Which quotation from a literary critic would most effectively illustr… | Verbal SAT Question

Bruce Sterling’s 1986 cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades contains just twelve carefully selected stories, and by the end of the 1980s Sterling himself claimed that cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, was a dead artistic movement. But editor Jared Shurin’s 2023 chronologically expansive anthology The Big Book of Cyberpunk contains 108 stories, including Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950) and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s “The State Machine” (2020). Critics have claimed that Shurin’s idea of what constitutes a cyberpunk short story is far more wide-ranging than Sterling’s with respect to method of publication.

Which quotation from a literary critic would most effectively illustrate the text’s assertion about critics?

“For all its merits, Mirrorshades neglected some strains of cyberpunk that would go on to influence science fiction as a whole, largely because Sterling exclusively focused on short stories written in a narrow window of time (the early 1980s).”

“Many of the best science fiction writers work only in the short story format. Anthologies like The Big Book of Cyberpunk serve a crucial purpose for such writers, making their work available to the many readers who purchase stand-alone books but rarely look at science fiction magazines or online journals.”

“Unlike the stories in Mirrorshades, not all the stories anthologized in The Big Book of Cyberpunk first appeared in print publications: for example, qntm’s 2021 story ‘Lena’ was originally self-published on the author’s site qntm.org.”

“In contrast to Sterling, who presents cyberpunk as a period-specific expansion of the boundaries of science fiction, Shurin presents cyberpunk as a genre with fixed conventions and essential characteristics that are unrelated to those of science fiction.”