During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations. That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there.

The hacker and the rocker are this decade's pop-culture idols, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots. An invisible flame passing between them, or a boiling cloud of pheromones—her eyes seemed to sparkle with them. The visions of where technology could could lead as written in the early 80's are fun and some are eerily accurate. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism.George was sitting on a chocolate sling couch; Charley Hughes lying back in a chrome and brown leatherette chair, his feet on the dark veneer table in front of him, a half inch of ash hanging from his cigarette end. lnnis gave George a few hours of futile attempts at sleep—enough time for the bright, gliding phosphenes caused by the high g’s of the trip up to disappear from his vision. In the introduction Sterling emphasises the overlapping worlds of high tech and the modern pop underground. Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. While I may not like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, I am not ignorant when it comes to their importance in popularizing and shaping the genre.

They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws. A chair covered in brown corduroy stood in the middle of the barren living room, a white telephone on the floor beside it, a television flat against the opposite waIl—that was the whole thing, what might have been home, if it weren’t for the snake. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind’s eye along late-night highways.The story's protagonist is a man named Rice, who works for a company that obtains natural resources and valuable artifacts from alternate timelines created in the past (whenever one engages in time travel, a new timeline forms, making it impossible to alter the original history).