Mirrorshades question 1: The collection

NeilNjae

What did you think of the stories? What was your favourite, what didn't you like, what did you think was notable.

Apocryphal

Overall I though it was a mixed bag (which is almost always the case with a collection or anthology - except those compiled by John Joseph Adams).

My favourite was easily the first story, the one by William Gibson, which mightily impressed me in terms of writing and imaginative sweep. I also quite liked two Lewis Shiner stories. I don’t have much experience with the author, though he does have some novels which have garnered acclaim. I just picked up one yesterday (Deserted Cities of the Heart) at the Fantastic Pulps show at the Merrill Science Fiction library here in Toronto).

I think in general I liked the least ‘cyberpunk’ feeling stories the most. Cyberpunk is not really my favourite genre - something about its sci-fi noir mood feels pretentious, and I find tech-prodigy characters to be rather trite.

RichardAbbott

Back home now and looking at these properly... Like @Apocryphal I found them mixed, and am never sure how well I get on with short stories (of course there are exceptions). I'm not sure I had a favourite as such - I thought there were interesting ideas in several but wished they'd been developed more. Looking back through the titles, I didn't click with 400 Boys. I thought Snake Eyes had promise but ended up a bit aimless to me. I wasn't sure where Solstice was going. In general I guess I found the setup more interesting and original than the plots.

NeilNjae

My thoughts on the stories:

• Gernsback Continuum: a nice way of both pointing out how disorienting modern technology can be, and how dystopian the world really is, only we don't notice it most of the time because it's "normal" now.
• Snake Eyes: good mood piece, again showing how technology can disrupt our ideas of "normality". Perhaps the modern analogue is how social media has made us all fragment into separate tribes, without many common cultural touchstones.
• Rock On: Corporations as evil, blood-sucking life forms that, when they decide that they own your soul, do so. With the art being a metaphor for the soul.
• Houdini: it was ... a trip. I'm not sure what it was trying to say, but at least it didn't hang around too long.
• 400 Boys: I think I can see what the author was getting at. Inner city gangs, feeling their own importance, being the ones who take over the city and make it their own, with the huge destructive outsiders being cut down to size and shown to be infantile beneath their capacity for destruction. The first story here to have a real anti-establishment message.
• Solstice: Another story about how technology dislocates us, in time and from our relationships. I'm not sure why Stonehenge was there.
• Petra: Another story of the underclass rising up, finding their own new ways of living in a world changed utterly from what people used to know. Also saying something about how religion, or maybe just Christianity, needs to be reconsidered in this new age.
• Til Human Voices Wake Us: A few now-standard cyberpunk tropes: body modification, powerful corporations that own people, and the search for individual freedom despite it.
• Freezone: A reasonable dystopic cyberpunk story of a rocker still leading a rebellion that everyone else has moved on form him. And utterly ruined by huge chunks of unconnected twaddle.
• Stone Lives: Cyberpunk does Cinderella. A setting of huge inequality, caused by the ascendancy of the Free Market above all others, where corporations control life itself. But our hero is lifted out of squalor, given the gift of true sight, and set on the pinnacle. I'd love to see what his version of "Happily Ever After" becomes.
• Red Star, Winter Orbit: Plucky American individualism frontier spirit overcomes the sclerotic commies. Yee-haw! Jingoistic nonsense.
• Mozart in Mirrorshades: A great piece about pollution and colonialism. Even now, we'd repeat all the sins of past if we could, but much more efficiently now we've got better technology. But if you can claw your way up the greasy pole, all is forgiven.

RichardAbbott

That was really helpful, not least because it highlighted the stories that made so little impression on me that I had forgotten them completely! To the point that I thought of a couple of them that you must have a different edition with different content... but not so. The ones I had just blanked were Houdini and Red Star Winter Orbit, which you were fairly negative about as well
Solstice seemed ok at the time of reading but I also couldn't work out what the point was of basing it around Stonehenge, nor the function of the historical flashback bits.

clash_bowley

OK - I really liked Gernsbach Continuum - fascinating idea, where reality was malleable, and consensus defined 'real reality'! Rock On was cool - the author saw what would actually happen to music except she didn't realize Rock really would die and become irrelevant. 400 Boys was interesting. I found Petra fascinating, but is it actually cyberpunk? Loved it though! Freezone... Freezone was horrific like swimming in a sea of molasses. Mozart in Mirrorshades was cool - - the idea of raping other timelines for raw materials was sick and all too believable. The rest was meh.