The big new theme in science fiction of the 1980s was cyberpunk -- stories that imagined the merging of the human and the cybernetic and explored the frontiers of virtual worlds. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling were the early stars of the movement, notably with Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer and Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades in 1986, containing stories first published from 1981 to 1985. The anthology defined cyberpunk's aesthetic and identified the key authors of the movement.

Larry McCaffrey's 1991 book spans both cyberpunk and postmodern fiction, and is less an anthology of stories than a sampling of fiction and nonfiction, with numerous excerpts from novels and only 11 complete stories, followed by interviews and essays taking more than half the book.

Sometime-cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan produced a retrospective of the movement looking back from 2002, reusing only one story from Sterling's book and including older stories, by Bester, Smith, Dick, and Tiptree, that prefigured cyberpunk's ideas. A feature is a portion of a previously unpublished graphic novel version of Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.

Victoria Blake's 2019 anthology (first announced in 2013) looks back at the movement from a world where "cyberpunk reality has largely come to be." Just four stories from the 1980s are followed by 16 others first published as late as 2012 (some by authors not usually associated with the movement, like Kim Stanley Robinson and James Patrick Kelly), to show how the movement developed since the end of the Cold War.

Most often reprinted authors: Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling (6 each), then William Gibson (5) and Pat Cadigan (4).