ABSTRACT

Print-based cyberpunk emerged in the early- to mid-1980s thanks to five upstart science fiction authors—William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley—who were loosely affiliated as the self-proclaimed Movement before the label cyberpunk came to define their early work. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until Bruce Sterling’s edited collection Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology that cyberpunk truly became an identifiable and marketable label used to categorize not only Movement-era authors but also Pat Cadigan, Tom Maddox, Marc Laidlaw, James Patrick Kelly, Greg Bear, and Paul Di Filippo. This chapter focuses on the early circumstances that brought the Movement-era authors into one another’s orbits, the emergence and applicability of the cyberpunk label, and how the diverse stories in the Mirrorshades collection exhibit both the strengths and weaknesses of print cyberpunk in its formative years.