Mirrorshades  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) is a defining cyberpunk short story collection, edited by Bruce Sterling.

Contents

• "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson
• "Snake-Eyes" by Tom Maddox
• "Rock On" by Pat Cadigan
• "Tales of Houdini" by Rudy Rucker
• "400 Boys" by Marc Laidlaw
• "Solstice" by James Patrick Kelly
• "Petra" by Greg Bear
• "Till Human Voices Wake Us" by Lewis Shiner
• "Freezone" by John Shirley
• "Stone Lives" by Paul Di Filippo
• "Red Star, Winter Orbit" by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson
• "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner

Cultural references

In a talk at Michael Bauwens & The Promise of the Blockchain, Vinay Gupta spoke about cyberpunk in general and Mirrorshades in particular as being the best way to understand the current status of civilisation. Alluding to the conversation initiated in Britain by C. P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture, Gupta described a clash between two groups who are capable of governance: the technologists, and the lawyers. He said that cyberpunk, though often badly written, consists of the stories these people had in their mind when they created such technologies and protocols as bitcoin, Ethereum, and the blockchain in general. He recommended Mirrorshades as an ideal introduction to these stories. Gupta further argued that such stories have attained the power of myth within the social classes which are reshaping the world but that, since science fiction has been marginalised in the wider culture as genre fiction, these myths are poorly understood.