In the introduction to this new edition of City Come A-Walkin ', William Gibson calls John Shirley "cyberpunk's Patient Zero." Reckless, rude, and raw-edged, Shirley had the 'tude before anyone; he also walked the walk. In the darkly exuberant City Come A-Walkin' , published four years before Neuromancer and long out of print, cyberpunk was already in full riotous bloom. Now Shirley has taken a swipe at polishing the sometimes rushed and awkward prose of the first edition, giving everything a sheen to match the beautiful trade-paper packaging provided by Eyeball Books. An essential addition to the libraries of cyberpunk historians, City 's appeal is much more than academic.Science fiction - and especially cyberpunk - often views humanity in terms of its cities. The metropolis is a perfect dramatic backdrop, a microcosm that permits us to view the collision of culture and technology at the very point of impact. In Shirley's novel, the city is not only the setting but also the protagonist: San Francisco has come to life in the form of a punked-out golem, determined to "take back the streets" from violent forces that have rotted it from within. The campaign is violent. Like most of the cyberpunk writers who came after him, Shirley has all but eliminated pastoral images from his fiction: the closest thing to paradise is the reclaimed urban wilderness left behind after the tyrants have been clobbered and the buildings have burned themselves out.For more in the same rich vein, check out Shirley's book The Exploded Heart , a collection of about a dozen of his most effective short stories, along with an introduction by Bruce Sterling, some new autobiographical material, and the lyrics to Shirley's Blue Oyster Cult songs. While Shirley scales the heights of delirious paranoid fantasy in his novels, it is in his shorter work that he's at his most polished and controlled. Some of these stories read like crystallized nightmares; others are pure electricity. If Eyeball would now put out a definitive collection of Shirley's best "new noir" and horror stories, my bookshelves would groan with contentment.
City Come A-Walkin' and The Exploded Heart , by John Shirley: US$10 each. Eyeball Books: PO Box 18539, Asheville, North Carolina 28814, email eyebrown@interpath.com , on the Web at www.empathy.com/eyeball/eyeball.html .
STREET CRED
Atari DazeDawkinian Evolution
Cyberpunk's Patient Zero
