Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

Probably the best introduction to a collection that I have thus read. Sterling does a great job of stressing the key elements of cyberpunk and discussing the manner in which this (then nascent) movement coalesced. He briefly predicts its demise as the authors who made it diverge. He does repeat himself a little, but it comes across as appropriate reinforcement of his ideas, rather than harping.
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William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum: ★★★☆☆

This story has pleasing depth that belies its length and the seeming simplicity of its central conceit. Gibson condenses to a pithy and often humorous jaunt what could have been an incredibly lengthy essay on the changing nature of the future and the shifting societal attitudes to scientific and technological advancement. There are several amusing comments on industrial design and the notion of "photographing something that isn't there" adds an extra philosophical layer to the story, leaving the reader with the feeling that they've just read multiple tales in the same text, always a welcome thing. The whole thing is presented in Gibson's brilliantly conversational, character-infused prose.

On reading this story, which I read before any of the others in this anthology, I didn't feel like it actually belonged to the cyberpunk genre, though having read the whole anthology know and gone through something of a shift in my understanding of what cyberpunk is --or at least was-- I can totally get behind it.
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Tom Maddox, Snake-Eyes: ★★☆☆☆

This is one of those short stories that feels like a sketch for a much longer work. This could have been a tight, tense, claustrophobic techno-thriller. At this length, though, none of the characters have time to develop up to a believability threshold, the action is too linear, and there is no real sense of peril, as one hasn't had time to become attached to any of the characters.
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Pat Cadigan, Rock On: ★★☆☆☆

This story is a bit style over substance for me. The style is definitely there, definitely great, but in a story of this length, it was sometimes counter-productive, obscuring the content of the tale, acting as a barrier to understanding. Again, this would have been better as a longer story, with more time allowed for the style to become familiar to the reader.
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Rudy Rucker, Tales of Houdini: ★☆☆☆☆

I am baffled as to how this story is cyberpunk, let alone any subgenre of science fiction. It's just... odd. I guess, in the context of the other stories in this anthology it does seem to have that same kind of street-wise voice. The language is good, it definitely smacks of the '80s/early '90s, but this one didn't really connect with me.
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Marc Laidlaw, 400 Boys: ★★☆☆☆

This story, which a very particularly '80s post-apocalyptic vibe to it, immediately made me think of work by Jeff Noon, Michael Marshall Smith, and Jeff VanderMeer. It's weird fiction. It also seemed like it needed to be longer to really pack a punch. The ideas behind it, the characters within it, were not suited to the brevity of the story; nothing had time to develop sufficiently.
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James Patrick Kelly, Solstice: ★★★★☆
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Greg Bear, Petra: ★★★☆☆
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Lewis Shiner, Till Human Voices Wake Us: ★★☆☆☆

I really liked the idea behind this story, and the setting. The tone was beautifully haunting. It just didn't quite come together. It was rushed and the rushing compromised the character development, hamstringing the work in the process as this is a very character-focused piece.
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John Shirley, Freezone: ★★☆☆☆

This story is composed of three parts: an uncompelling infodump and two scenes, both of which ripple with style and energy, neither of which quite makes a tale in its own right. The three are stitched together into some Frankenstein's monster of a tale and it just doesn't work. Either of the scenes --a rocker's last concert in a rapidly chaning entertainment landscape and a neon-drenched chase scene-- or both, could have been happily expanded into individual tales with a tightness that comes with a well-written short work. As it is, this story is flabby and unsatisfying.
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Paul di Filippo, Stone Lives: ★★★☆☆

I would have labelled this story as a post-apocalyptic science-fantasy tale personally, or just plain fantasy. Taken alone, I would question it being labelled as cyberpunk; taken as a part of this anthology, especially next to several other stories that don't fit my pre-existing boundary set for cyberpunk, it serves to further illustrate how broad and open the subgenre was in its nascent phase, how narrow a sliver of it has retained the label thirty years later. The style of prose, the voice, definitely fits with the other stories here, evern as the setting and tone departs markedly, and this voice seems to be the thing that emerges in this anthology as the critical focus of cyberpunk.

Stone Lives has strong character building and weaves a fun tale. The world building and treatment of themes are not as strong but by no means weak. A solid story that suits its length.
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Bruce Sterling & William Gibson, Red Star, Winter Orbit: ★★★★☆

This is a great piece of short fiction, nailing character, plot, and world-building with efficiency that would make Checkov proud. The space station setting is a well-realised hard-scifi, near future piece of tech. The politics are a perhaps a bit dated now and may well have been rather ham-fisted even in the '80s but it works in service of the story. One could imagine this as a brilliant entry in a collection of vignettes that painted a whole world, a future that never was; definitely a story that left me wanting more even as it felt in itself complete and well-contained.
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Bruce Sterling & Lewis Shiner, Mozart in Mirrorshades: ★★★☆☆

The central conceit of this story --splitting off a fork timeline-- is one that I've read several treatments of recently, two by William Gibson, and all of them have been so different in tone. Though, like many of the short stories I read, this felt like it could have happily been longer, unlike most it did not actually suffer for its length, managing to put everything necessary onto the page, getting in and out like a story-telling corporate ninja, high on amphetamine, spewing a verbal diarrhea of pithy witticisms... Definitely on the more tongue-in-cheek side of the cyberpunk spectrum.

Una breve reflexión sobre las antologías:
Por lo general nunca he tenido una buena predisposición hacia ellas, a no ser que fueran del mismo autor, ya que siempre me he quedado insatisfecho por lo breves de los relatos... y siempre he acabado disfrutando mucho de ellas.
Es cierto que hay piezas que no terminan de llenarte, pero si la selección está bien hecha, suelen ser las menos, y a cambio tienes un ramillete muy amplio de ejercicios narrativos que seguramente no conocías. Eso es lo que me ha v

Una breve reflexión sobre las antologías:
Por lo general nunca he tenido una buena predisposición hacia ellas, a no ser que fueran del mismo autor, ya que siempre me he quedado insatisfecho por lo breves de los relatos... y siempre he acabado disfrutando mucho de ellas.
Es cierto que hay piezas que no terminan de llenarte, pero si la selección está bien hecha, suelen ser las menos, y a cambio tienes un ramillete muy amplio de ejercicios narrativos que seguramente no conocías. Eso es lo que me ha vuelto pasar con esta antología que, quitando a Gibson, no conocía a nadie y me he llevado muy gratas sorpresas, que me llevarán a buscar más de esos autores...

Una breve reflexión sobre ESTA antología:
La breve presentación de cada autor en el contexto del género (el cyberpunk) me parece genial, pues te da un poco de perspectiva de lo que puedes esperar de él, no vas "a ciegas". Me ha resultado muy útil, pues como dije anteriormente, casi no conocía a ninguno de los autores.
La selección de los relatos me parece muy acertada, pues cubre un abanico amplísimo de opciones dentro del cyberpunk y la ciencia ficción: la mezcla de lo cibernético con lo biológico, viaje en el tiempo, las drogas como medio de ampliación de los límites perceptivos, etc.
También me ha gustado que el background de los autores fuera también tan variopinto: desde el archiconocido Gibson (autor de Neuromante o Conde Cero, entre otras), de enorme influencia en el género cyberpunk, sobre todo en la estética, pasando por los polifacéticos Pat Cadigan o John Shirley (ambos músicos), que mezclan el rock con la ciencia ficción, hasta la desoladora narrativa de Lewis Shiner, que aprovecha su rico bagaje cultural para plantearnos relatos fronterizos entre la fantasía, el horror y la ciencia ficción...

Mis relatos favoritos:
-Ojos de serpiente, de Tom Maddox, por la rica recreación de los estados mentales del protagonista al coquetear con las drogas psicotrópicas y sus alteraciones neutrales.
-Petra, de Greg Bear, por montar un mundo de fantasía creíble en un cosmos muy reducido, apoyándose en figuras de la antropología religiosa conocidas por todo el mundo, y aprovecharla para ensayar varios de los prejuicios morales en ese nuevo escenario de una forma bastante original.
-Zona Libre de John Shirley, por su excelente ambientación de lo que una novela cyberpunk requiere, junto con toda una estética rockera y las contradicciones que envuelven la vida de una estrella venida a menos.
-Stove vive, de Pau di Filippo, por el misterio con el que es introducido el personaje principal dentro de un mundo lleno de contrastes, escondiendo perfectamente su característica principal, aunque siempre la hemos tenido delante. Soberbio.

¿La recomendaría?
Sin ninguna duda. No es una obra de actualidad, está claro, pues se encuadra en los 80's/90's, que ya han quedado lejos, pero sí es una obra que remueve todos los ingredientes del cóctel que fue el cyberpunk y te ofrece la posibilidad de retomar el género y releer ideas que han sido de gran influencia en la ciencia ficción posterior.