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In the early 1980's SF author Bruce Sterling, under the pseudonym "Vincent Omniaveritas", edited a series of one-page newsletters titled Cheap Truth. (It's usually referred to as a samizdat, after the mimeographed newsletters dissidents circulated among themselves in Communist Eastern Europe.) In them, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and other members of a loose-knit group of SF writers (called by themselves "the Movement") attacked what they considered the stagnant state of the time's popular science fiction and hyped their own works. As such, they document the development of the literary consciousness of many of the writers of works later dubbed "cyberpunk".

"Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It's like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It's about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It's meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination."

"you are forgiven for wondering if cyberpunk is an authentic subculture or a media buzzword. Actually, it's both. "

"welcome to the unofficial alt.cyberpunk FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions guide). This file should give you some broad idea of what alt.cyberpunk is about, and hopefully some idea of what CyberPunk is about."

Read this just after you read Cheap Truth. "Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. This is cyberpunk."