculture into the mainstream and that's what seems to have happened with cyberpunk. Sadly, it often seems like those who have tried to most make the world the most cyberpunk were those who saw its warnings as inspirations and its villains as heroes.

Authors
72 men
31 women
5+ non-binary persons
1 AI + human prompters

Decade Distribution
1950s - 1
1960s - 2
1970s - 1
1980s - 18
1990s - 16
2000s - 13
2010s - 42
2020s - 15
20th Century - 38 35%
21st Century - 70 65%

At 39% of the stories, the 2010s are represented more than the entirety of the 20th century. That's understandable based on the restrictions Shurin placed upon this anthology. Of the 51 stories that were published before the 2010s, 13 of them were by authors who didn't exclusively identify as male, as assumed by a cursory search. That's 25%. The overall percent is 34%. The 57 stories in the 2010s and 2020s have 24, which at 42% is closing in on parity. I have no idea what the overall percent of eligible stories were written by whom, but I assume that even to be at this level of inclusion required a lot of effort. That's especially the case since Shurin said he tried to avoid having the same author more than once as well as those that have already been heavily anthologized.

Having a large number of non-white authors is almost surely too much of an ask without personally commissioning many authors. As Shurin notes, Afro-Futurism is not Black Cyberpunk. The other major source of fiction would be from authors from Southeast Asia and East Asia as far as I'm aware, but whether many of those would qualify is arguable.

I mention this because in the Editor's Note that opens the anthology Shurin explicitly states that cyberpunk was ahead of its time with both progressive themes and inclusivity. Of course, that's only relevant to its contemporaries and not to current expectations. However, Shurin also states that many of the stories in this anthology are transgressive in a variety of ways. I was surprised by how many of the stories could be considered offensive, personally I'd call them distasteful, by people of all sorts. Most of the stories I strongly disliked were because of this, though I would like to think it's also because of more than that, but it can be difficult to tell.

Enjoyment Distribution
Highly Enjoyable - 9
Enjoyable - 25
Ok - 37
Meh - 14
Blah - 23
Highly + Enjoyable - 32%
Ok - 34%
Meh + Blah - 34%

I don't know what conclusion I ought to draw from this since it's all over the place. This is unfortunately the case for a lot of anthologies and collections for me so it causes a lot of problems with how to rate it, much to the work's detriment. If a reader ignores everything they don't like rather than reading it all would it be a much better experience? I don't know whether that the better approach or not.

When I compared my ratings of the stories written by men compared to those of women I found that in terms of percentages, I was twice as likely (35%) to have rated a story as Enjoyable when it was written by a woman rather a man (17%). I was surprised by that and I'll have to look into that more. However, I was also twice as likely to have rated a story as Highly Enjoyable (10%) when it was written by a man as compared to a woman (5%). I'll have to ponder that as well.

The enjoyment distribution by published year was even more surprising for me. When I compared post-2010 and pre-2010 to have about half the stories in each era I found that I had almost the same for every single rating. I didn't expect at that all. Apparently I have minimal time preference, going by this at least.

In the preface to the Post-Cyberpunk section Shurin says that he was self-indulgent with the stories chosen for it. In my opinion, he was overly self-indulgent elsewhere as well, mostly with those that seemed to be included because of their malicious attacks on thinly-veiled contemporary public figures. It's not enough separation of fantasy from reality for my preference within its specific context.

Story Presentation
I copied the table of contents from Shurin's substack so I wouldn't have to type out the relevant details for each story. That's presented in alphabetical order by last name.
https://raptorvelocity.beehiiv.com/p/...

This anthology instead has them by sections and chronological order of publication. The sections are Self, Society, Culture, Challenge, and Post-Cyberpunk. The first story is outside of the sections though. Each section is prefaced with an introduction where Shurin discusses its theme and provides a brief description of each story. The first story of each section is one that could be considered to be proto-Cyberpunk.

The rest of this is what I've written about the stories. There's relatively a lot. As the entirety of everything here is about 60k characters, 10k words, and 20 single spaced pages. It suffices to say that if you have an interest in cyberpunk and don't mind short fiction then there will probably be a lot that you'll enjoy reading. I find it difficult to write about short fiction, the shorter the more so, because saying anything about it is a greater percentage of how much it is. So, be forewarned that what I've written for each story says enough to give an idea what the story is about, but since they're so short it may be also an overview of the story.

I received this DRC from Vintage Anchor through NetGalley

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This huge book has taken me ages to finish! Obviously in a book like this there are stories that didn’t grab me so I admit I skipped some. Divided into sections on the ‘self’, ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘challenge’ and ‘post cyberpunk’ and then in each section the stories are arranged chronologically. It includes well known authors and many I’d never heard of and stories from all over the world. Easy to dip into when I felt like a short story and very enjoyable.

[Florin Pitea · Rating 4 out of 5]

By far the most comprehensive cyberpunk anthology ever published. Some great stories, some good ones, some weird ones and some forgettable ones.

[Savior Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Big Book of Cyberpunk" is a fascinating journey into the gritty and neon-lit world of cyberpunk literature.

**Introduction**
Cyberpunk, a genre that fuses high-tech and low-life, offers an evocative and often disturbing vision of the future."The Big Book of Cyberpunk" attempts to encapsulate this essence in its pages. It's a bold endeavor, given the complexity and depth of cyberpunk as a genre. 🌃🔌

**Pros**
1. **Diverse Storytelling**: The anthology is a treasure trove of varied narratives. From AI-driven dystopias to neon-soaked streetscapes, it's a rollercoaster of cyberpunk themes. 🤖🌆
2. **Rich World-Building**: Each story immerses you in a meticulously crafted world. The level of detail is impressive, making you feel part of these alternate realities. 🌍✨
3. **Character Depth**: The characters are not just placeholders. They're complex, flawed, and incredibly human, which makes their stories more compelling. 🧑‍💼🚶‍♀️
4. **Cultural Relevance**: The book mirrors our current tech-obsessed society, raising poignant questions about technology, ethics, and human nature. 📱🤔

**Cons**
1. **Uneven Pacing**: Some stories hit the mark in pacing, while others feel like a drag. This inconsistency can be a bit off-putting. ⏱️😕
2. **Complexity for Newcomers**: If you're new to cyberpunk, some references and jargon might fly over your head, making it less accessible. 🤷‍♂️📚
3. **Emotional Disconnect**: A few stories lack emotional depth, making it hard to connect with the characters or the narrative. 💔📖

**Overall Rating**
Considering the highs and lows, I'd give "The Big Book of Cyberpunk" a solid 4 out of 5 stars. It's a commendable compilation that mostly hits the mark in delivering an authentic cyberpunk experience
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

**Reading Suggestions**
If you're hungry for more cyberpunk goodness, check out these titles:
1. "Neuromancer" by William Gibson – The quintessential cyberpunk novel that started it all.
2. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson – A mind-bending and witty take on the cyberpunk genre.
3. "Chantilly" by Savior Sullivan – A fresh and intriguing addition to science fiction library for its inclination to dystopian themes.

[Michael B. Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a heartbeat under my skin
Search my electric soul
For the hidden man within...
(Miracle of Sound)
A good song for this book. Cyberpunk is a genre that beats on the surface but resonates deep within. Burning lives, neon colors, arrogant hackers, too bright or too dark environments. I have no idea why, but I love cyberpunk. Each time I am surprised by the way it changes me inside and makes me happy and sad at the same time. Many of the texts in this book go beyond the classic cyberpunk style, but do not betray the sense of the frontier of existence that is typical of the narrative genre. Always beyond borders, beyond barriers, and into the maelstrom of extraordinary and terrifying visions.

[Doomscribe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review to come, but I can't see this being anything but the definitive Cyberpunk collection for many years to come. The baseline quality of these stories was strong, and the peaks were high and frequent.

Usual spiel about receiving a review copy but all thoughts are my own etc etc.

[WorldconReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Big Book of Cyberpunk” edited by Jared Shurin absolutely delivers the goods. It is a heavyweight at 1152 pages (in the electronic review copy) with 108 dark techno stories spanning 72 years from 1950 to 2022 including stories translated from German, Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, & Russian. This book includes many outstanding authors such as Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Fritz Leiber, Greg Bear, Greg Egan, Hoshi Shin’ichi (indirectly), James Patrick Kelly, James Tiptree, Jr., Ken Liu, Multiple AI's, Nancy Kress, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, & William Gibson. It is also notable that these stories were originally published in such venues as Omni, Galaxy, Nature, Time, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed.

As expected with good science fiction stories, these tales are entertaining and thought provoking. I think the editor did a great job of selecting these stories. I had already read about 15% of these stories, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed rereading these. Overall, I found about 20% of the stories to be exactly what I look for in science fiction (new ideas, cool settings, fun to read, etc). On the opposite spectrum there were a couple of stories that did not work for me, but I am sure that those stories are appreciated by some readers.

The most controversial point of this book is surely the label “cyberpunk”. The editor discusses and describes his definition of “cyberpunk” in the introduction. This book absolutely does contain some great cyberpunk, yet, it also contained a few stories that I personally do not consider to be cyberpunk. This is not a problem, however, since these are nicely offset by the rest of the book

An ideal review would include a brief critique of each of the 108 stories. Yet, if I attempted to do so, this review would turn in to a 100 page “Big Review of the Big Book”. Let me conclude by offering warm words of appreciation to the publisher, editor, authors, translators, and illustrators for kindly providing an electronic review copy of this excellent work. I strongly recommend this for readers that enjoy science fiction.

[Peter Tillman]

Book is certainly BIG: 1100+ pages! Editor Shurin has included many of the classics -- but also many, many more, up to stories published in 2022. All that I've seen, skimmed, or rejected fit some reasonable definition of Cyberpunk. Unfortunately, he's also included many stories that are not to my taste, or that didn't hold up to my re-reading. No surprise there. But lots of choices!

I'll be commenting on stories that I found particularly impressive, or that I particularly disliked. Stay tuned!

[Ondrej Urban · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would appear that to do anything publicly, one would better have an excuse bordering on defensive. Feeling like McDonald's? I myself have been there, time and again, the excitement of slightly disappointing food with an almost-negative nutritional value. McDonald's and Instagram? You'd better be doing it ironically after a week of salads and detox.

Feeling like putting together a big-ass book where you collect a ton of stories, because you liked them, like big-ass books and know that there are people that do too? Think of how long it's been since the likes of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology or Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, people! This is a serious academic undertaking, not just a vanity project that will make a bunch of people really happy!

Now, with that out of the way, The Big Book of Cyberpunk made me very happy not just because it's 1100-plus double-columned pages of cyberpunk BUT it also feeds my inner snob, allowing me to see where the field moved since oh-god-so-long-ago-my-university-days. You cannot say much more about an anthology of this size beyond the fact that it's been well put together and your opinion should rather go to the individual stories. But there is structure. Divided into sections focusing on broader topics such as Culture or Post-cyberpunk, the book offered a broader than expected (by me) range of stories and topics, from the standard cool-styled hackers of William Gibson, through sci-fi and fantasy, all the way to pieces that would fit like a glove in the famous The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.

Pretty much the only criticism I could give is the book's overall structure, where each section of several stories starts with an overview of topics discussed in them individually, with the authors' info being gathered on 20 pages at the very end of the tome. For someone with the kind of "OCD" that forces them to read this in order, I knew I could get so much more from this if only I could go back or peek forward after a story I particularly liked. Well, better stick to what the Vandermeer's did before - let's see how this worked for the big book of sci-fi!

Are you a cyberpunk fan? Get cracking, it's worth it! Are you a newbie? Don't get discouraged by the apparent high-brow notes of the theory in here and just give it a go!

[Runalong · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection exploring cyberpunks development over five years with a view to expanding beyond US male writers. Well worth reading

For a full review

Volume 1 https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...

Volume 2 https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...

[Paul Morisset · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ratings:

‘Lena’ by qntm - 5 stars.
'Choosing Faces' by Lavie Tidhar - 5 stars.
‘The Gernsback Continuum’ by William Gibson - 4 stars.
‘Dogfight’ by William Gibson - 4 stars.
‘Axiomatic’ by Greg Egan - 4 stars.
'The Girl Who Was Plugged In' by James Tiptree Jr. - 4 stars.
'Wolves of the Plateau' by John Shirley - 4 stars.
'Lobsters' by Charless Stross - 4 stars.
'0wnz0red' by Cory Doctorow - 4 stars.
'I Can Transform You' by Maurice Broaddus - 4 stars.
'Thoughts and Prayers' by Ken Liu - 4 stars.
'Ghosts' by Vauhini Vara - 4 stars.
'The Endless' by Saas Z. Hossain - 4 stars.
'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' by Philip K. Dick - 4 stars.
'Violation of the TrueNet Security Act' by Taiyo Fujii - 4 stars.
'The Last American' by John Kessel - 4 stars.
'Glitterati' by Oliver K. Langmead - 4 stars.
'Earth Hour' by Ken MacLeod - 4 stars.
'The Yuletide Cyberpunk Yarn, or Christmas_Eve-117.dir' by Victor Pelevin - 4 stars.
'Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars' by Cat Rambo - 3 stars.
‘Helicopter Story’ by Isabel Fall - 3 stars.
'Pretty Boy Crossover' by Pat Cadigan - 3 stars.
'Cyberpunk' by Bruce Bethke - 3 stars.
'The Great Simoleon Caper' by Neal Stephenson - 3 stars.
'The Scab's Progress' by Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo - 3 stars.
'With the Original Cast' by Nancy Kress - 3 stars.
'Coming Attraction' by Fritz Leiber - 3 stars.
'SPQR' by Kim Newman - 3 stars.
'Gray Noise' by Pepe Rojo - 3 stars.
'Deep Eddy' by Bruce Sterling - 3 stars.
'Alligator Heap' by E.J. Swift - 3 stars.
‘Petra’ by Greg Bear - 2 stars.
‘Cat Pictures Please’ by Naomi Kritzer - 2 stars.
'Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones' by Samuel R. Delany - 2 stars.
'The Memory Librarian' by Janelle Monae and Alaya Dawn Johnson - 2 stars.
'The Tin Pilot' by K.A. Teryna - 2 stars.

[David H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Containing stories first published between 1950 and 2022, this anthology was quite the journey through cyberpunk. Unlike the three earlier Big Books by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Science Fiction, Classic Fantasy, and Modern Fantasy), editor Jared Shurin forgoes the individual story introduction, but he does group all 108 stories into 5 sections detailing different themes relating to cyberpunk: Self, Society, Culture, Challenge, and Post-Cyberpunk. Each thematic grouping also gets its own introduction, and honestly, as much as I liked most of the stories, I feel like the editorial matter was incredibly valuable, a great lens to view these stories in. Even when I wasn't reading this anthology over the last 4 months, I was still viewing other SF I read using these perspectives.

The editor definitely has a broader definition of cyberpunk than I think many would be used to, but I think that is to this anthology's benefit--both for considering the larger subgenre and realizing (as he mentions in post-cyberpunk) how much of it has become the bedrock of our narrative future.

As with the VanderMeer Big Books, we also get a lot of translated and global fiction--it's not just an American subgenre, with stories from every continent except Antarctica (presumably--I didn't check to see if any of the authors were Antarctic researchers).

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: This is a summary, as a review of each of the stories may be too long for Goodreads to hold. The full review can be read at my website [ https://sohkamyung.github.io/reviews/... ].

A fabulous anthology of stories centred around the genre of Cyberpunk, as seen by the editor. The stories here centre around technology and its possible effects on people and society and range in style from contemporary to the more ‘punkish’ which involve a lot of cyber-slang, sometimes to the point where I have trouble understanding the story.

The book is divided into several sections, each with stories related to that section. It starts with a story that the editor considers the precursor to the kind of cyberpunk stories in that section. And the book starts with a story the editor considers a precursor to the whole field of cyberpunk.

With such a huge anthology, it would not be possible for the reader to enjoy every story, but I personally found myself enjoying most of them, and seeing the kinds of speculations that the field of cyberpunk has (and still is) contributing to contemporary speculative fiction.

[Gevera Piedmont · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took off a star for the inclusion of AI written stories at the end. I get why the editor might think that's cyberpunk, but as an author and editor I was deeply disappointed.

[KevinS · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is not just playing. This is a BIG book. There is a lot of cyberpunk here. Like a lot a lot. Who knew there was so much in this SF niche. If you're a fan of stories about the early days of networked computers when nobody knew what the internet was supposed to turn into or how humans would interact with it, about a time when hacking meant getting free long distance phone service, about the mythical days when a computer nerd was the next generation of western gunslinger and just as cool, then this is where to get your fix. Excellent stories, well organized, aggregated into significant mass.

[Groucho42 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just reviewed a fantasy collection that got five stars. It was long, but not too long. This book fails for being far too long. That means it has too many mediocre or downright bad stories in it. Still, there are enough good one that it's above average. If only the editor had controlled himself a bit.

[br]

ух бля

[Micah Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not usually a fan of short fiction, but this is an absolutely amazing collection of stories, organized by various themes of cyberpunk.

[Eric Folley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very long and uneven, but the good stuff is really good. These were some of my favorites:

Girl Who was Plugged In
Better Than
Helicopter Story
Great Simolean Caper
Immolation
Branded
Be Seeing You
Dogfight
White Mask
Alligator Heap
Act of Providence
Yuletide Cyberpunk Yarn
The Memory Librarian