I reread a Philip K Dick short story ‘Web of Air, Chains of Aether’ (or something like) last week and it was only 10% of the story I remember. Merv Kihn, a free-lance jounalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind. Tales of Houdini” appears in Complete Stories Copyright © 2016 Rudy Rucker “400 Boys” copyright 1983 by Marc Laidlaw. major premise from this story (intentionally or not) for his novel Distress, making it a quality selection.

While there are a couple newer Cyberpunk collections, The Ultimate Cyberpunk coming to mind, the first is still the best. With their hard-edged, street-wise prose, they created frighteningly probable futures of high-tech societies and low-life hustlers. Similarly, in The Matrix, mirrors are often featured in scenes, both distorting and showing an image of the characters in reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theories in Simulation and Simulacra (1981) — a work that even appears as a fake book in Neo’s apartment. Paradox, to Aleph one of the most interesting ot intellectual forms—a paradox marked the limits of a position, even of a mode of being, and Aleph was very interested in limits. I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing and cheap concrete.

Contributions from Greg Bear and Pat Cadigan also rocked my adolescent world, but it was James Patrick Kelly’s Solstice that really blew my mind. 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. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws.

Gibson actually makes me a little bit tired these days, but his vintage short fiction is still pretty execellent. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture.

She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.