The characters in a PCP story need this healthy dose of attitude because their relationship to reality is different from ours. Yes, there may well be, and often is, a virtual reality that is as persuasive as reality itself and far more pleasant. It can be variously a trap, an escape, or a refuge. Perhaps all three at once. But reality itself is everywhere mediated, and what comes between the characters and reality must constantly be interrogated.

The stories in this collection are too various for us to draw a tidy summary of what twenty-first-century cyberpunk is about, nor do we see the profit in it. However, so many of them imply or actually explore a posthuman future that we would be remiss if we failed to point out that a logical consequence of much of cyberpunk extrapolation is the singularity. Vernor Vinge, by no means a cyberpunk, although highly respected by them, first proposed the notion of a technological singularity in 1993. Briefly, he contemplates a moment in history in which runaway technology causes a change “comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence.” Vinge speculates this change may come through artificial intelligence, through computer/human interfaces, or through biological modification of the human genome. After this point, human history will end.

One of the obsessions of PCP fiction is to explore the edges of this “end” of history, and if possible, to see beyond it.

So far we have spoken of cyberpunk primarily in terms of content, and CP was indeed sparked by an attempt to bring content into science fiction that was being ignored by the sf of the early 1980s.

But part of the force of Cheap Truth was also the aggressiveness of its anti-art stance. Vincent Omniaveritas had little use for the pieties of literary culture and traditional values of well-made fiction. A lot of early CP gained verve from a conscious rejection of the New Wave and the New Wave’s reaching after high modernism’s literary pretensions.