I'll have to admit a little bit of dread when I first picked this book up. This is a collection of short stories and poetry from the members of an internet newsgroup dedicated to cyberpunk. This held two concerns for me. Cyberpunk is a subgenre that unless it's done very well has a tendency to leave me a little cold - my usual tastes in sf being Asimov, Clarke, Resnick etc although (like most people reading sf) Philip K. Dick does rate rather highly in my list.

The second concern I had was that as this is a book of tales from the members of a newsgroup I thought it might be little lacking in writing quality and that the stories might seem very derivative.

However, to a creditable degree the writers contained in this anthology have, for the most part, produced readable, enjoyable tales. The tales themselves covering many topics - we read of cybernetics, genetic modifications, artificial intelligences and computer adolescence amongst other expected cyberpunk themes, and with a mixture of tales set in current times and imagined futures there should be something in here for most readers.

There a few tales that stand out for me. Dan Argent's Tank Boy delas with a handicapped man transplanted into a robotic body soon after birth and now operating as a super-soldier is well told, a more militaristic version of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang. Peter Timusk's A Day in the Life telling of an aging computer hacker in 2014. Whilst Yury Khidekel's Coming of Age tells exactly how an artificial intelligence might deal with the electronic version of entering adolescence.

With the short stories I would have to say that the quality was higher than I expected with many of these stories of a standard that could be seen in some of the many short story magazines around, although maybe not of the level of Interzone or Asimov's.

The main downer I had was the poetry. This could be a lot to do with my thoughts of sf/f/h poetry in general. For a lifelong fan of speculative fiction I have seen very little poetry in the genre I thought to be good.

My tastes in poetry tend to be much more conservative and favouring John Betjeman so perhaps I am not the best judge of these pieces.

Overall there is much to recommend this book, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the authors contained herein developing good writing careers.