But the anthology as a whole is an oddity. The theme of the book for starters – crime in the future? Why? Why not ‘food of the future’? or ‘cars of the future’? Why should sf need an additional ‘hook’? And the cover is the worst I’ve seen in a long time.

So let’s just discuss the stories, most of which are classics. Philip K Dick’s ‘Imposter’ is a miniature Kafkaesque gem on one of his favourite themes, ‘false memories and identity’. Terry Pratchett (surprisingly for me) turns in a disturbingly haunting tragic story of love beyond death. Greg Bear extrapolates on the idea of genetic nano-engineering which reaches an almost epiphany at the climax, Ballard supplies one of his obsessional Bergman-like nightmares of disrupted time-sense and ruptured reality. But the most powerful for me was Alfred Bester’s ‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ where a human and his android slave blur identities and merge while one – or both – engages in a serial murder spree. The climax of this story is pure Faulkner!

For me the most interesting elements and aspects of the anthology were the human/psychological ones. But there are a lot of hard-core technical bits and pieces and much pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo to keep ‘the little boys club’ happy as well.

There was a time when sf of this calibre sold itself on its own merits – and you didn’t need some hokey gimmick to sell it. But sf has become a cultural cliché nowadays and the imaginative aspects are not enough to pull. It’s become overexposed and what once created an alluring frisson has now become banal. Thus the speculation becomes a mere backdrop and the plot which must never stray too far from Hollywood and cliché – in this case the crime story – becomes the theme. The editor, to his credit, enforces these criteria very loosely.

Another interpretation would have to involve an analysis of the latent content – of the socio-political implications of technology and the clash of cultures, in particular between the huge industrial techno-dinosaurs of America and Japan with older cultures both east and west. But that would take up a huge amount of space and I don’t think the editor of Cyber-Killers had such concerns even marginally in mind. I doubt if he’d even see any relevance in it.

So I suggest you ignore the cover, don’t think about the theme of the book, skip the flimsy intro and author profiles and just read the stories.