Storming the Reality Studio  Front cover of Storming the Reality Studio |
| Genre | Book |
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| Publisher | Duke University Press |
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Publication date | 1992 |
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| ISBN | 978-0-8223-1168-3 |
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Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, was published by Duke University Press in 1992, though most of its contents had been featured in Mississippi Review in 1988.
This collection of fictions by well-known contemporary writers and critical commentary by postmodern theorists addresses issues concerning how cyberpunk functions within postmodern culture. [1] This casebook became the criterion for promoting the interaction between the genre of science fiction and the literary avant-garde.
In his review of the book in Science Fiction Studies, John Fekete writes, "McCaffery likes to read good books; and his role, as in this text, in introducing interesting and off-beat literary artifacts to readers who might otherwise miss them, is to provide a laudable service with an infectious enthusiasm." [2]
Lance Olsen says in his review: "We're talking Zeitgeist here. Nothing more, nothing less. That's what Larry McCaffery's onto in this brilliant new compilation he's edited that you've just got to read.... You can't help getting excited about this collection. You just can't. It does nothing less than assemble a 1990s canon of postmodernity." [3]
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre.
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
John Shirley is an American writer, primarily of fantasy, science fiction, dark street fiction, westerns, and songwriting. He has also written one historical novel, a western about Wyatt Earp, Wyatt in Wichita, and one non-fiction book, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. Shirley has written novels, short stories, TV scripts and screenplays—including The Crow—and has published over 84 books including 10 short-story collections. As a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. His newest novels are Stormland and Axle Bust Creek.
Burning Chrome (1986) is a collection of short stories written by William Gibson. Most of the stories take place in Gibson's Sprawl, a shared setting for most of his early cyberpunk work. Many of the ideas and themes explored in the short stories were later revisited in Gibson's popular Sprawl trilogy.
Biopunk is a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on biotechnology. It is derived from cyberpunk, but focuses on the implications of biotechnology rather than mechanical cyberware and information technology. Biopunk is concerned with synthetic biology. It is derived of cyberpunk involving bio-hackers, biotech megacorporations, and oppressive government agencies that manipulate human DNA. Most often keeping with the dark atmosphere of cyberpunk, biopunk generally examines the dark side of genetic engineering and represents the low side of biotechnology.
Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of cyberpunk derivatives have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction. Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally and mechanically focused setting of cyberpunk, these derivatives can display other futuristic, or even retrofuturistic, qualities that are drawn from or analogous to cyberpunk: a world built on one particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated level, a gritty transreal urban style, or a particular approach to social themes.
The slipstream genre is a term denoting forms of speculative fiction that blends together science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction or do not remain in conventional boundaries of genre and narrative, directly extending from the experimentation of the New Wave science fiction movement while also borrowing from fantasy, psychological fiction, philosophical fiction and other genres or styles of literature.
The Pioneer Award is given by the Science Fiction Research Association to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year.
Lawrence F. McCaffery Jr. is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre.
Lance Olsen is an American writer known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge.
"The Gernsback Continuum" is a 1981 science fiction short story by American-Canadian author William Gibson, originally published in the anthology Universe 11 edited by Terry Carr. It was later reprinted in Gibson's collection Burning Chrome, and in Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling. With some similarity to Gibson's later appraisal of Singapore for Wired magazine in Disneyland with the Death Penalty, as much essay as fiction, it depicts the encounters of an American photographer with the period futuristic architecture of the American 1930s when he is assigned to document it for fictional London publishers Barris-Watford, and the gradual incursion of its cinematic future visions into his world. The "Gernsback" of the title alludes to Hugo Gernsback, the pioneer of early 20th century American pulp magazine science fiction.
The works of William Gibson encompass literature, journalism, acting, recitation, and performance art. Primarily renowned as a novelist and short fiction writer in the cyberpunk milieu, Gibson invented the metaphor of cyberspace in "Burning Chrome" (1982) and emerged from obscurity in 1984 with the publication of his debut novel Neuromancer. Gibson's early short fiction is recognized as cyberpunk's finest work, effectively renovating the science fiction genre which had been hitherto considered widely insignificant.
Turkey City Writer's Workshop is a peer-to-peer, professional science fiction writer's workshop in Texas. Founded in 1973 and still ongoing today, it was consciously modeled after the east coast Milford Writer's Workshop. The workshop "was a cradle of cyberpunk" where many of the practitioners of what would become cyberpunk first met.
Cyber-Psychos AOD (CPAOD) is a book and magazine publishing venture based in Denver, Colorado, focusing on avant-garde and unusual art, culture, and writings. Founded in 1992 (magazine), and 1995 by Jasmine Sailing, it has released 10 books and 10 issues of the magazine. The magazine's unabbreviated title is Cyber-Psychos And Other Diversities, with a subtitle of "The Magazine of Mental Aberrations".
The bibliography of American science fiction author Bruce Sterling comprises novels, short stories and non-fiction.
Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation is a Fiction Collective Two book published by Black Ice Books in 1992 edited by Larry McCaffery. It is a collection of innovative fiction, graphic art, and various unclassifiable texts written by some of the most radical literary talents who McCaffery classifies as Avantpop. In his introductory chapter, McCaffery calls these writers "a new breed of pop-culture demolition artists". These writers include cult figures such as Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany, Harold Jaffe and Derek Pell, as well as young new writers such as Euridice, Mark Leyner, and William T. Vollmann.
