Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The term "cyberpunk" entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson's pathbreaking novel Neuromancer . Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde.

By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture.

What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age.
A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art.

Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman

Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Desert of the Real
• Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio
• Fiction and Poetry
• Beyond the Extinction of Human Life (from Empire of the Senseless)
• From Crash
• Mother and I Would Like to Know (from The Wild Boys)
• Rock On
• Among the Blobs
• From White Noise
• From Neuromancer
• Fistic Hermaphrodites
• Microbes
• Penetrabit: Slime Temples
• nerve terminals
• Max Headroom
• From Straight Fiction
• The Toilet Was Full of Nietzsche (from Metrophage)
• Office of the Future (from Dad's Nuke)
• I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot (from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist)
• From Plus
• Wire Movement #9
• Wire for Two Tims
• From Easy Travel to Other Planets
• Frame 137
• From The Crying of Lot 49
• From Software
• From Life During Wartime
• Stoked
• Wolves of the Plateau
• Twenty Evocations
• The Marc Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu: 2-1-'16 (from Schismatrix)
• The Indigo Engineers (from The Rainbow Stories)
• Non-Fiction
• Before the Lights Came On: Observations of a Synergy
• The Automation of the Robot (from Simulations)
• Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism
• From Of Grammatology
• Yin and Yang Duke It Out
• Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism
• From Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• Television and the Triumph of Culture (from The Postmodern Scene)
• Bet On It: Cyber/video/punk/performance
• The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot
• The Postmodern (from The Postmodern Condition)
• An Interview with William Gibson
• Cutting Up: Cyberpunk, Punk Music, and Urban Decontextualizations
• POST cyber MODERN punk ISM
• The Wars of the Coin's Two Halves: Bruce Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper Narratives
• Frothing the Synaptic Bath
• Literary MTV
• Preface from Mirrorshades
• On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF
• The Japanese Reflection of Mirrorshades
• Bibliography
• Contributors

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Editor McCaffery here collects over 50 essays, short stories, novel excerpts, literary criticism, poetry, artworks, and a comic strip that illustrate the influences on and of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction and its distinctive sensibility. Most of the space goes to the two godfathers of cyberpunk, William Gibson (whose Neuromancer , Berkley, 1984, won the science fiction triple crown--Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards) and Bruce Sterling ( Schismatrix , LJ 6/15/85), but most other major cyberpunk writers are represented. McCaffery does not limit cyberpunk to science fiction but puts it in the context of postmodern literature and 1980s popular culture. The only flaw is that Sterling's preface to Mirrorshades ( LJ 12/86), often considered a cyberpunk manifesto and constantly referred to in the essays, is not presented until the end of the nonfiction section. An important work; highly recommended for all sf, literature, and pop culture collections. (Illustrations not seen.)-- Keith R.A. DeCandido, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

A lot of words have spewed from word processors since William Gibson invoked the cyberpunk movement with the novel Neuromancer back in 1984. With Storming the Reality Studio, Duke University jumps on the cyberpunk bandwagon. Larry McCaffery, the volume's editor, was also at the helm of a well-received 288-page special cyberpunk issue of Mississippi Review (vol. 16, nos. 2 and 3, 1988). In fact, 11 of the 51 pieces in this book previously appeared in the MR cyberpunk issue. Putting together an anthology on a pop-culture movement is akin to dissecting a frog, in that it's usually done following the frog's demise. After making one's way through the critical analysis, the deification, the blathering, and the examples of the genre's fiction that make up this anthology, it's still difficult to know for sure whether cyberpunk is dead or not--or if it was only "postmodern science fiction" with a truth-in-labeling problem. However, there's a lot of interesting stuff here plus a decent bibliography, and this is probably the best one-stop-shopping center for getting a handle on a significant technophilosophical movement. (Reviewed Nov. 15, 1991)0822311585Elliott Swanson

Kirkus Book Review

Another of those strange fiction/nonfiction hybrids that only science fiction seems to generate. As shaped by McCaffery (English/San Diego State; co-ed., Alive and Writing, 1987), the intent is to explore the phenomenon of cyberpunk sf, its relationship to postmodern fiction, and its influence on the literary mainstream. Cyberpunk's type-specimen novel is William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), which introduced many of the concepts for which cyberpunk is now famous: the imaginary computer-generated universe, cyberspace; the punk sensibility (personal appearance, clothes, music, lifestyle); the global awareness based on unrestricted corporatism and consequent lack of a global ethic; and, above all, the culture of perpetual change, embedded in and driven by technology. Many of the essays here capably and sometimes excitingly explore this universe (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Brian McHale, Darko Suvin), while others hide behind a smoke screen of academic jargon (Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson), and still others become distracted (Joan Gordon, failing to determine why Pat Cadigan is cyberpunk's only female practitioner). For the uninitiated in particular, the fiction on display here forms an excellent introduction, ranging from acknowledged cyberpunkers like Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Lucius Shepard, Rudy Rucker, and Marc Laidlaw to fellow travelers such as J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and poet Rob Hardin. Also excerpted here, William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon are held--with some justification--to have prefigured cyberpunk. Yet other authors (Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Don DeLillo) demonstrate how far cyberpunk has infiltrated the literary mainstream. Clearly, cyberpunk now forms the cutting edge of sf; equally clearly, sf has not just challenged the mainstream literary avant garde but has become part of it. Like cyberpunk and sf in general: sometimes irritating, severe, puzzling, or incomprehensible, but just as often original, provocative, incisive, or challenging. Newcomers to cyberpunk will find the fiction particularly useful and enjoyable, while oldsters will revel in and argue over the essays. Splendid, stirring stuff.