This series is all about novels to inspire your cyberpunk games. The last entry was all about spies and spooks! This post is going to cover the magical realist tendency in cyberpunk, and traverses some strange territory.
Science fiction has alternated between inner space and outer space for decades now. In the 1960s the British New Wave - Moorcock, Ballard, etc - reached for the inner space of the mind, accessible through drugs or fringe psychiatry. Twenty years later, a new more technological inner space provided the backdrop for Cyberpunk: cyberspace. The British New Wave and Cyberpunk achieved their final synthesis in the Vurt.
I'm just going to come out and say it. Jeff Noon's Pixel Juice is my favourite short story collection ever, above Burning Chrome, above Cyberabad Days and Vermillion Sands and Ribofunk and even the unjustly ignored Mammoth Book of Future Cops. I read it when I was 15, when half my friends were into rave music and hour long electronic mixes shared over MSN Messenger, when I was discovering all pop culture in a rush, soon after I discovered Cyberpunk 2020 and most of the other nonsense on this blog. I brought it along with a copy of Naked Lunch in a railway station in Prague or Dresden or Berlin or somewhere else mitteleuropean, because the English language sections of foreign railway station bookshops are the best fiction bookshops anywhere.
I've made a semi-conscious decision never to read it again, because it can't possibly be as cool now as it seemed when I was a teenager.
I'm just going to come out and say it. Jeff Noon's Pixel Juice is my favourite short story collection ever, above Burning Chrome, above Cyberabad Days and Vermillion Sands and Ribofunk and even the unjustly ignored Mammoth Book of Future Cops. I read it when I was 15, when half my friends were into rave music and hour long electronic mixes shared over MSN Messenger, when I was discovering all pop culture in a rush, soon after I discovered Cyberpunk 2020 and most of the other nonsense on this blog. I brought it along with a copy of Naked Lunch in a railway station in Prague or Dresden or Berlin or somewhere else mitteleuropean, because the English language sections of foreign railway station bookshops are the best fiction bookshops anywhere.
I've made a semi-conscious decision never to read it again, because it can't possibly be as cool now as it seemed when I was a teenager.
