On a bus bench in San Diego I found a rain swollen copy of Count Zero.

I never recovered...

There for the first time were razorgirls and corporate mercenaries...hard men living on the bitter edge, cool, fey, elegant women, deadly as digital nightshade.... 

 

  Growing up I had crawled through the stacks, devouring Vonnegut...Heinlen...Vance...Silverberg...

but was left unsatisfied...there was something missing...regardless how good, well written, or imaginative.. I always felt a step removed, as if had already happened. 

 

  Cyberpunk was something different....stripped down to its chromed sheathed bones, it glittered like a fever dream...just at the edge of what was and what will...like the Zaibatsus, it existed just beyond my awareness stretching its unseen and inhumanly patient tendrils, encompassing the near future, moments before it become the present.

 

  Sometimes even today, something will break the surface. It will hit me, bringing that feeling that was so powerful yet so fleeting. That concentrated pinprick awareness you get just on the crumbling edge of a Dexedrine, caffeine push. Where it's all ya got cause ya got nothing, so you are going to ride this fucker over the top or drive it right in the ground at full military power, leaning into it, grinning like a skull.



Cyberpunk is not just a genre. It is a stance, an attitude. Knowing that sometimes...Just sometimes...it not winning or losing, but the fact that you had the balls to take the shot at all...

































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