Books'n'Bytes

The Review

Cyberskin

by Paul Collins

Cyberskin

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Cyberskin is the Paul Collins-edited Australian SF anthology focused on near-future cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk material. The volume sits in the long shadow of the Broderick-and-Hartwell Centaurus anthology and is necessarily slighter, but the curation is careful and the selections include several Australian writers whose work is hard to find elsewhere.

The book is most useful as a snapshot of Australian SF's response to the international cyberpunk moment. The stronger pieces engage with the form without simply imitating Gibson or Sterling. The weaker pieces show the same struggle to find a distinctive voice that any national-tradition cyberpunk volume of the period would.

Three stars. Recommended to readers of cyberpunk who want to see what the Australian tradition was doing.

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