New Cyberpunk Anthology, New Visions of the Dark Tech Future

Editors: Jason Heller and Joshua Viola/ Hex Publishers Writing future-themed science fiction is hard. You are, after all, predicting the future, which no one can do with any certainty. It is an even larger, and weirder, challenge the closer to “now” that future will be. Early Cyberpunk novels can seem hopelessly incorrect now, too dark in some spots (San Francisco hasn’t fallen into the Bay; multinational corporations haven’t taken over governments…exactly), not dark enough in others (wasn’t police brutality supposed to be equally applied across all racial groups by now? And where are my prosthetic limbs and organs?). This is actually a real prosthetic, you can see more at Unyq.com. [divider type=”space_thin”]Into this field of not enough/too much comes a new Cyberpunk anthology: Cyber World: Tales of Humanity’s Tomorrow. By and large, the authors face this problem with a combination of throwback references (there are the usual assortment of hard-bitten, take-no-shit detectives fighting street gangs and the bottle) and updated technologies. But even those are problematized as those technologies are no longer fool proof or universal. The cyber-future these authors imagine is more fractured, more prone to disruption either purposeful or accidental. This is also a more diverse and inclusive near-future, with stories set all over the globe, with protagonists of all varieties. Gone are the days of the White Male Hero fighting The Man with his keyboard and designer drugs. In its…