who showers the blessings of super-science upon the hoi polloi" as Sterling put it and an attention to prose style which had previously been rare in hard science fiction. These include an emphasis on information and bio-technology, usually consumerist in orientation and frequently entailing bodily modification near-future, post-industrial settings glimpsed through a vantage point which both saw the lie in the Jetsonian image of the future, and was at the same time "bored with the Apocalypse" protagonists from society’s margins, often "a pirate’s crew of losers, hustlers, spin-offs, castoffs, and lunatics," in place of the "passionless techies and rock-Ribbed Competent Men," or the "white-bread technocrat. While a very diverse collection of authors, as even this truncated list demonstrates, the science fiction they were writing at the time also shares a number of striking similarities. Perhaps the last movement in science fiction to truly catch fire was "cyberpunk" in the early and mid-1980s, which included William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, and Bruce Sterling in its ranks.
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