About this project
I know exactly which summer I first read Neuromancer and what it did to my reading tastes from that moment on. (I came to it via Stewart Brand's The Media Lab book.) Years later I encountered "Bruce Sterling's Idea of What Every Well-Appointed "Cyberpunk SF" Library Collection Should Possess" and I dived in to read everything listed...
This site is a rebuild of a site I built originally in 2005 for two purposes: 1) to archive the successive revisions of Bruce Sterling’s document which he would periodically post to conferences on The WELL, and it would then find its way around the Internet as a text document, and 2) to keep the electronic version of Tom Maddox's novel Halo online.
Much of the mid-to-late 90s online cyberpunk discussion lives in simple text files and long-dead websites. It's long been possible to bring some of the items forward to a more modern presentation - and in the process provide additional context via annotations. Adding the annotations allows me to link to free copies of text where possible and provide other comments ("there was a sequel to this book"), or advice ("skip Live Robots and just read the full quartet"), or link to other useful sites ("check out this exhaustive site about "Agrippa"). Hopefully Chairman Bruce will not take offense at what I've done here.
Ultimately, "Bruce Sterling's Idea of What Every Well-Appointed "Cyberpunk SF" Library Collection Should Possess" is about writings by The Movement, a set of up-and-coming young science fiction writers in the 1980s. It isn't a list of "books about hackers fighting evil corporations" (or what Lewis Shiner calls "sci-fiberpunk").
In the end, Sterling's reading list did not evolve much over the years. But it is still useful to archive all the versions in one place. If you've got additional versions, or an online source for the version from _The Ultimate Cyberpunk_, please let me know.
Contributions, comments, criticisms, etc. to karl at rockin-r.net