"Mississippi Review" is an amazing document of cyberpunk and cyberpunk academic analysis circa 1988. Edited by Larry McCaffery, this 288-page journal from the University of Southern Mississippi offered interviews, essays, short stories, and a lively forum section with writers from within the movement and without. "MR 47/48" probably marked the beginning of academia's serious consideration of the cyberpunk aesthetic. Essays by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay and George Sluser, along with McCaffery's introduction to the issue, explored the place of cyberpunk in the current of post-modern critical thinking. Fiction was provided by Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, Rucker, Disch, Delaney, Laidlaw and Mark Leyner.
This issue of "MR" is long out of print, but McCaffery has re-edited it, added more material, and is republishing it in 1992 as "Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction." It will be published by Duke University Press in January 1992 and will sell for $17.95.
LATE BREAKING NEWS FLASH...
"Reality Studio" is out!! This revamped, greatly expanded version of the "MR" makes a great companion to "Beyond Cyberpunk." Cover art by our pal John Bergin.
(G. Branwyn)
Glossary:
ACCESS:
Mississippi Review #47/48
Vol. 16, Nos. 2 & 3, 1988
(out of print)
Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction
edited by Larry McCaffery
Duke University Press
1992, 387 pgs., pb, $17.95
Here is the TEXT POPUP for Mississippi Review #47/48 and Storming the Reality Studio:
...how many formulaic tales can one wade through in which a self-destructive but sensitive youth protagonist with an (implant/prosthesis/telechtronic talent) that makes the evil (mega-corporation/police state/criminal underworlds) pursue him through (wasted urban landscapes/elite luxury enclaves/eccentric space stations) full of grotesque (haircuts/clothes/self-mutilation/rock music/sexual hobbies/ designer drugs/telechtronic gadgets/nasty new weapons/ exteriorized hallucinations) representing the (mores/fashions) of modern civilization in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up with rebellious and tough-talking (youth/artificial intelligence/ rock cults) who offer the alternative, not of (community/ socialism/traditional values/ transcendental vision), but of supreme, life-affirming hipness, going with the flow which now flows in the machine, against the spectre of a world-subverting (artificial intelligence/ multinational corporate web/evil genius)?
And yet, out of the anti-human evil that has created conditions intolerable for normal human life, comes some new situation. This situation is then either the promise of an apocalyptic entrance into a new evolutionary synthesis of the human and the machine, or an all-encompassing hallucination in which true motives, and true effects, cannot be known. Neuromancer's myth of the evolution of a new cosmic entity out of human technology is perhaps the only seriously positive version of the new situation...
-Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
