Heatseeker
Foreword by Stephen P. Brown. Introduction by William Gibson.
John Shirley's phenomenal first collection of short stories, Heatseeker's stories were originally published from 1975 through 1988 in a wide range of publications including Oui, The Mississippi Review, and OMNI. Chosen by the Locus Reader's Poll as one of the best short story collections of 1989, it was considered (at the time) by Bruce Sterling as Shirley's "most significant and influential work" and an essential volume for the "Well-Appointed Cyberpunk Library Collection."
Along with a Foreword by Stephen P. Brown and Introduction by William Gibson, the collection contains the following 19 stories:
- What Cindy Saw
- Under the Generator
- Sleepwalkers
- Tahiti in Terms of Squares
- Silent Crickets
- I Live in Elizabeth
- The Almost Empty Rooms
- The Gunshot
- Equilibrium
- Uneasy Chrysalids, Our Memories
- Quill Tripstickler Eludes a Bride
- Recurrent Dreams of Nuclear War Lead B.T. Quizenbaum into Moral Dissolution
- What It's Like to Kill a Man
- Triggering
- Six Kinds of Darkness
- The Unfolding
- The Peculiar Happiness of Professor Cort
- Ticket to Heaven
- Wolves of the Plateau
John Shirley
John Patrick Shirley (born 1953) is an American science fiction and horror writer of novels, short stories, and television and film scripts.
John Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe". Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin.