George Scithers, US Army (Ret’d), like to see? In the end I tacked on a coda and sent it back to Scithers. This time he rejected it with a letter saying that in the meantime he’d consulted a real mainframe computer expert, and the whole idea of punk kids running around causing trouble with cheap, powerful, portable, pocket-sized computers was just too far-fetched to be credible. After that, the story spent the next two years bouncing around the editorial offices of all the other magazines in the field. In the summer of 1982 it finally came to rest at Amazing Stories, where the new editor - George Scithers again, just hired away at great expense from Asimov’s - loved it, had to have it, and wanted to know: where had I been hiding all these years? I didn’t tell him the truth until after his check cleared. The story itself has become a seminal piece of work birthing an entire genre and leading to a novel of the same name. You sold the novel to a publisher, but they never released the book. Why? In all fairness, I think the seminal work of the genre came a year later, with William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer. There were a lot of people beginning to explore similar sets of ideas in those days but Neuromancer is the book that every agent and editor in the publishing industry saw that made them sit up on their hind legs and say, “Wow! We can publish stuff like that!” So beginning about 1985-1986 there was this enormous flood of Imitation Neuromancer, most of it written by people who wouldn’t know which end of a hot soldering iron to hold and published by people who wouldn’t recognize a line of code if it was tattooed on their forehead. Publishing being the follow-the-leader marketing-driven business it is, everyone began casting about for a label to put on this new stuff. At the time Norman Spinrad argued for calling it “neuromantic” fiction, because so much of it was transparently Imitation Neuromancer, but “cyberpunk” is the name that caught on: partly because it just plain sounded better. During those years I was not idle. Everyone focuses on that one story, “Cyberpunk”, as if it was the only thing I did. But in those three years, I got married, became a father, joined the R&D staff of Passport Designs, did two full-length theatrical scores, two indie movie soundtracks, and learned to play the grants and commissions game well enough to both succeed at it and realize that I didn’t want to succeed at it after all. Plus, I wrote and sold a lot of other stories, both in and out of the SF market.
He Who Must Not Be Named, an American publisher best known for his blood-spattered rightwing militaristic SF novels, got wind that I was working on a novel, tracked me down, and made me an offer that seemed too good to pass up. It was only after I was under contract and interacting with him on a regular basis that I began to realize that, while he wanted to own exclusive rights to the title, Cyberpunk, the story he wanted to be in the pages behind that title was a blood-spattered right-wing sadomasochistic military boarding school novel. My Cyberpunk novel, while not the book I set out to write, turned out to be a pretty decent bildungsroman. But the publisher insisted I rewrite it and throw in a great big bloodbath of a götterdämmerung adolescent vengeance ending, and this I refused to do. Consequently, He Who Must Not Be Named refused either to release the book or to give me a waiver so that I could try to sell it elsewhere. It was only after I fired my agent and took over handling negotiations myself that I realized the publisher’s contract contained a clause preventing my selling any novel-length fiction to anyone else, without the express written permission of He Who Must Not Be Named. It took me five years to buy my freedom from that contract.
All these years later, you must be proud of the original story’s contribution to sci-fi, and its