Among the vanguard of today's boldest writers, Michael Swanwick presents his world of plug-in personalities, colonized asteroids, and a daring fugitive named Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, a high-tech criminal seeking refuge on Earth's orbiting settlements--where all human evils blossom in the vacuum of space.

Blending cyberpunk action with metaphysical mystery, VEX: SYNTHESIS is a mind-bending sci-fi novelette...

Enter an aimless 20 something desperate for human connection and excitement. After a dangerous encounter reveals itself as a fortuitous opportunity, Justin finds just what he’s looking for in the secret world of Proxies–young, pretty, ambitious hustlers like himself who allow the rich access to their feelings and experiences through a technological implant. Does Justin have what it takes to make it in this seductive new world?

With enough risky behavior and a slowly emerging viral following, it’s not long before Justin creates enough buzz to get invited to a Proxy party, where he meets Sylvia Synn– someone who will change his life forever. It’s time for a new persona and a new manager, but as with any work that is less than legal, the authorities aren’t far behind…

Status is all perception… and Justin’s feeling more than ready to be perceived, upgrading every facet of his life now that he’s a Proxy. But the life of a Proxy is far from just luxury and parties… There's a dark side as well, and Justin’s about to find out that he’s entered a world that’s far more dangerous than he could have ever imagined...

Justin is finally going home after the brutal attack that left him hospitalized… but he’s not about to forgive and forget. As he struggles to separate his work as a Proxy from his personal vendettas, he’ll be drawn down an even darker path, one that he may never be able to return from...

It’s all been leading to this! Justin has a plan... and he's ready to put everything on the line for a shot at his ultimate goal. With his masterstroke just steps away, though, what will he be willing to sacrifice, and what lines will he cross to finally have it all?

Virtual Geographies is the first detailed study to offer a working definition of cyberpunk within the postmodern force field. Cyberpunk emerges as a new generic cluster within science fiction, one that has spawned many offspring in such domains as film, music, and feminism. Its central features are its adherence to a version of virtual space and a deconstructivist, punk attitude towards (high) culture, modernity, the human body and technology, from computers to prosthetics. The main proponents of cyberpunk are analyzed in depth along with the virtual landscapes they have created - William Gibson's Cyberspace, Pat Cadigan's Mindscapes and Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. Virtual reality is examined closely in all its aspects, from the characteristic narrative constructions employed to the esthetic implications of the 'virtual sublime' and its postmodern potential as a discursive mode. With its interdisciplinary approach Virtual Geographies opens up fresh perspectives for scholars interested in the interaction between popular culture and mainstream literature. At the same time, the science fiction fan will be taken beyond the conventional boundaries of the genre into such revitalizing domains as postmodern architecture and literature, and into cutting-edge aspects of science and social thought.

The plot centers around Chevette Washington, a young bicycle messenger who lives in the ad hoc, off-the-grid community that has grown on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. Chevette, on a whim, steals a pair of dark-rimmed glasses from a man at a party because she is offended by his demeanor. Soon after, she realizes that the glasses have unlikely importance, as security company henchmen begin tracking and following her. Among the pursuers are Svobodov and Orlovsky, two Russian immigrants who reside in San Francisco and are employed as cops, as well as Loveless, a ruthless corporate hitman with gold incisors. The glasses contain plans by a powerful corporation to rebuild San Francisco entirely using nanotechnology, and for that reason, they are highly coveted and present a danger to the person who possesses them.

Hidden in plain sight in buildings spread around the New Morecambe, a secret city populated with some of the world's top scientists. THE RETURN OF Can Emma Kline, AKA 'Thursday' (of the 'AFK' novels), infiltrate New Morecambe to steal its technology, a groundbreaking discovery which will change humanity forever?

True Ailey is a journalist in a strange land, exiled by his network to a damp Southeast Asian republic gouged out a war-ravaged peninsula weeping monsoon tears. When his friend is murdered, True sets out to find the killers, and in the process untangles a vast conspiracy that threatens to upend the global balance of power. Set in the near future, Virtually True takes readers on a wild ride through a world where nothing is what it seems, corporations rule, technology has been woven into the fabric of people's lives, and information can be both weapon and life-saver.

Vision, Technology and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature interrogates an array of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk science fiction novels and short stories from Mexico whose themes engage directly with visual technologies and the subjectivities they help produce – all published during and influenced by the country’s neoliberal era. This book argues that television, computers, and smartphones and the literary narratives that treat them all correspond to separate-yet-overlapping scopic regimes within the country today. Amidst the shifts occurring in the country’s field of vision during this period, the authors of these cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk narratives imagine how these devices contribute to producing specular subjects―or subjects who are constituted in large measure by their use and interaction with visual technologies. In doing so, they repeatedly recur to the posthuman figure of the cyborg in order to articulate these changes; Stephen C. Tobin therefore contends that the literary cyborg becomes a discursive site for working through the problematics of sight in Mexico during the globalized era. In all, these “specular fictions” represent an exceptional tendency within literary expression―especially within the cyberpunk genre―that grapples with themes and issues regarding the nature of vision being increasingly mediated by technology.

Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

Etienne Steward is a clone, also known as a beta. When he awakes, his memories are fifteen years old, because the original Steward—the alpha—never bothered to have his memories updated. In those fifteen years, the entire world has changed. An alien race known as The Powers has established relations with humanity. The Orbital Policorp which held his allegiance has collapsed. He fought and survived the off-world Artifacts War, but dozens of his friends did not. Both his first and second wives have divorced him. More importantly, someone has murdered him, causing the activation of the beta back-up. Now Steward has to figure out who wanted him dead, if he doesn't want to die again.

Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, but it’s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging.

Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his "gang", the Stash Riders, as they search for his missing sister Desdemona. The novel is set in an alternate version of Manchester, England, in which society has been shaped by Vurt, a hallucinogenic drug/shared alternate reality, accessed by sucking on colour-coded feathers. Through some (never explained) mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity have achieved objective reality in the Vurt and become "real".