‘Gibson’s strength as a writer lay primarily in his art direction.  From Neuromancer onwards, his books featured enough brand names and referenced enough forms of music and art to make his works exude a distinctive whiff of verisimilitude.  While Cyberpunk was ostensibly a reaction to the hypercommercialisation that began in the 1980s, Gibson wrote about the process having absorbed its mores and values but, because he wrote about outsiders and the dispossessed and his works showed a certain degree of social awareness, they never came across as smug or unpleasant.  The crossroads of Gibson’s career was undeniably Pattern Recognition (2003), a work that took the style of Cyberpunk and applied it to a contemporary middle-class world’s emerging online culture.  In the four years between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, the underground and countercultural elements of the online world became mainstream among the Western middle-classes, as a result, where Pattern Recognition mined an emerging culture, Spook Country (2007) felt like an extended love affair to hipsters.  A victim of his own success, Gibson defined Cyberculture and then made the mistake of writing about it again once it had sold out.’

…

The Barleypunk Manifesto:

Be a 30-something British Male.

Be published by a mainstream publisher.

Have a near-future setting.

Lack any interest in political context.

Target broad social trends and archetypes.

Use humor and troubling imagery to get your points across.

…

— Jonathan McCalmont, ‘Defining Barleypunk’, SFDiplomat