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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."

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".

"the inevitable result of art responding to the technological milieu that is producing postmodern culture at large"