Storm The Reality Studio.
And retake the universe.
--William S. Burroughs, Nova Express
Storming the Reality Studio -A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, by Larry McCaffery, ed.(1991).
An excellent book on the rise and flow of the cyberpunk subgenre as we know it today. Although now 7 years old, it charts an excellent path of how, through the publication of some certain books -both SF and nonfiction, through choice music releases, through critical essays on postmodern culture, through select films, a pool of influences was formed, noticed, followed, and then broadened and more thoroughly defined by an evolving and evermore creative core of science fiction writers -the so called Rise of the Cyberpunks.
An excerpt from Larry McCaffery's Introduction to the book:
Introduction: The Desert of the Real
In gathering together the materials contained in Storming the Reality Studio, I hope to create a context that will illuminate and broaden our understanding of two enormously exciting topics that have broad significance for postmodern culture generally. The first of these has to do with the recent evolution of what I will call "postmodern science fiction." This evolution was spurred on within genre SF by the "cyberpunk controversy" during the 1980s. Sparked initially by the publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1984, this controversy spawned numerous critical debates in SF fanzines and at SF conferences and ultimately had the effect of opening up a dialogue within the field that encouraged even cyberpunk's most hardened opponents to examine the nature and roles of the genre, especially as these have been changing in response to postmodern culture. Equally significant in SF's recent transformations has been the development of experimental, quasi-SF works created by a number of major "mainstream" literary innovators (Pynchon, Burroughs, Ballard, Mooney, DeLillo and many others) that featured themes, motifs, and other elements that would previously have been associated with SF.
The nature and background of these parallel developments are discussed by a number of the critical essays included here as well as being schematically introduced in Kadrey/McCaffery "Cyberpunk 101" text that follows this introduction...