It may seem strange to find reviewed in a journal of poetics a book devoted to fiction, half of which is made up of primary works in that genre. But as the foremost genre of “cognitive estrangement” (in Darko Suvin's nice description), science fiction has always raised compelling questions of and for poetics—questions about the relations between standard and alternative language systems, about the nature of textual representation, about formula and its subversion, and so forth. Not for nothing did Poetics Today editor Brian McHale devote a major portion of his Postmodernist Fiction (1987) to science fiction; not for nothing does he have a follow-up essay in Storming the Reality Studio.

And in the branch of science fiction with which this anthology is concerned in particular—cyberpunk—the relation to poetics can become even more explicit. To a large degree, cyberpunk is a literature of what French writer Guy Debord termed “the society of the spectacle,” a universe in which we experience reality through, and as, a series of signs, messages, texts—life itself rendered as pure semiosis. Many of the cyberpunk writers themselves are theory-literate, and their works are filled with references to new critics, new discursive modes of investigation, and new branches of the human sciences (for example, one of the leading conspirators in William Gibson's Neuromancer has taken courses in semiotics). At the same time, many of today's critical theorists adopt a virtually science-fictional approach to the order of things (take, for instance, Jurij Lotman's idea of literature as a “secondary modelling system”) and thereby create their own forms of cognitive estrangement. Indeed, the notion that literature is primary, while criticism is secondary gets blasted away in much of today's discursive practice, which can be at once poetics and poetic.

In fact, the writings in Storming the Reality Studio all seem to have been picked to exemplify new, widely shared modes of thinking, writing, and representing. If, for instance, a passage from Derrida's Of Grammatology shows up here in close proximity to an excerpt from Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, it is not because the former offers critical tools with which to understand the latter, but because both are indicative of a new discursive moment. The most apt term available to describe this moment is “postmodernism,” and one function of Storming the Reality Studio is to bring together some of the most famous articulations of postmodernism (hence selections by Jameson, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, among others) with equally famous examples of its discursive practice (hence excerpts from Pynchon, Burroughs, and Kathy Acker).

Within literary postmodernity, cyberpunk is a privileged genre. It images a world of semiotic simulations, of rampant commodification, of an informational society run wild, of emotion turned into superficial affect; a world where the body and the mind are rendered mutable (by electronic and mechanical prostheses, by mind alteration, by memory implantation, and so on). Imaged as well are the consequences of this world for a society (still) made up of self-willed individuals, whose lives make for gripping narrative.

Storming the Reality Studio is a wonderful introduction to the cyberpunk phenomenon. It offers a range of fiction, poetry, and graphics from cyberculture and allied traditions, such as works by Burroughs, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Acker, as well as critical/theoretical pieces on and of postmodernism by Jameson, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Arthur Kroker. The essays specifically on cyberpunk traverse a vast array of issues, from feminist possibilities in the new fiction (Joan Gordon) to the relation of cyberpunk to new experiments in literary forms other than science fiction (Veronica Hollinger, Brian McHale); from the possible superseding of a specifically literary cyberpunk by an emergent multimediaism (Brooks Landon) to cyberpunk's relationship to philosophies of rebellion (Timothy Leary—yes, that Timothy Leary); from cyberpunk's ambiguous position in the marketplace of late capitalism (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.) to cyberpunk and the new sounds in rock (Larry McCaffery); from cyberpunk's reputation in postmodern Japan (Takayuki Tatsumi) to the ideology of cyberpunk (Darko Suvin). The anthology also offers a superb interview (by editor McCaffery) with William Gibson, an extremely comprehensive bibliography, and a captivating annotated reading list (not just of cyberpunk, but also of its influences and allegiances).