Bruce Sterling should also be remembered as a major contributor to the formation of the genre, on par with Gibson and Stephenson. Islands in the Net grounded future speculative tech in emerging real-world geopolitics, and Schismatrix took the genre into far future space, introducing the concept of cybernetics vs. biological augmentation.
Also see Greg Bear's Blood Music, which came out a year before Neuromancer.
There was also an early book about VR, which I can't remember the name of. It was about a reviewer of "apples" which gave the people who ate them something like a VR experience.
Finally, the grandaddy of all of these was The Machine Stops[1], by E. M. Forster. Written in 1909, it predicted virtual reality, something like the internet, internet addiction, chat rooms, and more.
Sterling was also editor 'Vincent Omniaveritas' behind the early 80s zine 'Cheap Truth [0] collected here: [https://web.archive.org/web/19970315042849/http://www.csdl.t...], where it's described as 'a samizdat' circulated by 'a loose-knit group of SF writers (called by themselves "the Movement")'.
