[In the following review, Jonas characterizes the stories comprising the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.]

Mirrorshades is subtitled “The Cyberpunk Anthology.” The editor, Bruce Sterling, explains in a brief preface that, “cyberpunk” is a new science-fiction esthetic for our time, born of “an unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy. … Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap, a cultural Petri dish where writhing gene lines splice.” A few pages of this word-hype and it is a relief to turn to the stories themselves, 12 in all, the earliest originally published in 1981, the most recent in 1986.

What we find is a science fiction that takes the runaway power of science and technology for granted, that plays paranoia straight and finds comic relief in anarchy, and that gives center stage to characters who ask of the future not, “What's new under the sun?” but “What's in it for me?” The best known exponent of cyberpunk is William Gibson, whose 1985 novel Neuromancer (a computer hacker's power fantasy) won every major prize in science fiction. Unfortunately, Mr. Gibson is represented in Mirrorshades by a minor story (circa 1981) and a pedestrian collaboration with Mr. Sterling. The sense of on-the-edge excitement that made Neuromancer so popular is captured here in a long story called “Freezone” by John Shirley. Ignore the first three pages of background synopsis, which is as unconvincing as it is unnecessary; the rest of the story offers a funny yet affectionate portrait of the artist as a hard-core rock “classicist” who cannot stand the “new” artificial music and who is drawn into an assassination plot because he likes the looks of one of the plotters: “Bare breasts, nipples pierced with thin screws. … Her makeup looked like a spin painting. Her teeth were filed. Rickenharp swallowed hard, looking at her. Damn, she was his type.”

Rudy Rucker, a mathematician by trade, contributes a breezy “Tales of Houdini” that tickles the imagination and then vanishes without a trace. In a zany collaboration called “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” Lewis Shiner and Mr. Sterling see time travel as opening the door for exploitation of the earth's resources on a scale undreamed of by today's most ruthless corporate polluters; the serious-slapstick style of this tale reminded me of the movie Brazil.

There are also some good, if unremarkable, stories by Tom Maddox, Pat Cadigan, Mr. Shiner solo, James Patrick Kelly and Paul Di Filippo, any of which could have appeared in science fiction magazines any time in the last 25 years without benefit of the “cyberpunk” label. Mirrorshades are, of course, mirrored sunglasses that hide the wearer's eyes from the gaze of passers-by.