Mirrorshades

There's a quote from Michael Swanwick on the inside back cover of the Mirrorshades paperback: "These are all hot young verbal pilots who think nothing of taking forty-thousand tons of screaming heavy metal prose and throwing it straight at the ground in a forced power dive shedding sparks and literary chaos only to pull up at the last possible instant shy of total grammatical implosion just to see the horrified looks on the pale upturned faces of the civilians as the afterburners cut in." Very cool quote. Also, inaccurate. There are no bad stories in Mirrorshades, but there are a bunch that are just OK. The best part of the book is Bruce Sterling's preface, in which he traces the history, the influences, the concerns, the tropes of the cyberpunk movement. The strongest stories in Mirrorshades are two by William Gibson: "The Gernsback Continuum" and "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (the latter co-authored with Sterling), both of which also appear in Gibson's Burning Chrome collection of stories, which I read just prior to this. Otherwise, in this collection Sterling and Lewis Shiner's "Mozart in Mirrorshades" is a fun time-travel tale; Greg Bear's "Petra" is weirdly wonderful, as is Marc Laidlaw's "400 Boys"; "Solstice" by James Patrick Kelly is also pretty strong. The rest of the stories weren't bad, and I didn't dislike them, but they weren't as super-awesome and spectacular as Swanwick's quote and Sterling's preface would lead us to believe. The tales in Mirrorshades are definitely 1980s-flavored and this is definitely an enjoyable and worthwhile read. The collection is just not as good as I was hoping it would be.