"Cyberpunk," before it acquired its handy label and its sinisterrep, was a generous, open-handed effort, very street-level andanarchic, with a do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage-band 70s punk music. Cyberpunk's one-page propaganda organ,"CHEAP TRUTH," was given away free to anyone who asked for it.CHEAP TRUTH was never copyrighted; photocopy "piracy" was activelyencouraged.

CHEAP TRUTH's contributors were always pseudonymous, anearnest egalitarian attempt to avoid any personality-cultism orcliquishness. CHEAP TRUTH deliberately mocked established "genregurus" and urged every soul within earshot to boot up a word-processor and join the cause. CT's ingenuous standards for SF weresimply that SF should be "good" and "alive" and "readable." But whenput in practice, these supposed qualities were something else again.The fog of battle obscured a great deal at the time.

CHEAP TRUTH had rather mixed success. We had a laudablegrasp of the basics: for instance, that SF writers ought to *work a lotharder* and *knock it off with the worn-out bullshit* if they expectedto earn any real respect. Most folks agreed that this was a fineprescription -- for somebody else. In SF it has always been fatallyeasy to shrug off such truisms to dwell on the trivialities of SF as acareer: the daily grind in the Old Baloney Factory. Snappycyberpunk slogans like "imaginative concentration" and "technologicalliteracy" were met with much the same indifference. Alas, ifpreaching gospel was enough to reform the genre, the earth wouldsurely have quaked when Aldiss and Knight espoused much the sameideals in 1956.

SF's struggle for quality was indeed old news, except to CHEAPTRUTH, whose writers were simply too young and parochial to havecaught on. But the cultural terrain had changed, and that made a lotof difference. Honest "technological literacy" in the 50s was