Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology
James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel
Language: English
Pages: 425
ISBN: 1892391538
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Time to stop flipping the channel.
These sixteen extreme stories reveal a government ninja routed by a bicycle repairman, the inventor of digitized paper hijacked by his college crush, a dead boy trapped in a warped storybook paradise, and the queen of England attacked with the deadliest of forbidden technology: a working modem. You’ll meet Manfred Macx, renegade meme-broker, Red Sonja, virtual reality sex-goddess, and Felix, humble sys-admin and post-apocalyptic hero.
Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology) have united cyberpunk visionaries William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan with the new post-cyberpunk vanguard, including Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and Jonathan Lethem. Including a canon-establishing introduction and excerpts from a hotly contested online debate, Rewired is the first anthology to define and capture the crackling excitement of the post-cyberpunks.
From the grittiness of Mirrorshades to the Singularity and beyond, it’s time to revive the revolution.
wide shoulders. He met her gaze and smiled, white teeth appearing in the darkness of his beard. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…. Do you know those lines?” He pointed to a lump of shapeless stone, one of several that lay about. It bore traces of carving, almost eΩaced by time. “There was a city here once, with market places, fine buildings, throngs of proud people. Now they are dust, and only the caravanserai remains.” He stood before her, one tanned
woman’s flank would brush the man’s side; or he would lean for a moment, as if by chance, his hand on her shoulder. Then they would move deliberately apart, but they would smile at each other. Soon. Not yet… They must be vigilant. The approaches to fortunate Zimiamvia were guarded. They could not expect to reach the pass unopposed. And the nights were haunted still. They made camp at a flat bend of the river, where the crags of the defile drew away, and they could see far up and down their
People 68 | Jonathan Lethem were craning around to see. Fearing came out and took his microphone and said, “It isn’t his fault, folks. Just good hacker instincts for ferreting out corruption from encrypted data. The feds don’t want us digging up their trail, but the kid couldn’t help it.” Ed and Kromer started snapping me back into my suit. “We chased them oΩ,” Fearing said, patting his gun. “We do take care of our own. You can’t tell who’s going to come sni≈ng around, can you? For his
if it had; I couldn’t literally see where the contents was squirted, but I could imagine the route very clearly: back as far as the y-junction of the vein, where the blood flow would carry cancerous cells into the previously unaΩected right lobe. I swore for ten seconds, enraged by my own helplessness. I had none of the emergency tools I was used to: there was no drug I could inject to kill oΩ the spilt cells while they were still more vulnerable than an established tumour, no vaccine on hand to
briefed you on everything?” “Not the Bens, but yes, I know.” “Good, good.” “There is one thing I’d like to know. Where’s Bobby?” “Ah, Bobby, our little headache. Dead now, I’m afraid, or at least that’s the current theory. Sorry.” Anne paused to see if the news would deepen her melancholy. “How?” she said. “He signed on one of the first millennial ships — the colony convoy. Half a million people in deep biostasis on their way to Canopus system. They were gone a century, twelve trillion kilometers