Product Description
"I'm an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex." -- Bruce SterlingPolemicist, provocateur, futurist, 'visionary in residence', Bruce Sterling has been out there, personally sharpening the cutting edge of science fiction for more than thirty years.From his first story "Man-Made Self" in 1976 to his latest "Kiosk" in 2007, Sterling has written science fiction that is fast-moving, sharply extrapolated, technologically literate, and as brilliant and coherent as a laser, as he himself once said of William Gibson. His "Shaper/Mechanist" stories were an essential part of the cyberpunk movement of the '80s, just as his "Leggy Starlitz" and "Chattanooga" stories wrangled the near future of the '90s better than anyone else. Whether writing about the deep future in Schismatrix or the deep present in Holy Fire, he has developed into the best science fiction writer working in the world today.Born in Texas in 1954, Sterling has traveled the globe writing and working for The New York Times, Nature, Wired, Newsday, and a number of industrial design magazines. His short fiction has appeared in almost every major publication in the science fiction field. His novels include far future adventures Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Islands in the Net, The Difference Engine, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction, and The Zenith Angle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

good synopsis of Sterling's works
Bruce Sterling fans will find nothing new here, sadly. But the selection of his best works will be a pleasant reread. While newcomers to Sterling's works can get an excellent synopsis of why he is so highly regarded. The stories in this book originally appeared in sundry magazines, scattered over 20 or so years. The diversity of topics speaks to a versatile writing ability.

As to what is be the best story, this might not be a useful question. Readers' tastes will vary widely enough to make difficult any sort of consensus judgment. My personal favourite would be the Dinner in Audoghast, for its piognant evocation of a lost culture. It also differs strongly from the cyberpunk flavoured tales for which Sterling is renowned. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, Michael Swanwick is one of science fiction's best authors and a master of short fiction. Tales of Old Earth collects 19 of his acclaimed stories, including one ("The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O") that is original to this volume.

"The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" is a mythic, Zelazny-tinged tale of time-transcending, world-hopping humans, monsters, and gods. In the Hugo Award winner "The Very Pulse of the Machine," the stranded surviving member of a Jupiter mission may have discovered the secret of the moon Io--or may be going mad. In "The Dead," the corporate mania for profit reaches a shocking nadir of exploitation. "Mother Grasshopper" explores a planet that might be the weirdest ever to appear in science fiction (a huge claim, but true). In the World Fantasy Award winner "Radio Waves," a peculiar science-fictional ghost in a strange and frightening afterlife recovers his memory, and regrets it.

Tales of Old Earth has one minor but potentially annoying problem: it doesn't give copyright information for the individual stories, so you can't see where, or when, they first appeared. Other books by Michael Swanwick include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Griffin's Egg, Stations of the Tide (a Nebula Award winner), and The Iron Dragon's Daughter (a New York Times Notable Book); and the collections Gravity's Angels and A Geography of Unknown Lands. --Cynthia Ward Book Description
From pure fantasy to hard science fiction, this finely crafted offering by one of the greatest science fiction writers of his generation promises to stretch readers' minds far beyond ordinary limits. Nineteen tales from Michael Swanwick's best short fiction of the past decade are gathered here for the first time, including the 1999 Hugo Award-nominated "Radiant Doors" and "Wild Minds" and this year's winning story, "The Very Pulse of the Machine." The collection also features "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O," written especially for this volume. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

I like Swanwick and I enjoy SF short fiction . . . just not most of these
Generally speaking, I like Swanwick's stuff -- _Jack Faust_ and _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ are among the best SF I've read in many years -- but I'm afraid I wasn't very impressed with this collection. The first story, "The Very Pulse of the Machine," about time travel and dinosaurs, is really pretty good -- but it's also the basis for a chapter in his latest novel, _Bones of the Earth_ (only slightly rewritten) so I already knew where it was going. "Mother Grasshopper" didn't make a lot of sense, nor did "In Concert," nor did "Ancient Engines." I couldn't even finish several of the others. "North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy" was more straightforward, but the author was trying too hard with that one. Maybe the best thing in the volume, actually, is "Radiant Doors," about time-traveling refugees from future fascism (maybe) and whether people get what they deserve. Everyone's entitled to an off day, but I think I'll just stick to Swanwick's novels hereafter.

Some of the Best Michael Swanwick Stories.
Contents of this collection can probably still be found on the Amazon site and elsewhere, but here they come again, with additional information.

A User's Guide to Michael Swanwick by Bruce Sterling (foreword).
'The Very Pulse of the Machine' (short story) Asimov's Feb 1998.
'The Dead' (short story) Starlight 1, ed. by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, 1996.
'Scherzo with Tyrannosaur' (short story) Asimov's Jul 1999.
'Ancient Engines' (short story) Asimov's Feb 1999.
'North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy' (novelette) Killing Me Softly, ed. Gardner Dozois, 1995.
'The Mask' (short story) Asimov's Apr 1994.
'Mother Grasshopper' (short story) A Geography of Unknown Lands, 1997.
'Riding the Giganotosaur' (short story) Asimov's Oct/Nov 1999.
'Wild Minds' (short story) Asimov's May 1998.
'The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O' (short story).
'Microcosmic Dog' (shory story) Science Fiction Age Nov 1998.
'In Concert' (short story) Asimov's Sep 1992.
'Radiant Doors' (short story) Asimov's Sep 1998.

'Ice Age' (short story) Amazing Jan 1984.
'Walking Out' (short story) Asimov's Feb 1995.
'The Changeling's Tale' (short story) Asimov's Jan 1994.
'Midnight Express' (short story) Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, 1998.
'The Wisdom of Old Earth' (short story) Asimov's Dec 1997.
'Radio Waves' (short story) Omni Win 1995.

There are quite a number of stories here that have either won an award or were at least nominated. Scherzo with Tyrannosaur is a 2000 Hugo winner. And The Very Pulse of the Machine is likewise a Hugo winner, but of the year 1999. All those awards merely state the obvious: Read these tales.

Swanwick is excellent in the short story and novelette regions but I'm as of yet unfamiliar with his novels. This collection was for me an introduction to Swanwick the writer, and I'll probably pick up one of his novels in the near-future.

This is a fine collection, one of the best in years. Write more stories, Michael Swanwick!

Incredible
This collection of short stories is among the best ever written.Deeply profound, thoughtful and literary tales, these stories remind me of Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick at their best.Swanwick utilizes science fiction in the exact way science fiction should be utilized: as a realistic and cautionary window into the future.His favorite themes include: The dangers of unfettered capitalism and emergence of corporate slave-labor; science and medical technology run amok; the nature of death, the soul, and the afterlife; and time travel and the complications involved in altering the past.He also seems to have an obsession with dinosaurs.If these themes sound like a recipe for intellectual and thoughtful literature, you are correct.Swanwick is able to convey fascinating philosophical concepts through his fiction, and does so with a clear and lucid style.Unlike some modern authors, Michael Swanwick does not try to experiment with an overly abstract or poetic style, and does not play tricks with the reader in an attempt to create a "new" style of writing prose.Swanwick sticks with a basic writing style, and invokes pioneering literary concepts through the actual content of his stories.This is mystical-realist literature at its best - realistic style and execution, combined with far-out mystical concepts.

The body of work of a true Master
Michael Swanwick's latest collection 'Tales of Old Earth' is masterful.The collection of stories ranges from Hard SF to the so-called Hard Fantasy (don't ask me to explain it).There are Hugo and World Fantasy Award Winners and numerous stories that were nominated for major awards.

It's unfortunate that Michael Swanwick isn't widely-recognized as the writer that he is.His work is consistently head-and-shoulders above the average work being turned out in the genre.But he writes predominantly short fiction, and short fiction never has, and never will be, recognized by the masses.

This is one of the best story collections I've ever read.There isn't a 'dog' in the bunch.Every story jumps out at the reader with its vibrancy.Michael Swanwick is a wordsmith of unparalleled talent.I have no doubt that he's the best writer of the current generation.I highly recommend this collection.

A collection worthy of Borges
This is one of the finest SF collections in years, a generous gathering of Michael Swanwick's superb, rich, dense, sardonic, and allusive stories. Each of these 19 tales is like a gem: concentrated, many-faceted, craftedwith tremendous skill. Of particular note: "The Wisdom of OldEarth", "The Very Pulse of the Machine", "TheChangeling's Tale", and "Mother Grasshopper". ... Read more

Book Description
"Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic."

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.

The vision of Shaping Things is given material form by the intricate design of Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers -- and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Techno-futuristic ruminations on "spimes" and sustainability
Type a few words into Google and you can find a sushi restaurant, a movie theater, concert tickets or a new car. But if you misplace your car keys in your house, you still have to search the old-fashioned way: room by room, cushion by cushion, coat pocket by coat pocket. If Bruce Sterling is correct, though, one day you'll Google your keys. And your shoes. And your dog. This is the nascent "Internet of things" made possible by technology, including such items as radio frequency ID tags and traceable product life cycle management. That is where technology is going: to the interactive "spime," Sterling's term for objects that will arrive with data attached. In this visually arresting novella-sized essay, Sterling riffs on a number of scenarios, from customized-to-order cell phones to products that "know" how much carbon their construction required. His aphoristic prose seems at times like madness, but there's method in it: Sterling urges designers to make beautifully sustainable products rather than more proto-trash. We believe his book could reform your ideas about design and provide a stock of carbon-neutral insights you can deliver to your colleagues over a recyclable cup filled with shade-grown coffee.

This book is a little too short.
This book is 'wafer thin', I would recommend John ThakorsIn the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World instead, it is goes into a lot more depth, but is still a sci-fi.

A tool, in a way...
This is such a short read, and such a good read - it really is a tool, more of a reminder.The way some people put a model of their dream car on their desk, to remind them their goal, this book should be kept around, read once or twice a year to remind oneself to put purpose, intelligence, and diligence into what you create.I think I'll start giving copies of this to new employees...

Setting the agenda..
If you're looking for a book on sustainable design, the intertwining of the informational and the material, and RFID, look no further.

Sterling's account is more than a book for designers. Though some angles tend to originate from design-related topics, the implications and responsibilities pertaining to design cannot belong to a community of designers per se.

That's a pretty self-evident idea of course, but allow me to elucidate.

When Sterling argues that "we need a designed metahistory", this pertains to the idea that the information that is related to objects / spimes / shaping things needs to be designed. Given the fact that more and more objects are tagged, and thereby enrolled in a global information architecture, this implies that 'design' has the ability to influence the way we relate to object-data.

And this is by no means a scenario that is sci-fi: take the EPCglobal architecture as an example. Sterling is perfectly aware of this.

For me, the book provided a framework in which many more things can be deployed.. But I suppose the book's effects will depend on the mindset of the reader. The capacity of the book to create new concepts and new levels of thought is obviously there. To me, the ability of a written work to do this is what makes a book great.

important work for more than just designers...
...or perhaps it's just that "design" is an extremely broad category. Sterling presents a futurity that is at once realistic and utopian, frightening and hopeful.

This book would be useful for not just anyone designing anything, but anyone concerned with the future, how to achieve real sustainability, or how all that geeky stuff (you occasionally read about in the Wired you pick up at the airport) will really effect you.

I agree with another reviewer that the actual print design of the book is a hindrance, which is ironic; my distaste for it was only made worse by having already heard Sterling brag on it during a talk. But even with this beef, I have to give it a full five stars based on the content alone. ... Read more

Book Description
“Nobody knows better than Bruce Sterling how thin the membrane between science fiction and real life has become, a state he correctly depicts as both thrilling and terrifying in this frisky, literate, clear-eyed sketch of the next half-century. Like all of the most interesting futurists, Sterling isn’t just talking about machines and biochemistry: what he really cares about are the interstices of technology with culture and human history.” -Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century

Visionary author Bruce Sterling views the future like no other writer. In his first nonfiction book since his classic The Hacker Crackdown, Sterling describes the world our children might be living in over the next fifty years and what to expect next in culture, geopolitics, and business.

Time calls Bruce Sterling “one of America’s best-known science fiction writers and perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre.” Tomorrow Now is, as Sterling wryly describes it, “an ambitious, sprawling effort in thundering futurist punditry, in the pulsing vein of the futurists I’ve read and admired over the years: H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alvin Toffler; Lewis Mumford, Reyner Banham, Peter Drucker, and Michael Dertouzos. This book asks the future two questions: What does it mean? and How does it feel? ”

Taking a cue from one of William Shakespeare’s greatest soliloquies, Sterling devotes one chapter to each of the seven stages of humanity: birth, school, love, war, politics, business, and old age. As our children progress through Sterling’s Shakespearean life cycle, they will encounter new products; new weapons; new crimes; new moral conundrums, such as cloning and genetic alteration; and new political movements, which will augur the way wars of the future will be fought.

Here are some of the author’s predictions:

• Human clone babies will grow into the bitterest and surliest adolescents ever.
• Microbes will be more important than the family farm.
• Consumer items will look more and more like cuddly, squeezable pets.
• Tomorrow’s kids will learn more from randomly clicking the Internet than they ever will from their textbooks.
• Enemy governments will be nice to you and will badly want your tourist money, but global outlaws will scheme to kill you, loudly and publicly, on their Jihad TVs.
• The future of politics is blandness punctuated with insanity.
The future of activism belongs to a sophisticated, urbane global network that can make money—the Disney World version of Al Qaeda.

Tomorrow Now will change the way you think about the future and our place in it.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Great ideas in need of an editor.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first 2 or 3 chapters of this book, but soon after that it became quite clear that Mr. Sterling needs an editor, badly.

The ideas are rich, the structure intriguing, but the prose is nearly stream-of-consciousness, which makes it quite difficult to follow.Each sentence is perfectly understandable, but they do not build on each other in a meaningful or revelatory way.

Clever rundown to the ecological end
The coming decades pose great promise and imminent peril, oracular sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling argues in this compelling critique of the state of the modern world. On the plus side, scientists someday might eliminate disease and allow people to live forever. In the debit column, people are burning so much fuel that humanity is setting itself up for extinction. Sterling combines the analytical acumen of a true visionary with the prose of a master craftsman in this fascinating work seasoned with first person anecdotes. As a futurist, Sterling is too savvy to make concrete predictions that soon might be proven wrong (though some of his U.S. political analysis is already losing topicality), so readers might find his approach a bit obtuse at times. But even Sterling's glancing blows connect. We recommend his intriguing analysis and conjectures to techies and to anyone else who seeks a literate look at what the future might hold.

Amazing!
Tomorrow Now is essentially a long and brilliant essay by Bruce Sterling, a noted science fiction writer and futurist covering some of his ideas of what the future may hold. Sterling very cleverly breaks the book into seven parts based upon a soliloquoy from Shakespeare covering the ages of man from birth to death, and wittily prophesies what life may shape itself into in our near future.

Two things struck me about this book. The first is that it is not nearly as focused on the next fifty years as the title purports. There is a fair deal of what the future may hold, but there is also a great deal of the present thrown in (especially in the soldier section), and some futurism that is more than 50 years out. Surprisingly this didn't bother me at all because his analysis of the present, especially an exposition on three different terrorists warlords, was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. This book ranges far and wide, and colors outside the lines of the 50 years stated, but I was glad it did as I read.

The second thing that struck me was that this is one of the most amazingly well-written books I've ever read. I am not sure I have ever read something as engaging, fascinating, informative and so easy to read at the same time. I have always enjoyed Sterling's fiction work but, frankly, the quality of this non-fiction book trumps his fictional stories. His writing style is very chatty, more or less as if you are sitting across the table from him, and at first this threw me. It's not something you expect in a science book. Yet once I adjusted I realized that this may be one of the clearest pieces of writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. When I say "pleasure to read" I actually mean it. That is a phrase far too over-used, but in choosing it I mean it literally: reading the words was a pleasure regardless of what he was talking about. His sentence construction and word choices were simply pleasurable to read in and of themself, and I have never seen adjectives used so well to create shades and nuances of meaning before.

Much of the speculation for the future involves biotechnology, changes in workplace dynamics, and what we actually produce, the change of market dynamics, consumerism to end-user, medical advances, and the rift between the New World Order (the first world) and the New World Disorder (the third world). If I had one reservation about this book it is that Sterling promised to show why the Islamic terrorism today will be irrelevant in the future. I don't think he ever really did that; he set the stage for it, and provided the backstory necessary to see the writing on the wall, but he never came out and posited why. I agree with him that the terrorism is not a long-term problem but it would have been nice to see him forcefully make that conclusion. That one quibble aside, this is a book that anyone who cares about current events, the future, or science will find compelling, interesting, and incredibly easy to understand and follow. This is a first class work and I highly recommend it. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Bruce Sterling has called his Shaper/Mechanist novel Schismatrix "my favorite among my books." It is a detailed history of a spacefaring humanity divided into two camps: The Shapers, who prefer genetic enhancements, and the Mechanists, who rely on prosthetics. Sterling also published five Shaper/Mechanist stories between 1982-84, which have been collected with the novel in this compendium volume. This book represents the definitive collection of what is arguably Sterling's most intense work, offering a hard, gritty look at humanity as it pushes and claws its way to the stars. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (35)

Sterling's Best
Since "Neuromancer" and the accompanying cyberpunk explosion, Sterling (and many others) has been unfairly relegated to Williams Gibson's shadow.Too bad, because while "Neuromancer" has dated (most near future stories do), "Schismatrix" seems to be getting better and better.

"Shaper revolutionaries struggle against arisocratic Mechanists" is the dust jacket blurb, but this is a gross simplification.Sterling covers a century in the life of Abelard Linsey, Shaper Rebel, compressing it into two-hundred-and-fifty hurtling pages.No words are wasted.The episodes fly: Linsey's exile; his theatrical program; the Red Consensus; the asteroid clave; the arrival of the Investors; and so on.Just when you think the story can't go any further, Sterling starts another unpredictable chapter.The pace is relentless, decades slashed from the narrative (if Sterling had written Dune it would be twenty pages long) as Lindsey's stock rises and falls.

Sterling is a master of the short story: the ability to evoke time, place and character quickly and concisely.Here he evokes a civilisation in chaos -- using Linsey as our eyes and ears -- by giving us bare glimpses of fashion, technology, art, conflict.It's like taking every iconic moment of the twentieth century and watching it in fast forward.

But if you're expecting Cyberpunk, forget it.While there might be some common elements, Sterling is working with a whole other set of textures.The closest thing to Cyberpunk is the "Spider Rose" short-story in the accompanying suppliments (all good, too).If anything, Schismatric might be the first "post-cyberpunk" novel.

Whatever it is, I continue to reread it regulary.

A major leap forward for SF
I read a lot of science fiction, both the classics and newer ones. I am happy to say the this book has really got me back into Science Fiction when I was starting to think that I hadn't read anything truly groundbreaking since Arthur C. Clark'es "The Light of Other Days."

Schimatrix Plus, despite its complexity (it can easily be labeled "hard" science fiction) details the life of our main character, whose age spans hundreds of years. It probably won't move you to cry, but it will give you plenty to think about.

Includes The Novel Schismatrix And (Plus) All Related Stories, 2-1/2 Stars
I really wanted to like this novel.It had a clever name, an amalgamation of the Great Schism that separate Catholicism and Protestantism, and Matrix, like the movie with the same title.(Note: the novel is pronounced Shiz-mat-rix, with a short a, rhymes with schematics).A classic cyberpunk title.However, this novel is anything but user-friendly.I don't know if pharmaceuticals are needed for appreciating this novel, or if the author used them when frantically writing, in between vacuuming the roof of his house and such.The novel moves at such a frantic pace that within one sentence the entire setting can change and this happens more than a few times.It's difficult to know the point of the plot; perhaps that life is worth living.The novel is a cross between Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, Bester's The Stars My Destination, and petting a sea urchin.

In a shocking act of consideration, the publishers have included all of Sterling stories related to the Shaper-Mechanist War.That would be the full length novel, plus five stories.The stories were written before the novel, which was the order I read them in, although after reading the novel last, I can't say whether or not to recommend reading in that order.The stories are interesting and enjoyable.In fact Sterling seems to excel with his short stories.His story "Flowers of Edo" is where I got interested in his style.I would recommend his short stories, but this novel is another matter.

Humanity has balkanized into a number of factions, with the Shapers and Mechanists being the most powerful.The Shapers have reshaped their bodies genetically.This includes such drastic things as replacing all the E. Coli in their intestines with enzymes.The Mechanists are like the Borg of Star Trek, they use mechanical prosthetics to enhance themselves.If you think the Mechanists are the cleaner of the two, think again.Cockroaches and bacteria are prevalent in Mechanist environments.Every five years the Mechanists need to have the bacterial growth scraped and UV-burned off their skin.That's one thing prevalent throughout his writings, this sort of creepiness.Expect more of it.

However, don't let the war make you think this is some majestic good vs. evil epic space war.Battles are mostly low key.There is lot's of narration and dialog.Sterling self-claims his crammed prose.No kidding.Adjectives rule supreme in this novel; as many as possible are crammed into each sentence.If one would do a histogram of adjectives, this novel would be on the far right tail of the bell curve.Here's an excerpt: " He always wore his spacesuit, [something something], and [multiple length modifiers] body odor came through its [multiple adjectives] collar with [multiple adjectives] pungency."Sentences like this go on and on and on and on and on and on and on throughout the novel.And there's no shortage of hyphenated words, like long-fermented, eye-watering.On one page, there were no less than 11 hyphenated words, plus one triple one.

Similar to the prosthetics of the Borg, the sentences themselves seem interchangeable.Here's another excerpt of a dialogue:
"What was your brigade?
I'm no Cataclyst.
I have your weapon here.
Constantine pulled a ... vial from his ... jacket ..."
You may as well interchange your own sentences: `The tree fell in the forest; it made no sound' or `the space ship went into orbit; it's boots were muddy.'Give it a try. It'll make as much sense.

There are times when the novel seems profound.I would find myself backtracking at times to understand some point, and I would go back 5, then 10, then 20 pages to try to understand something and would just give up and go back to where I was.It's hard to say you read this novel, it's more like your eyes glance over the words, and on occasion you absorb some of it.Since the novel fluctuates from the profound to the mundane an average of 2-1/2 stars seemed appropriate.

Prophetic
I've read this novel 4 times, which beats Dune and The Silmarillion by one.

This is easily one of the most richly imagined futures ever conceived.And it has aged better than just about anything else written in this era (early 80's).

As far as it being "inacessible":Go read one of those awful Dune prequels if you want to be spoon-fed your predigested pap.

Come back when you're ready.

Bungled Effort by Confused Author
Schismatrix (1985) by Bruce Sterling- 236 pages- rating: 2.5/10

All the elements of a brilliant science fiction novel are here. Sadly, the author seems to have enormous problems in presenting them in a form the reader can enjoy.

His thoughts, sentance and paragraph structure are frequently incomprehensible. His writing style is rambling and confused. Then suddenly, 40 pages will go by which are interesting, compelling and straightforward. It is as if the author wrote 80% of the novel while under the influence of a mind altering substance and the other 20% while sober.

Its tragic. I can see the man has skill. Unfortunately, as a reader I am not willing to plow through the muck to get to the few moments of coherency.

If you like weird mind altering experiences you might enjoy this. I can see from the other reviews here that some people did. I have my suspicions that some of the reviews are intentionally misleading perhaps to promote sales or a new publishing.

If you enjoy interesting writing that flows with skill and allows the reader to enjoy the experience and the story without needing to decipher every second sentance then you should stick with authors like Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, or Fred Hoyle.

Claus Kellermann
2005 November 15
Sci_Fi_Researcher@yahoo.com ... Read more

Amazon.com
Why hack computers when you can hack nature? Sterling's Storm Troupe lives in a post-greenhouse world ravaged by monster storms and finds itself hacking the ultimate storm: the F-6 tornado. No one in the Troupe, not even it's brilliant, driven leader, guesses the real nature of the F-6 or the shadowy forces unleashed in its twisting fury. Not until it is too late...Book Description
Bruce Sterling, one of the founding fathers of the cyberpunk genre, now presents a novel of vivid imagination and invention that proves his talent for creating brilliant speculative fiction is sharper than ever. Forty years from now, Earth's climate has been drastically changed by the greenhouse effect.  Tornadoes of almost unimaginable force roam the open spaces of Texas.  And on their trail are the Storm Troupers: a ragtag band of computer experts and atmospheric scientists who live to hack heavy weather -- to document it and spread the information as far as the digital networks will stretch, using virtual reality to explore the eye of the storm.  Although it's incredibly addictive, this is no game.  The Troupers' computer models suggest that soon an "F-6" will strike -- a tornado of an intensity that exceeds any existing scale; a storm so devastating that it may never stop.  And they're going to be there when all hell breaks loose. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (34)

A harrowing visit to Tornado Alley
The year is 2030, and the world is in a state of political, economic, social and environmental chaos.Things have literally fallen apart.Everything is for sale, and life is cheap.

Some choose to retreat into hacking or drugs, or sit in front of the television absorbing manipulated news and information.Others, like Dr. Jerry Mulcahey, lose themselves in the pursuit of knowledge.Mulcahey, who has dedicated his life to the study of weather, is chasing the ultimate storm--the F-6 tornado.If his theories are correct, an F-6 would contain enough energy to make an atomic bomb look like a firecracker.

Assisting him in his work is a rag-tag group of disciples, collectively known as The Storm Troupe.Together, they watch the skies over America's Tornado Alley, waiting for the cataclysm to take shape.The Troupe itself is watched by weather groupies and opportunists, and by members of a shadow government, who wait for the storm to pursue their own agendas.

Sterling tells a great story with vivid and memorable characters.His vision of the future will enthrall, disturb and entertain you at the same time.While all this may sound familiar in the advent of the movie Twister, remember, Sterling got there first, and did a much better job with the material.

Not Free SF Reader
A story about a team of storm chases, and their dictatorial, totally
obsessed leader, and their struggles to survive and make a living.

Also of interest is that in this society commercial banks are
extinct dinosaurs, as a system for person to person encrypted,
government and corporate proof financial transactions has been
invented, totally cutting out the middle man and law enforcement in
general from tracing money.

Fun eco-cyberpunk
I enjoyed reading this book.A lot.There were a few glitches, like a mysterious creepy subplot that doesn't really explain or resolve itself.Perhaps these were just anti-linear story techniques or something.But generally the book is well written, the characters are interesting, and the mix of ideas is one I have not found elsewhere.I hope to see more writers pursue this direction.

Maybe I've got some major blind spot, but I haven't seen apocalyptic, dystopian, cyberpunk type science fiction seriously or centrally address climate change - which this book does, in an appropriately pessimistic, cynical, but still entertaining way.Interesting thoughts on the collapse of standard currencies, militarization of police and civilian life, treatment-resistant diseases, and so on.Fun stuff.

Not a future to look forward to
Bruce is one of those Texas SF authors I've seen and heard at Cons since the late 1970s. His style in public has always been to hold forth and fulminate, which can make for interesting and invigorating policy discussions but which sometimes get in the way of his fiction-writing. But he's pretty much gotten it right with this one. It's set in the 2030s, in the aftermath of several worldwide eco-economic disasters, most involving the total loss of water in places like West Texas and Oklahoma, without which they have become real deserts. In the foreground of the story is the Storm Troupe ("Storm Troupers," get it?), a dozen-odd tornado-chasers led by Jerry, a highly charismatic mathematician cum atmospheric physicist who, after hundreds of hours in VR simulations, is predicting an F-6 storm a whole order of magnitude beyond anything we've ever seen. Jerry is also in a deep relationship with a young woman whose brother, Alex, an intermittent invalid, is one of the most interesting characters I've seen in quite a while. Sterling is in his element here, bombarding the reader with techno-jargon from several disparate disciplines while describing in detail the handbasket the world has gone to hell in. High adventure of the geeky variety.

hack this storm
Weather challenged everyone before the 20th century: if you lived in Kansas, how did you know what weather was coming toward you over the plains?Naturalists developed anemometers, wind vanes, barometers, rain gauges, and thermometers to collect measurements over time of the weather at particular locations.In the early 19th century, statisticians sought to interpolate among enormous numbers of measurements of wind speed and direction, humidity, temperature, barometric pressure, and rainfall to figure out what the atmosphere plans for us in terms of weather.Only when we distributed accurate clocks along railroad routes could meteorologists integrate this data into weather maps that showedthe development and decay of weather systems over time and geographic space.In the 20th century, with aircraft, more complex statistics, and computers, we developed measurements and models of weather systems in 3-dimensions.(See, for example, James Fleming's Meteorology in America.)

The protagonists of Heavy Weather use nothing as handy as a thermometer, but rather a combination of modern and futurist tools, most of which require developing a personal knack to master.In addition to supplying a story, the extreme weather of the southern plains also serves as a metaphor for stormy relationships and the battle that one protagonist, Alex, wages with his own body, whose mysterious debility has seemed to control his life's purpose until he chooses to focus on helping his sister's troupe of roving weather hackers to understand the region.Medicine employs instruments much like those used to measure weather, but that reduce Alex's body to a mapped system that then does not respond to therapies as doctors project.

This is a complex book, gratifyingly over the top in areas, and mundane in some aspects of character development.Sterling's novels show that he is intent on examining basic interpersonal relationships, such as parent-child, lovers, siblings, colleagues, and civil society in extreme settings.As with all his books, his protagonists are heroes who are less than heroes, sometimes improbably sweet or strong.

In light of the mysterious, powerful weather on the U.S. Gulf Coast this fall, I especially recommend this book.As I listen on the radio and TV to the reasons that the public and officials give for not acting appropriately in the face of enormous risk, I think about the 500-year transition much of the world has made away from a mystical and toward a science-based understanding of "why things happen."Clearly, the science of hurricanes has not been heard by many of those who are most at risk of losing life and property, as well as by many of those most favored by position or education and bearing an enormous responsibility, as experts, to act to promote public safety.

Four stars only because I wish this Sterling book were longer, with more development of his settings and technologies.It might be a characteristic of the cyberpunk label that intriguing terms get plopped in the text with little explication, their meaning derived from narrative context.However, many of these terms stick like burrs and travel with me into conversations; they are very pithy.I can't complete the metaphor of comparing extreme weather to the characters because that would give away too much.Suffice it to say that there's an end to every storm. ... Read more

Amazon.com
It's the year 2044, and America has gone to hell. A disenfranchised U.S. Air Force base has turned to highway robbery in order to pay the bills. Vast chunks of the population live nomadic lives fueled by cheap transportation and even cheaper computer power. Warfare has shifted from the battlefield to the global networks, and China holds the information edge over all comers. Global warming is raising sea level, which in turn is drowning coastal cities. And the U.S. government has become nearly meaningless. This is the world that Oscar Valparaiso would have been born into, if he'd actually been born instead of being grown in vitro by black market baby dealers. Oscar's bizarre genetic history (even he's not sure how much of him is actually human) hasn't prevented him from running one of the most successful senatorial races in history, getting his man elected by a whopping majority. But Oscar has put himself out of a job, since he'd only be a liability to his boss in Washington due to his problematic background. Instead, Oscar finds himself shuffled off to the Collaboratory, a Big Science pork barrel project that's run half by corruption and half by scientific breakthroughs. At first it seems to be alose-lose proposition for Oscar, but soon he has his "krewe" whipped into shapeand ready to take control of events. Now if only he can straighten out his lovelife and solve a worldwide crisis that no one else knows exists. --Craig E.EnglerBook Description
Near future Earth and a new cold war is in full swing - the Dutch Cold War.The US is a shadow of its former self and in hock to Europe, its infrastructure falling apart at the seams and with nomadic tribes roaming from state to state living according to no one's rules but their own.

Oscar Valpariso, spin doctor to possibly the next president ,is only half human but if he can straighten out his love life and solve a worldwide crisis that only he has noticed, America should be ripe for the taking . . . ... Read more

Customer Reviews (60)

Masterful writing undermined by gross implausibilities.
-------------------------
Rating: "B":masterful writing and funny/clever satire, undermined
by gross implausibilities and clunky auctorial manipulations.

Distraction has a more mature, less headlong feel than Holy Fire,
Sterling's previous novel. And the premise is grimmer -- the mid-
21st century USA, bankrupted by a Chinese netwar, is coming
seriously unglued.could almost see the footnotes in the catalog of "what went wrong":

Military bases selling equipment to survive:Russia, now

16 US political parties, endless infighting:recent Italy.

Charismatic, corrupt, narcissistic Southern governors: a composite from RL -- pick your favorite. Fer sure a contribution from Narcissus ultimus, the Man from Hope.

Sterling's eye for the absurd and powers of invention are
unmatched, and you'll have a lot of fun reading Distraction. But --
the book never quite jells, and left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied. I
started a review, but couldn't quite put my finger on what went
wrong -- until I found Gerald Jonas had done the review I wanted to
write [G00GLE NY Times]:


In DISTRACTION (Dec 98, Bantam, $23.95) the estimable Bruce
Sterling demonstrates why science fiction is such a difficult genre
to get right...So unlikely is [Sterling's] next-century scenario
that I found myself unable to take the actions of his characters
seriously, even as satire. Ideas as counterintuitive as the
bankrupting of the United States by the overnight obliteration of
copyright and trademark laws cannot function as mere background for
other events; they call for front-and-center treatment on their
own... The players in the drama [are reduced] to bloodless puppets of
the authorial imagination...


Yup, that's pretty much What Went Wrong with the book. Perhaps he got too
close to some True Beliefs... Pity. Still worth reading, but you might wait for the paperback, or get it from the library. And mind you, I'm a big Sterling fan.

Minor cavil for a bit of background, which shows up 2 or 3 times:
Wyoming burning? What's to burn? You can walk through a short-
grass prairie fire and barely singe your leg-hair. Grmph.

And I profoundly, deeply, sincerely wish Mr Sterling would find
some fresh superlative modifiers....

I know, cheap shot. But DISTRACTION marks the start of Sterling's decline as a novelist, which, I'm sorry to report, has now extended to his nonfiction.And he's published no new short fiction since 2003. Sigh.

Review copyright 1999 by Peter D. Tillman
Minor revisions, 2006.

It's okay
The story here is decent but not exactly what it's pitched as.To read the description would lead you to believe that you're going to read a book about two people trying to change a corrupt, lost America.But by the time you finish, it's obvious that the story is more about two people who are caught up in their own bubble and have not really made an effort to fix America.Instead they have played a bunch of "dangerous" games with a few politicians and some crazies who have dropped out of society becuase there are just not jobs left.
I was also constantly mystified at how everyone reacts to Oscar in this story.Every single character he comes across just stares in amazement at his skills to think and plan quickly and to get the upper hand.That is fine and all except that he never actually earns this respect.At no point in the story did he have a thought that was really that original or dashing.Sure, he can talk quick but lots of people can do that.There were no ideas he put forward that the reader couldn't see coming.Perhaps the moral of the lesson is that in the future everyone will be so slow that a "normal" thinker by our standards will be nearly super-human.
But the one thing this book has going for it is that it has a sharp, believable future.If we don't fix our system now, it is not difficult to see the America painted here as a reality.That vision of the future alone does make this worth reading and saved the book from some serious issues that I had with it.

A work of precision intensity and intelligence
Bruce Sterling addresses every major topic of our time.It is a transformational futurists view of the social impact that biotechnology, nanotech, and a global network may have.The sheer number of concepts that have been intertwined and projected into the future are staggering.It is a massive vision, and yet it is told simply and with a sensitivity for suspense and overall appeal.

Great Near Future Sci-Fi
Sterling does it again with this book, prescient and witty.It tells the tale of two people stuck in a civil war of sorts between the old world and the new.It is a great read if you are into "Emergence Theory," as you watch the city of Buna unfold.

Confirming once againthe whole genre of Sci-fFi
I've recently felt compelled to re-read 'Distraction', and I've been really enjoying myself.The character of Oscar Valparaiso has snuck up on me and won me over; my copy is all marked up in pink and purple highliner.There are so many great and clever lines.

The people who don't like the plot are probably looking for a conventional Triumph of the Individual Against All Odds adventure."Distraction" is that rarity in speculative fiction, character-driven Sci-Fi.For an S-F novel to be character-driven, the character(s) must be recognizable and well-observed, but also modified by some speculative concept.The ability to observe well a person who cannot yet exist requires an intuitive vision that, if successful, confirms the whole genre of Sci-fi as a literary artform.I think Bruce Sterling pulls it off.

The whole delightfully wierd rambling plot, about feuding anarchistic nomad bands and the power-grappling over a national
biological laboratory by 16 political parties and neurological Gumbo a la Bayou, are loaded with flip ideas and throw-away shaggy-dog genius, but are ultimately a... well, a distraction.The real story is about Oscar himself, whose plight as the ultimate outsider seems like it must be a sublimation of something the author knows about personally.I'm sorry to say that I worry that Oscar's in-vitro birth as a genetic experiment in a black-market off-shore Columbian Mafia baby-selling operation may be occurring in real life right now.How the scary dark unavoidable abuses of our unprecedented technology impact on human souls is the real subject of this book.

Oscar's dark alter-ego, Green Huey, says to him,"I finally got you all figured out... You're always gonna have your nose pressed up against the glass, watchin' other folks drink the champagne. Nothing you do will last.You'll be a sideshow and a shadow, and you'll stay one till you die.But, son, if you got a big head start on the coming revolution, .... you can goddamn have Massachusetts."But Oscar consistantly chooses quietly perserving his own dignity over exploiting his tremendos gifts, which would only re-enforce his alienation. 'Distraction' is for anyone who's ever found their nose pressed up against the glass in this present bewildering Cyber-Age. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Slightly dated science fiction about the near future can be fun, especially when it evokes a strange, chaotic, anddangerous world that's uncomfortably close to our present one. Bruce Sterling's 1988 book, Islands in the Net,is a thrilling blend of high tech and low humanity. The glue that binds together this world of data pirates, mercenaries,nanotechnology, weaponry, and post-millennial voodoo is the global electronic net. You'll find jarring references topre-Microsoft Windows computer technology, the Soviet Union, and that fancy new wonder machine--the fax. But thisbook has enough cool stuff to keep even a jaded cyberpunk interested. The characters are far more than mere constructsused to show off the technology, and the plot is fast, complicated, and mysterious. Veteran Sterling fans will enjoy thistaste of his pre-fame style. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

With respect to the other reviewers...
...I found value in this work by Sterling. I don't remember a whit of the plot machinations or the characters ten years after reading it. I do remember, however, the author's gift for thoughtfulness about the mechanisms of the future--the "sunglasses" in particular are something I think about often, being used to confer with "board members" all over the globe.

I think Islands in the Net is a valuable read in that the author put a lot of thought into the technology itself of his "future." It's regretful that the book itself is turgid, but an awful lot of cyberpunk at the time was plot- or "feeling"- heavy, with the technology needed by the plot just "there," and little thought given to how and if it would work and be used.

This book was very interesting at the time I originally read it if you were thinking about how to build the future, and what to build and how it could actually be used in practical fashion, rather than say, the kevlar dusters and mirrorshades.

I'm really surprised at this book.
I have read most of Sterlings other works of fiction and loved all them (The Difference Engine, Heavy Weather, Global Head, Holy Fire, Good old fashioned future, Zeitgeist).

This book surprised me. The title has nothing to do with the book. I had to force myself to read the whole thing and I only did that because it was hard to get (I know now why was out of print).

The main character, Laura, and those that surround her are probably the most annoyingly self-righteous cast of characters I've seen. They live in the future, think they know everything, have genetic engineering, yet they still do natural child birth. The criminal element in this book is way more interesting and believable.

I re-read my favorite science fiction when I either see it on my self and forget what it was about or every couple of years. Islands in the net is a laborous read that I wouldn't repeat.

Boring
The headline isn't entirely fair as the last third of the book gets pretty good. Sadly most of the book just drags along with characters that you don't like, political philosophies that should have died with Communism and a worldview firmly rooted in the 80s.

Maybe it's just because I've read Bruce Sterling short stories and I know that he can write. Maybe it's because I've read Neal Stephenson and compared to Snowcrash, other books in the cyberpunk genre are plodding. But mostly it's just not a very good book.

Set in the 2030 this book concerns a democratic corporation and the information pirates that it's trying to bring to heel. Instead of focusing on the pirates, as Gibson would do, this book concerns itself with the corporate types that are trying to figure out what's going on in the assassinations.

The world set-up in this opening is dull. Most of the characters are talking heads to spout philosophical mumbo-jumbo. A church of goddess worshipping prostitutes was probably innovative in its time but Starhawk's fifteen minutes are up, and paganism has moved away from the hippie garbage finally.

Halfway through the book it becomes a travelogue of the various places in this world. Here's where it begins to get good. Zelazny compares it to Candide. Sadly it's nowhere near as funny as Candide- which could be the fault of the main character whose nowhere near as innocent or cynical as she would need to be to pull off a Candide. Instead she's simply morally outraged.

When the book gets to Africa it begins to pick up, but then the protagonist is rescued by a Noam Chomsky type reporter whose running a guerrila army. This is where the book again falls flat on its face - by presupposing that Noam Chomsky would actually be able to run a workable system - rather than criticize the unworkabiility of current systems.

There are moments, but mostly this book is a lifeless remnant of the cyberpunk explosion.

Incredibly underrated, though not for everyone
This is one of the gutsiest SF novels I know of. Bruce Sterling has set his novel in one of the most incredibly detailed, well thought out futures ever developed. He's thought about his world geopolitically, economically, ideologically, and on a host of other levels, including how people live on a day to day basis. His people have internalized genuinely different ideas because of the world that has shaped them. In this sense it is most like some of the best Heinlein novels.

The world Sterling creates alone would make this worthwhile reading, but his characterization is strong and unconventional, and he tells an extremely interesting story that travels all over the world. This isn't really a fast-paced pageturner, and it isn't immersed in hard-science details about how things work in the future--it's more like real life for most of us, where technology is part of the background, and just works. So if those are the kinds of things you value in a SF novel, this may not be your book. But the traditional virtues of plot, characterization, and setting make this an outstanding novel.

Not Sterling's Best
Having read and liked The Difference Engine, I wanted to try something else by Sterling (writing solo). While I didn't find the book to be as bad as some earlier reviewers, I do have to say sheer stubbornness is what got me to the end. This book, by the way, is not cyberpunk or even science fiction, it is more political thriller ficton or whatever.In spite of the title, the few oblique references to the "Net" in the book seem to refer generally to modern communication technology including television and the phone. I was pretty bored until the main character got out of Texas, and even though you want to care about her, there is nothing about her that really grabs you. Some of the minor characters are a lot more interesting. Some intriguing socio-political ideas are hazily touched on, but this was NOT one of those books that are hard to put down, which may help explain why it is out of print as of this writing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Not Free SF Reader
There are two main political factions in the masses of humanity that
have spread to the stars. The Shapers, and the Mechanists. These
factions have two different schools of thought on posthuman alteration
of the body, the former organic, the latter taking the cyborg route.
They are not the only organisations that exist, but are the most
influential.

This is good old-fashioned "hard science fiction"
I sometimes wonder whatever happened to good old-fashioned science fiction, the traditional type stuff of Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov.Seems the old sci-fi has diversified into so many subgenres now I can't locate the good stuff.But you could hardly ask for a better sampling of traditional space adventure than this.

And overall, much like other famous space adventure novels, the vast scope and plot of "Schismatrix" serves at least somewhat as a metaphor for our own present day world.It's the story of a society divided, and a series of covert wars among the different schisms, and the life of one lone maverick who tries to stand clear of all of them and find prosperity and greatness separate and apart.

As an aside, I think the genre Bruce has been identified with, "cy6erpunk," is more ephemeral than most fashionable genres, and is often just a trendy buzzword.There is little or nothing in this novel to identify as cyberpunk but plenty to describe it as traditional science fiction much like Asimov or Roddenberry would write.If Bruce ever wrote cyberpunk this wasn't it IMO.

Bruce is a high-energy writer who is well-known for his short stories.In fact, a few of them took place in this same Schismatrix universe, and were later included I think in the "Schismatrix Plus" collection.One of my very favorite shorts of his is one of these and can be found also in the collection "Crystal Express."

I found this to be a pretty easy read, and like much traditional science fiction, is not extremely emotional stuff, but focuses much on science and technology.It is not without some emotional depth, but anyway is focused on the loner protagonist, who is in fact pretty alien in his ways compared to us.I think Bruce empathized with him to some extent though.

I'd say if you like sf and want a good intro to Bruce, this is a great way to go.But I'd suggest the "Schismatrix Plus" instead, because the shorts included there, while not essential to this plot, are great reading also, and help fill out this universe a tiny bit.And besides, if you are some science-fiction-readin' weirdo like me, you will finish this book in a heartbeat and be ready for more.

Pronounced Schiz-mat-rics, With A Short a, 2-1/2 Stars
I really wanted to like this novel. It had a clever name, an amalgamation of the Great Schism that separate Catholicism and Protestantism, and Matrix, like the movie with the same title. (Note: the novel is pronounced Shiz-mat-rix, with a short a, rhymes with schematics). A classic cyberpunk title. However, this novel is anything but user-friendly. I don't know if pharmaceuticals are needed for appreciating this novel, or if the author used them when frantically writing, in between vacuuming the roof of his house and such. The novel moves at such a frantic pace that within one sentence the entire setting can change and this happens more than a few times. It's difficult to know the point of the plot; perhaps that life is worth living. The novel is a cross between Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, Bester's The Stars My Destination, and petting a sea urchin.

In case you've also seen a book titled Schismatrix Plus and was wondering what that was, note that it's not a sequel.Instead it's the novel Schismatrix and his related Mechanist-Shaper short stories. The short stories are interesting and enjoyable. In fact Sterling seems to excel with his short stories. His story "Flowers of Edo" is where I got interested in his style. I would recommend his short stories, but this novel is another matter.

Humanity has balkanized into a number of factions, with the Shapers and Mechanists being the most powerful. The Shapers have reshaped their bodies genetically. This includes such drastic things as replacing all the E. Coli in their intestines with enzymes. The Mechanists are like the Borg of Star Trek, they use mechanical prosthetics to enhance themselves. If you think the Mechanists are the cleaner of the two, think again. Cockroaches and bacteria are prevalent in Mechanist environments. Every five years the Mechanists need to have the bacterial growth scraped and UV-burned off their skin. That's one thing prevalent throughout his writings, this sort of creepiness. Expect more of it.

However, don't let the war make you think this is some majestic good vs. evil epic space war. Battles are mostly low key. There is lot's of narration and dialog. Sterling self-claims his crammed prose. No kidding. Adjectives rule supreme in this novel; as many as possible are crammed into each sentence. If one would do a histogram of adjectives, this novel would be on the far right tail of the bell curve. Here's an excerpt: " He always wore his spacesuit, [something something], and [multiple length modifiers] body odor came through its [multiple adjectives] collar with [multiple adjectives] pungency." Sentences like this go on and on and on and on and on and on and on throughout the novel. And there's no shortage of hyphenated words, like long-fermented, eye-watering. On one page, there were no less than 11 hyphenated words, plus one triple one.

Similar to the prosthetics of the Borg, the sentences themselves seem interchangeable. Here's another excerpt of a dialogue:
"What was your brigade?
I'm no Cataclyst.
I have your weapon here.
Constantine pulled a ... vial from his ... jacket ..."
You may as well interchange your own sentences: `The tree fell in the forest; it made no sound' or `the space ship went into orbit; it's boots were muddy.' Give it a try. It'll make as much sense.

There are times when the novel seems profound. I would find myself backtracking at times to understand some point, and I would go back 5, then 10, then 20 pages to try to understand something and would just give up and go back to where I was. It's hard to say you read this novel, it's more like your eyes glance over the words, and on occasion you absorb some of it. Since the novel fluctuates from the profound to the mundane an average of 2-1/2 stars seemed appropriate.

Prophetic
I've read this novel 4 times, which beats Dune and The Silmarillion by one.

This is easily one of the most richly imagined futures ever conceived.

As far as it being "inacessible":go read one of those awful Dune prequels if you want to be spoon-fed your predigested pap.Come back when you grow up...

Not Sterling Silver
This is one fascinating but frustrating novel. The Sterling sociology lesson is in full swing, but between the many treatises there is a sort of plot about a solar system torn in two by the genetically altered (Shapers) and the technically life-enhanced ("Mechanists"). They wage a political war and perform dirty deeds for the entire length of the book, meeting an alien race along the way. The main character, Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsey, survives the ages and finally just drifts off as an entity (a la Dave Bowman). There is a fascination to this novel--there are beautiful passages and interesting ideas, but this is hard-core Sterling and not at all an easy read.
... Read more

Book Description
“Nobody knows better than Bruce Sterling how thin the membrane between science fiction and real life has become, a state he correctly depicts as both thrilling and terrifying in this frisky, literate, clear-eyed sketch of the next half-century. Like all of the most interesting futurists, Sterling isn’t just talking about machines and biochemistry: what he really cares about are the interstices of technology with culture and human history.” -Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century

Visionary author Bruce Sterling views the future like no other writer. In his first nonfiction book since his classic The Hacker Crackdown, Sterling describes the world our children might be living in over the next fifty years and what to expect next in culture, geopolitics, and business.

Time calls Bruce Sterling “one of America’s best-known science fiction writers and perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre.” Tomorrow Now is, as Sterling wryly describes it, “an ambitious, sprawling effort in thundering futurist punditry, in the pulsing vein of the futurists I’ve read and admired over the years: H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alvin Toffler; Lewis Mumford, Reyner Banham, Peter Drucker, and Michael Dertouzos. This book asks the future two questions: What does it mean? and How does it feel? ”

Taking a cue from one of William Shakespeare’s greatest soliloquies, Sterling devotes one chapter to each of the seven stages of humanity: birth, school, love, war, politics, business, and old age. As our children progress through Sterling’s Shakespearean life cycle, they will encounter new products; new weapons; new crimes; new moral conundrums, such as cloning and genetic alteration; and new political movements, which will augur the way wars of the future will be fought.

Here are some of the author’s predictions:

• Human clone babies will grow into the bitterest and surliest adolescents ever.
• Microbes will be more important than the family farm.
• Consumer items will look more and more like cuddly, squeezable pets.
• Tomorrow’s kids will learn more from randomly clicking the Internet than they ever will from their textbooks.
• Enemy governments will be nice to you and will badly want your tourist money, but global outlaws will scheme to kill you, loudly and publicly, on their Jihad TVs.
• The future of politics is blandness punctuated with insanity.
The future of activism belongs to a sophisticated, urbane global network that can make money—the Disney World version of Al Qaeda.

Tomorrow Now will change the way you think about the future and our place in it. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Amazing!
Tomorrow Now is essentially a long and brilliant essay by Bruce Sterling, a noted science fiction writer and futurist covering some of his ideas of what the future may hold. Sterling very cleverly breaks the book into seven parts based upon a soliloquoy from Shakespeare covering the ages of man from birth to death, and wittily prophesies what life may shape itself into in our near future.

Two things struck me about this book. The first is that it is not nearly as focused on the next fifty years as the title purports. There is a fair deal of what the future may hold, but there is also a great deal of the present thrown in (especially in the soldier section), and some futurism that is more than 50 years out. Surprisingly this didn't bother me at all because his analysis of the present, especially an exposition on three different terrorists warlords, was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. This book ranges far and wide, and colors outside the lines of the 50 years stated, but I was glad it did as I read.

The second thing that struck me was that this is one of the most amazingly well-written books I've ever read. I am not sure I have ever read something as engaging, fascinating, informative and so easy to read at the same time. I have always enjoyed Sterling's fiction work but, frankly, the quality of this non-fiction book trumps his fictional stories. His writing style is very chatty, more or less as if you are sitting across the table from him, and at first this threw me. It's not something you expect in a science book. Yet once I adjusted I realized that this may be one of the clearest pieces of writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. When I say "pleasure to read" I actually mean it. That is a phrase far too over-used, but in choosing it I mean it literally: reading the words was a pleasure regardless of what he was talking about. His sentence construction and word choices were simply pleasurable to read in and of themself, and I have never seen adjectives used so well to create shades and nuances of meaning before.

Much of the speculation for the future involves biotechnology, changes in workplace dynamics, and what we actually produce, the change of market dynamics, consumerism to end-user, medical advances, and the rift between the New World Order (the first world) and the New World Disorder (the third world). If I had one reservation about this book it is that Sterling promised to show why the Islamic terrorism today will be irrelevant in the future. I don't think he ever really did that; he set the stage for it, and provided the backstory necessary to see the writing on the wall, but he never came out and posited why. I agree with him that the terrorism is not a long-term problem but it would have been nice to see him forcefully make that conclusion. That one quibble aside, this is a book that anyone who cares about current events, the future, or science will find compelling, interesting, and incredibly easy to understand and follow. This is a first class work and I highly recommend it.

Recommended reading to understand the right questions
This is entertaining, informative, funny, and grim at the same time.A bittersweet look at the future.

When you look at the reviews, just remember that republicans will hate this book because they have a belief system impervious to the reality happening outside of their heads.They alone have the power to be right and rightness is affirmed by belief!They read Fred Barnes and John Stossel for whats really going on because they're closed and finite.Ambiguity is kryptonite to republicans.

Read this book to find out more about the small print at the bottom of the social contract.There is no threat of a New World Order.There is a New World Disorder that is already here and devolving.Order is not on the horizon anywhere except in one's own chosen orthodoxy.

Brilliant Futurist Architecture Built on Weak Foundations
Bruce Sterling is, without doubt, a brilliant futurist. In "Tomorrow Now", he serves up a feast of clever andentertaining prognostications about humanity's near future. But reader beware! The book is like a gleaming, new building whose stunning design, lavish decoration and gleaming contours can blind observers to many small architectural flaws and the crucial fact that it's built on shaky foundations.

To take one example, Sterling tells us in one paragraph that a "cruise missile ... is just a rich guy's truck bomb". But in the very next paragraph he emphasizes that there are in fact huge differences between cruise missiles and truck bombs that go far beyond the class background of their users. Cruise missiles are produced and deployed by complex, industrially advanced societies, while truck bombs are used by terrorists who operate beyond the ken of settled governments and civilized society.

Another, more serious example of some of the less-than-deep thinking that went into this book is its overall organizational gimmick, which is based on the "Seven Ages of Man" so poetically described by Shakespeare and Marlowe. Sterling emhasizes the chronological aspect of these "Ages" by labelling his chapters as stages. Stage 1 is the Infant, Stage 2 is the Student, and so on. He uses these stages as conceptual launching pads for fascinating riffs on a variety of subjects related to 21st century technology, culture and politics. In the chapter on the Infant, for instance, he writes at length about future bioengineering not just for babies but also adults and what this will mean for huminaty as a whole. In "Stage 4: The Soldier" he speculates on the nature of future warfare. Thus, Sterling is really often talking about cross-cutting themes rather that chronological ages, which is more than a little confusing. Why he did this, except that it is so cool to quote from Shakespeare, escapes me.

A final example of Sterling's inconsistency is the subtitle of the book itself: "Envisioning the Next 50 Years". In fact, he often describes trends from the late 21st century, which puts us more than 50 years ahead. So why didn't he just call the book "Envisioning the 21st Century"? Search me.

This is a great book, but Sterling's slickness can't completely compensate for these weaknesses. Cool soundbytes, technological virtuosity, cute wordplay and even large dollops of honest-to-God weighty insight are not enough to make up for some rather shoddy underlying illogic and conceptual weaknesses.

Not very good...
Not very good...tries to examine the social and institutional trends, but goes into much self-serving prose.

Tomorrow Never Knows
Paradigm-shifts can stick in our collective craw like jawbreakers in a goose-neck.Galileo's carpet-pull on Ptolemy was no amateur-hour prank, and Darwin trumping Yahweh left a cantelope-sized goiter that still makes religious fundies bark and fume.Earth-shaking, yes, but taking decades, sometimes centuries to evolve their total, terraforming, reality-torquing impact -- slow-flying dreadnaughts of cultural metamorphosis whose meaning and trajectory still won't let us sleep at night.

Sterling's question is: What happens when the winds of change start storming the reality-studio at supersonic speeds?When whiplash upgrades seem to convulse the Zeitgeist every other minute?When dimensions start spinning like nerve-cells in a centrifuge, when ontology itself becomes as fluid as the global market?Leaning into the stormwinds of these queries, *Tomorrow Now* is less a bland Tofflerian forecast than a smoking flak-helmet pocked with the dents, scars, and impact-profiles of paradigm-shifts concussing like hot shrapnel.

"Apocalypse is boring," as Sterling likes to say, the last-ditch noctuary of the evangelical, the helpless, the neo-Luddite, the future-shocked.Better to encounter futurity with all the Olympian resources of the secular visionary imagination, with conceptual thaumaturgy and high comedy, with new languages to be learned and created, new disciplines picked up and dropped on the fly, a new world racing a hairsbreadth ahead of social and environmental holocausts that have always accompanied technological innovation....

But hey, enough of my hero-worshipping agit-prop, here are some snapshots from Sterling's globalist Bazaar of the Bizarre:

BIOTECH: Let's learn a lesson from our ancestor and brethren, the prokaryote -- let's pay homage to the two pounds of living bacteria that all humans carry within.In the microbe-literate society of the future, the elasticity and survival-skills of the bacterial swarm will make human cloning look like "a simpleminded stunt"(27) by comparison.Genetic engineering will heal the sick, fortify new deadly viruses, darken and transfigure every certainty, pump ontological coolants into the icy elysium of the posthuman.When evolution is reverse-engineered, becoming another stock-option in the industrial market sweep, Homo Prometheus will tap into genetic realms of unprecedented freedom, complexity, beauty, disfigurement, and terror.

EDUCATION: Whisked and pummeled by constant change, traditions will corrode, protocols will deliquesce, and canons will bloom with rot like beached whales.Fields of learning and praxis will ooze squishily from discipline to discipline, producing a steady stream of dynamic hybrids to stay on top of the market.Cultural memory will become like Leonard in *Memento* trying to reassemble and deploy his rapidly obsolescing past, swimming inside of whirlpool of innovation, competition, ecological catastrophe, and an elephant's graveyard of accumulating dead tech.

DESIGN: When things start to think, when domestic objects "love" you, when Shopping starts to look like Art and Philosophy, "visionary materialism" becomes a tasteless euphemism for a phase of cybernetic immersion that would have given McLuhan the spins.We will all be owned by our machines the way tribal peoples feel "owned" by the horizon, by the regenerative landscape of moon and tide, river and mountain, animal and insect.(In case you mistake my tone, this is not a "good" thing.It is simply inevitable.)We will all be passionate, obsessed fetishists.Think of the current ubiquity of cell-phones and telecom gear, and multiply it a thousandfold, in every direction.Trying to write "predictive" science-fiction in this maelstrom of voices and priorities will be like trying to set up a house of cards inside a wind-tunnel.

WAR: Cocksure superpowers trying to net a swarm of locusts in Fourth World zones run by pirates, drug-runners, mercs, ethnic-genociders, and cold-eyed Arab theology students jumping from wreckage to wreckage in the transnational narco-arms bazaar.Just think Belgrade, Kabul, Chechnya, Baghdad, and Mogadishu on crack.And the Third World zones of controlled anarchy embedded in every First World technocracy.

LAW, BUSINESS, POLITICS: Will there be much for governments to do in a post-ideological world, where public policy simpers beneath the windfalls of corporate underwriting, where human rights become a browser plug-in, where success and happiness is sold in terraced upgrades to graduated bidders?Will lawyers and legislators and police superstructures be installed as ornamental horticulture, migrant tenants surfing the crest of technology's raw, surging power?Will a democratic electorate retain its passion for activism and involvement, or will we vote with our money, our investments, our channel flipping, our site surfing, our zodiac of recorded purchases and credit histories?

DEATH: Sure, the Atomic Age may have decked us out in a cozy, suburban Cold War where mutually assured destruction and commie witchhunts could guarantee rigid cultural identity, war-fever eschatology, and a sober sense of imperialist mission (in short, the technocratic inheritor of Judaeo-Christian End Times), but where's the corporate payoff in that?Why not treat human mortality as another marketing-scenario to be spun, merchandized, glossed and sold?But if Sterling is right, our species may, in the end, "outsmart itself to death, [if] human knowledge is...not compatible with human survival"(264).We've burrowed too deep and too greedily into the planet to give birth and sustenance to our machines.Every species lost in the quest to infect the ecosystem with our ubiquity is a piece of the planetary survival-plan that's been irretrievably eroded by our narcissism, our fear, our all-too-human frenzy for mastery and technique, our Faustian gamble with machine-interface....

All in all, Mr. Sterling puts the Zeit in Geist, and *Tomorrow Now* has enough Plutarchan zing, erudition, and vervy wisdom to keep you buzzing for weeks.Some awesome riffs here.Kept me on tenterhooks throughout.Highest recommendation.

--for Ian Vance ... Read more

Amazon.com
Bruce Sterling's classic work highlights the 1990 assault on hackers, when law-enforcement officials successfully arrested scores of suspected illicit hackers and other computer-based law-breakers. These raids became symbolic of the debate between fighting serious computer crime and protecting civil liberties. However, The Hacker Crackdown is about far more than a series of police sting operations. It's a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures--the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians.

Sterling begins his story at the birth of cyberspace: the invention of the telephone. We meet the first hackers--teenage boys hired as telephone operators--who used their technical mastery, low threshold for boredom, and love of pranks to wreak havoc across the phone lines. From phone-related hi-jinks, Sterling takes us into the broader world of hacking and introduces many of the culprits--some who are fighting for a cause, some who are in it for kicks, and some who are traditional criminals after a fast buck. Sterling then details the triumphs and frustrations of the people forced to deal with the illicit hackers and tells how they developed their own subculture as cybercops. Sterling raises the ethical and legal issues of online law enforcement by questioning what rights are given to suspects and to those who have private e-mail stored on suspects' computers. Additionally, Sterling shows how the online civil liberties movement rose from seemingly unlikely places, such as the counterculture surrounding the Grateful Dead. The Hacker Crackdown informs you of the issues surrounding computer crime and the people on all sides of those issues. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (42)

Essential reading on computers, freedom and privacy.
Bruce Sterling of Cyberpunk fame takes a journalistic approach to researching law and disorder on the electronic frontier by examining two specific events in depth : the 1990 Operation Sundevil, a concerted nationwide effortby district attorneys, the Secret Service, the FBI, local authorities and various Telco security to bust and publicize a hacker crackdown; and the resulting trials and creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and rise of the civil libertarians.

The book is divided into four parts: crashing the system, the digital underground, law and order, and the Civil Libertarians. Mr. Sterling does a credible job explaining the telco systems and motivations and actions of the people on both sides of the issue - phone phreaks/hackers and law enforcement/district attorneys without succumbing to a lot of jargon or taking sides.

The book is replete with interesting accounts of Alexander Graham Bell and history of telephony, the origins of the Secret Service and its' early battles with "Boodlers", and the dissemination of the E911 document that came to cause grief to many people.

Reading this in 2006 and beyond will cause a few chuckles at his penchant for describing and drooling over advance systems (I have a real urge to drive down to the storage unit for my Commodore 64 and IBM clone), yet the events of the early hacker sub-culture remain relevant to anyone interested in computers, freedom and privacy.

Very worthwile...
A very lively, interesting, and well-written (by Bruce Sterling no less) summer read for those interested in the history of phone phreaking and computer exploration and mischief.Highly recommended.

EXCELENT BOOK UNTIL THE ''UNDERGROUND'' PART
this is an excellent book until the ''underground'' part. But it forgot to talk about the cybergang ''Master Of Deception'' the opponent of Legion Of Doom.

Learned more about the phone in 12 hours than in 12 years
I learned more about the telephone in 12 hours than 12 years of school life.The dates and times depicted in this book happened during a time when I'd been 'off-line' with the computer world.I began with AOL (unfortunately) and due to my own reasons gave up computers for a while.It's like going back home and finding out what's happened to everyone after you'd left years back.Historically, this is the place to begin reading about phones and phone systems.To understand at least the fundimentals of the technology we wrap ourselves into.
Most definitely a must-read book.If you liked this, try At-Large, the Strange case of the world's Biggest Internet Invasion by David H. Freedman and Charles C. Mann.

A near-complete retrospective history of cyberculture...
Sterling's book is a must-read for anyone genuinely interested in the roots of Cyberculture.It documents everything from old-school phone phreaks to the 1990 crash of AT&T.It goes into great detail as to how "cybercops" were established, their training, and the mass-reluctancy a decade ago to utilize their services.While this may sound like a history textbook, it is not.It is a fair and unbiased look at the past from the eyes of one of the greatest cyberpunk authors ever, which is probably why the book is so often quoted in academic research papers and in other works on the subject.The book does not lack charecter nor does it lack accuracy.Those who are looking to find an entertaining yet accurate, if not dated, historical account of hacking need not look any further. ... Read more

Amazon.com
A Good Old-fashioned Future is a paperback collection of seven short stories by former cyberpunk guru turned sociocultural prognosticator Bruce Sterling. Most of the works here come with impressive pedigrees, ranging from a Hugo Award for "Bicycle Repairman" to Hugo nominations for "Maneki Neko" and "Taklamakan." Another piece, "Big Jelly," was cowritten by Sterling's fellow cyberpunk alum, Rudy Rucker.

These stories have a lot in common. They all take place in the near future, and most are action-oriented, involving colorful characters such as secret agents, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Mafioso's, and revolutionaries. But they are also personal tales that tend to focus on individuals rather than ideas, which makes them hit home more often than standard SF fare. The best of the bunch is probably "Taklamakan," a high-concept piece about two freelance spies sent to a central Asian desert called Taklamakan, where the Asian Sphere is doing some sort of secret research into space flight. "Bicycle Repairman" is set in the same world, but instead of in an Asian desert it takes place in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the spies in this story aren't the good guys. It's a less successful piece than "Taklamakan" but also a good read.

Not all of the stories in this collection have the edgy, this-is-what-tomorrow-will-be-like quality that typifies Sterling's best work. But even when Sterling isn't at his best he's entertaining, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future is certainly that. --Craig E. EnglerBook Description
From the subversive to the antic, the uproarious to the disturbing, the stories of Bruce Sterling are restless, energy-filled journeys through a world running on empty--the visionary work of one of our most imaginative and insightful modern writers.

They live as strangers in strange lands. In worlds that have fallen--or should have. They wage battles in wars already lost and become heroes--and sometimes martyrs--in their last-ditch efforts to preserve the dignity and individuality of humanity.

A hack Indian filmmaker takes the pulse of a wounded and declining civilization--21st-century Britain. A pair of swashbuckling Silicon Valley entrepreneurs join forces to make a commercial killing--in organic underground slime and computer-generated jellyfish. A man in a Japanese city takes orders from a talking cat while pursuing a drama of danger and adventure that has become the very essence of his life.

From "The Littlest Jackal", a darkly hilarious thriller of mercs and gunrunners set in Finland, to a stark vision of a post-atomic netherworld in his haunting tale "Taklamakan", Bruce Sterling once again breaks boundaries, breaks icons, and breaks rules to unleash the most dangerously provocative and intelligent science fiction being written today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Great place to start investigating this smart science fiction writer
This was the first Bruce Sterling I've read, fiction or non-fiction, and I definitely plan to read more. Sterling is ostensibly a cyberpunk author, which (I think) means that his stories feature marginal characters (e.g., terrorists, bicycle repairing squatters, skyscraper climbers, neuter industrial spies, etc.) in gritty, if not necessarily grim, near-future circumstances. Whatever subgenre of science fiction he belongs to, Sterling is a literate, intelligent writer who sees the line between science and science fiction growing ever hazier and whose speculative extrapolations are all the more frightening and engaging because they are so close to the contemporary reality. (For example, in aptly titled story "Sacred Cow," Anglo-Americans and Western Europeans have been decimated by the slow plague of "mad cow" disease---a chilling possibility---leaving Bollywood to take up the cinematic slack---another chilling possibility!) Other reviewers have commented on the unevenness of the stories in this collection, and I concur with that assessment; a few of the stories are definitely not as interesting as others, but luckily the number of these weaker stories is low. In short, this is a great place to start investigating a smart science fiction writer whose reputation will probably be hard to tarnish.

The Quintessence of Sterlingism
A Good Old-Fashioned Future, (...), is an anthology of seven stellar stories authored by Austin, Texas novelist and seer Bruce Sterling. These yarns were originally published in magazines -- such as Asimov's, Hayakawa's Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, -- that were sold between 1993 and 1998. And with the exception of one tale, they are all interlaced in some form or another, whether by scheme or character.

My favorite story in this collection is "Big Jelly," a collaboration Sterling hatched with his close friend Rudy Rucker of Freeware fame. "Big Jelly," is an anecdotal account of the unintended consequences that result from a second-chance meeting between Tug Mesoglea, a gay San Jose computer programmer, and Revel Pullen, a straight Texas oil billionaire that dabbles in venture capitalism on the side. While not the longest story in AGOFF, "Big Jelly" does seem to have the most going on, conceptually. Also note the glib sense of humor, as in the initials of the story, and the backward names, "gut" and "lever." Lever Pullen... hehe. Coincidentally this is the one story that has little in common with the others. The other stories seem to take place anywhere from 30 and 70 years from now. Based on the quality of this story, I'd love to see a whole novel from this pair. Would that be too much to ask for? After all, Bruce did collaborate once before on The Difference Engine with William Gibson. What do you say Bruce?

My second favorite parable in this group is "Deep Eddy," a forty-seven page recounting of Edward Dertouzas's pleasure trip from the metropolis of Chattanooga, Tennessee, into the dark heart of modern-day Dusseldorf, circa July 2035. "Deep Eddy," a ripe old 22, is a young man of amazing technical prowess, and while deemed a "security risk" upon his arrival on European soil, he's then assigned his own personal Security Guard who will escort him while he conducts his business in country -- and her name, we are led to believe, is simply Sardelle. These two curious specimens are then thrown together in a dangerous set of circumstances, as they attempt to reach the city center during a "Wende" -- a multi-cultural holiday of some type, wherein over a million people rapidly descend upon the city over the course of a few summer days. Ultimately this turns out to be a tale of both efficiency and charm, and is told by Sterling. with a firm grip on a "truly alien sensibility." In the final analysis, "Deep Eddy" and "Sardelle" are destined to part ways, but not until after they spend a couple of years together. I'd really like to see another story featuring Sardelle, perhaps set in the Canary Islands or Ibiza.

And I suppose my third favorite gem from this volume would be "Bicycle Repairman," a chronicle that has garnered many accolades, and that has been reprinted in any number of other places, such as The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 14, Hartwell's Year's Best SF2, and The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. "Bicycle Repairman" is set in the Chattanooga of 2037, and involves one Lyle Schweik, southern high-rise squatter and confederate mail-drop for one Edward Dertouzas, whom is set upon by comely Federal Agent Kitty Casaday, after receiving a mysterious delivery from former acquaintance "Deep Eddy," currently living it up in Spain. Only it turns out Casaday is incompetent, like most government workers, and as a result she is captured by a trap that Lyle had set up in his home. After some light coercion from Lyle's "unique friends," Kitty reveals her ulterior motives -- "spills the beans" so to speak. When you boil it down, this is a truly fascinating short-hop extension of "Deep Eddy," a classic Sterling short that the author decided to riff on a mere three years later. I'd really like to see another story featuring Eddy & Violeta Dertouzas, their two children and their in-laws -- set in a unified Middle East of 2048. Can you humor me Bruce?

For the purpose of this review, and in favor of not boring you, I've decided to summarize only three of these adventures. The other four items in this anthology, Maneki Neko, The Littlest Jackal, Sacred Cow, and Taklamakan are just as good, in terms of quality. The trio of story lines I've decided to outline for you here are simply the ones that I most prefer to tout. *Sterling still pens short stories from time to time, but the realities of being a writer with a family to support generally make it a necessity that he concentrate solely on non-fiction books, such as *Tomorrow Now, or on science fiction novels, such as *Holy Fire. Which is too bad, since he's so truly adept at the art of the short story -- arguably a more elusive gift than the basic ability to complete a manuscript of novel length.

If you seek out A Good Old-Fashioned Future based on my recommendation here, you'll also want to pick up Bruces@ older anthology, Globalhead, from 1992, and gobble up "Dori Bangs," perhaps the most melancholy short story ever set to paper. I highly recommend anything written by Bruce Sterling, and this volume is one of his better efforts. I have seven of his books -- four in hardback, and three in paperback. Zude. Eventually I'll own them all. Keep on writing Bruce, never change what you do, and please -- write faster!

Stellar collection of stories from cyberpunk's visionary
Bruce Sterling rose to prominence in the 1980s as the master visionary and literary theorist of the cyberpunk movement. Although he has not left cyberpunk's sensibility behind, his newer fiction incorporates a wider range of themes, philosophical concepts, and just plain fun which is immediately engaging and entertaining as well as intellectually satisfying.

The best of Sterling's fiction- and "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" definitely belongs in that category- extrapolates current events and trends into the near future, then gives them a baroque twist. Here, Sterling's combination of a mad-cow disease epidemic and the rise of Indian cinema combine to make "Sacred Cow" a darkly humorous exploration of reverse colonialism. Likewise, cultural warfare- whether between differing intellectual movements, government and squatting entrepreneurs, or ethnic minorities against their own state and each other- invests and links the three last stories in the book in a progression that is as intricate as it is involving.

It's not all Bollywood and literary theory, though- Sterling loyalists will be pleased with the return of his irrepressible outlaw Leggy Starlitz. Scheming to free a group of islands from Danish control in order to set up a money-laundry, Starlitz's efforts are as amusing as they are, always, ultimately futile.

All in all, this collection is excellently balanced between the foreboding and the comic, the earnest and the absurd, and it's a must-have both for Sterling fans and those who just want to know how good science fiction can be.

An uneven collection
This uneven collection points up a lot of what was going wrong for Bruce Sterling in the 1990s: an overconfidence in his own ability to have his finger on the pulse and sometimes seemingly superficial understanding of other cultures replacing in-depth research.

This is at its worst in stories like 'The Littlest Jackal', set largely in the Aland Islands between Finland and Sweden - I've been there, and he just seems to use the islands as an exotic locale without any real understanding of the culture or geography. This story also features the return of Leggy Starlitz, the shady gun-for-hire of several stories in Globalhead, Sterling's previous and equally uneven collection. Unfortunately where in those stories he was amusing, here he has out-stayed his welcome and become tedious. I know these stories are an ironic riff on the old cyberpunk assassin theme and the superficiality is probably intended, but still - I don't think it works.

Also lightweight is Sacred Cow, which has a great concept (Bollywood film-makers come to Britain to take advantage of cheap labour in a country devastated by mad cow disease), but which largely fails to deliver more than a few cheap laughs. The title character of Deep Eddy (who gets a mention in a couple of other tales) is another of those irritating know-it-alls that Sterlings seems to specialise in at present. Will the geeks inherit the earth? Perhaps he's right, but it doesn't make for interesting characterisation here. Neil Stephenson does this a lot more effectively.

However, there are some really good stories in this collection.

I've lived in Japan, the setting for Maneki Neko, which in this context appears to suffer from the same faults as the lesser stories in demonstrating no more than a passing grasp of the culture in which it is set. However, having thought about this more, I realised that when I first read this story when it was published in F&SF's 'best of' collection, I really enjoyed its subtleties and humour (like many in that fine collection), and indeed its Japaneseness. Perhaps this time I reread it via Leggy Starlitz instead!

The long Bicycle Repairman and Taklamakan, set in the same world as Deep Eddy, are also better, the former a fairly gritty urban tale in a set amongst techie squatters, the latter a effectively dusty and atmospheric tale of some of the same foreign techs and spaceships in central Asia. I also enjoyed the wobbly and wonky Big Jelly which is at least partly down to lunatic collaborator Rudy Rucker's all-round obsession with jellyfish!

Sterling started to return to form with the novel, Holy Fire, but for fans of short fiction I suggest going back to his first satisfyingly varied collection, Crystal Express, which featured both early cyberpunk and more tradtional space-and-aliens sci-fi done equally well.

Overall this collection suggests that Sterling isn't putting as much effort into his short fiction as he used to, but there are very few writers who start off writing short stories who continue to do them as well or as often as their careers progress. While there are some really worthwhile pieces in here, my reading of them at least was unfortunately coloured by the not so great ones.

Excellent collection of cyberpunk stories
It's nice to know that someone is still writing good tight cyberpunk stories.Overall, it's a format that suits Sterling quite well.I've read his novels, and they don't seem to be quite all there.It's the short stories that he really shines.

All of his interesting sensibilities are there, and he has evolved to new concepts as time goes on and the future we expected changed.The Japanese mega-corp - a staple of early science fiction - is dead.Bruce was ahead of the curve in viewing Russia as an interesting place to do cyberpunk.Certainly as history unfolds, it remains an interesting place.

Lastly, the evolution of the writing is good.It maintains the cyberpunk view of the world, undergoing some few modifications for the Internet as it came out, not envisioned, as well as the toys that make cyberpunk fun.Bio Drills that eat sugar, not eating and living on implanted fat for days.The whole Urban spider concept is a fun one that needs to be explored more.

Overall, a must read for the old-school cyberpunk fan.Heck, it's a must read in general. ... Read more

Amazon.com
The Zenith Angle, futurist Bruce Sterling's first novel since Zeitgeist(2000), tells the story of Derek "Van" Vandeveer. As The Zenith Angle opens, Van sits peacefully at his breakfast table, enjoying life as a new homeowner and happily married man, with a new son and a fortune in stock options. Then the morning news reports a jetliner has crashed in nearby Manhattan--colliding with the World Trade Center. Like many other Americans' lives, Van's will never be the same. He leaves his corporate job to work fighting terrorism for the U.S. government. He soon finds himself sequestered at a top-secret undisclosed location while his fortune vanishes, his former company sinks into a morass of lawsuits and arrests, and his wife and son move to the far side of the country. And as Van is transformed from cyber-whiz to spook, he finds himself changing in ways he would never have imagined.

A novel from Bruce Sterling is always cause for celebration, and The Zenith Angle is one of the finest contemporary novels and finest techno-thrillers of 2004. Sterling operates at the cutting edge of both technology and pop culture, and he possesses innumerable literary strengths. However, his strengths don't usually include deeply-penetrating character development, and that injures the believability of The Zenith Angle, which is the portrait of a man undergoing an enormous and shocking transformation. --Cynthia WardBook Description
Like his peers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, bestselling author Bruce Sterling writes cutting-edge speculative fiction firmly rooted in today’s reality. Now in The Zenith Angle, he has created a timely thriller about an information-age security expert caught up in America’s escalating war on terror.

Infowar. Cybercombat. Digital security and techno-terror. It’s how nations and networks secretly battle, now and into the future. And for Derek “Van” Vandeveer, pioneering computer wizard, a new cyberwarrior career begins on the fateful date of September 11, 2001.

Happily married with a new baby, pulling down mind-blowing money as a VP of research and development for a booming Internet company, Van has been living extralarge. Then the devastating attacks on America change everything. And Van must decide if he’s willing to use the talents that built his perfect world in order to defend it.

“It’s our networks versus their death cult,” says the government operative who recruits Van as the key member of an ultraelite federal computer-security team. In a matter of days, Van has traded his cushy life inside the dot-com bubble for the labyrinthine trenches of the Washington intelligence community—where rival agencies must grudgingly abandon decades of distrust and infighting to join forces against chilling new threats. Van’s special genius is needed to make the country’s defense systems hacker-proof. And if he makes headway there, he’ll find himself troubleshooting ultrasecret spy satellites.

America’s most powerful and crucial “eye in the sky,” the KH-13 satellite—capable of detecting terrorist hotbeds worldwide with pinpoint accuracy—is perilously close to becoming an orbiting billion-dollar boondoggle, unless Van can debug the glitch that’s knocked it out of commission. Little does he suspect that the problem has nothing at all to do with software . . . and that what’s really wrong with the KH-13 will force Van to make the unlikely leap from scientist to spy, team up with a ruthlessly resourceful ex–Special Forces commando, and root out an unknown enemy . . . one with access to an undreamed of weapon of untold destructive power.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (38)

I really enjoyed this book
Being a programmer and a geek, I really enjoyed reading this book. Yes, some of it is implausable, and there a few rants in there, but I didn't like the book less because of that. I liked the characters - Van, his wife Dottie, Michael Hickock, etc. There's also some dry humor in there. It's not a super action-packed story for the most part, but I liked reading about what Van and Dottie worked on. I also liked the ending.

I have read some of Bruce's other books (and enjoyed them too), and this book is a little different than them. And not everyone will like every book that an author writes. I for one am glad Bruce wrote "The Zenith Angle", and am searching for more books like it.

remarkably poor
This might be the worst book I've ever read. A refund isn't enough, I want those wasted hours back.

I know Bruce Sterling can write - I've read his articles in Wired and elsewhere. Despite the byline, I don't know who wrote this book. Was it Drunk Bruce Sterling, Bruce Sterling's Roomfull of Monkeys? A Spambot that calls itself Bruce?

Er, it's considered a "thriller"??
This is way down on the boring end of Sterlings' writing. Three-fourths of the way through and pretty much nothing has happened. I mean literally no narrative events have occurred, and the characters have advanced no conflict. Amazing considering the story takes place around 9/11 and is supposed to be about some kwel l33t hackers' responses to it.

Sterling vaguely attempts to include real human emotions but they are wedged in pretty clumsily. The main character is separated from his wife and child for much of the book--there are occasional reminders of how desperately he misses them! And how he's trying to save the world for their sake! Sadly, it's impossible to care about the human emotions of these cardboard cutouts Sterling arranges around metal government desks to discuss federal funding disputes.

Really, this is sort of bureaucracy-fiction, not science-fiction (or "design fiction" as Sterling now calls it.) I half expected the story to turn on the filing of some form in triplicate, though it never really even got that interesting. The brief good parts actually read like Sterling's non-fiction essays, and characterize the over-funded paranoiac surveillance State in some chilling ways. So, a star for that.

Where's the beef?
A peculiar book. Sterling's descriptions of technological gadgets and governmental processes are convincing, but Zenith Angle seems to be missing some things. An obvious or compelling plot, for one - you can read 3/4 of the way through the book without figuring out what exactly is the point of the book. The characterizations are weird - a mixture of colorful, dull, and just plain odd. For a hundred or so pages it seems like it might be a good read, and then after a couple hundred pages more you realize you have just about run out of pages, and it hasn't become a good read yet.

Each page is well written, but taken as a whole, the book's pages add up to surprisingly little.

Entertaining to near the end, where it flys off the rails
..
Bottom line: Sterling's obligatory 9-11/dot-bomb novel/rant. Entertaining almost to the end, where it suddenly flies off the rails. Rating: overall "B-""A-", if you skip the last chapter.

""Ignore the techno-thriller packaging ...what you're getting here is still Sterling's patented, hi-octane brand of gleeful, shrewd, speculative, cynical, closely observed, micro-detailed analysis of how the world works..." --Paul di Filippo, in his 2004 Washington Post review

So anyway, I was having a great time, grooving on Sterling's wonderfully-observed technospeak, skimming over the odd bobbles (like a weird little jump-cut to Chechnya, fortunately short, which reminded me how much I loathe Leggy Starlitz). Then I got to the ending, where Sterling goes completely off the rails, out into la-la land. This is chapter 13, the last, and you should *seriously* consider stopping after chapter 12.

I have no idea why Sterling went so far wrong at the finish. As Di Filippo wryly notes, the ending is "a set-piece that is not extensively foreshadowed." Yup.Reads like a really bad Tom Clancy wrapup. The ending, well, *sucks*, bigtime. IMO, anyway.

But whatthehell-- it's short, you can read it in one sitting, forewarned is forearmed, it isn't Leggy Starlitz.... go for it. Just don't expect HOLY FIRE or "Taklamakan" or "We See Things Differently." And don't read this as your first Sterling novel!

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
(review first posted at rec.arts.sf.written 12-12-04) ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (9)

Maybe his best collection yet.
I've grown quite tired of Sterling's novels.With the exception of the "Schismatrix" material (with I think is his masterpiece), his long-form fiction often degenerates into rambling narrative, inconsistent characters, and non-endings.

But his short-story material is wonderful.I can't think of another writer who is so consitently imaginative, entertaining, funny, and insightful.I've enjoyed all of his collections, and none more than this.

some interesting stories but won't drag you back for more.
This collection of short stories was somewhat disappointing.
For the most part the stories do have interesting plot points or interesting premises highlighting just how out of the box Sterling can be sometimes. However the stories generally seem to run out of steam near the end and often come up feeling somewhat contrived or rushed.
The standout exception is "luciferase" which is *so* different that it deserves a read.
Overall a good light read but it probably won't drag you back for a 2nd look.

Very hit or miss
"Visionary in Residence" (modest to a fault, Bruce is) is a real mixed bag. There are two or three nifty stories here, and a bunch of forgettable stuff.

Sterling seems to be writing fiction out of some sense of obligation these days, not out of a love of it. His old stuff is often great, but anymore he obviously enjoys his Wired columns, his many (many) tech conference keynotes, and his pure design criticism (like the excellent Shaping Things) way more. It's almost like he's writing these short stories in order to keep his SF Writer's Club membership card active or something.

Extropian Infodump
Bruce Sterling is a brilliant futurist whose novels have defined cyberpunk, and have propelled science fiction into new ultra-scientific realms. However, his short stories are more varied but less groundbreaking, as can be seen in this rather uneven collection. The main problem is that several of the short stories herein were created for very specific niche publications, and some show signs of being subjected to space constraints or heavy-handed editing. For example, "Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct," "Ivory Tower," and "Message Found in a Bottle" are just too short to provide anything other than simplistic attempts at big statements on social problems. A couple of other stories here, "In Paradise" and "Code," offer up much more interesting stories and settings, only to end very abruptly with absolutely no conclusions for the characters or thematic ideas. Fortunately, the longer submissions here will be real treats to Sterling fans, and save the collection from oblivion. "The Blemmye's Strategem" is a winning piece of supernatural historical fiction that is quite outside Sterling's usual subject matter. Meanwhile, Sterling continues his futurist innovations in the adventurous "The Scab's Progress," co-written by Paul Di Filippo; and especially "Junk DNA," co-written by the bodaciously creative Rudy Rucker. Those longer and better-constructed stories save this collection and make it a worthy addition to Sterling's body of work. But most of the briefer submissions are barely memorable. [~doomsdayer520~]

Not as "visionary" as one would wish
Bruce is one of those authors I always approach hesitantly. When he's good, he's very good, but when he's not, he's . . . well, not terrible, but certainly uninteresting. That goes for both his novels and his short stories. As I've noted elsewhere, he's a kick to listen to in person at a con, but his ideas and enthusiasms and social concerns don't always translate well into print. This collection of thirteen stories which first appeared in the past five or six years is divided thematically -- "Fiction for Scientists," "Design Fiction," "Architecture Fiction," etc. And there are several here that are great fun: "In Paradise" (love by means of real-time language translation in your cell phone), "Code" (boy-nerd meets girl-nerd), "The Necropolis of Thebes" (a very thoughtful look at "the old days" -- really old), and "The Denial" (actually a ghost story set in Ottoman times). One of the best, under the heading of "Ribofunk," is "Junk DNA," written with Rudy Rucker, which is about a high-tech start-up built around genomics instead of software; it's damaged, though, by the rather silly ending which makes me think Bruce simply got tired of writing it. The least-readable story, as it happens, is also about biotech -- "The Scab's Progress," with Paul Di Filippo, which made almost no sense at all to me. Also, if the author would just learn to write endings for his stories instead of just stopping his typing, I wouldn't have to keep turning the page, wondering if the rest of the story had been omitted. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

C'mon, man, you can do a lot better than this . . .
I first met Bruce back in the `70s, when he was one of the young Texas SF authors who regularly appeared at IguanaCon in Austin, so he's been at this awhile. While he has talent, he's not the best Texas has to offer -- that would be Howard Waldrop and the late Chad Oliver. Unfortunately, Sterling's stories from the 1980s and early `90s, of which there are thirteen in this collection, are heavily politics-dependent, and they don't always wear well ten or fifteen years later. As in "Hollywood Kremlin" and "We See Things Differently," they postulate a Soviet Russia or a Middle East that really haven't changed -- but things have changed, a lot. He also has a habit of launching into stories brimming with neat ideas, stories that would actually make good novels, and then running out of steam (or becoming bored?) and simply stopping instead of ending. This is the case in "The Moral Bullet" (which, in fact, led to his novel, _Holy Fire_ -- sort of) and "The Unthinkable." The best stories in this collection are those that step entirely outside our world, especially "The Shores of Bohemia" and "Are You for 86?," and maybe "Dori Bangs."

Hits and Misses
This collection of short stories contains some interesting "hits" (Hollywood Kremlin, Storming the Cosmos, We See Things Differently, Are you for 86?) and some disappointing "misses" (The Sword of Damocles).

Sterling is at his best when he is discussing alternative futures close to our own, and he has done his homework in studying two rival cultures that play roles in his alternate universes -- the Muslim world and the world of the old Soviet Union.He creates memorable characters (the international arms dealer/hustler Leggy Starlitz, for instance) and generates a lot of thought-provoking ideas (Will Turing-conscious AI's embrace Islam?Was the Tunguska blast really caused by an alien speacecraft? Will Islam become the dominant superpower -- threatened only by American rock and roill?Will genetically engineered pets capable of human-like thought and speech exist?).

Sterling's prose here is not of the quality of William Gibson's, or indeed, as good as Sterling is in other works, such as Schismatrix, or The Difference Engine.It is a good collection of stories, for the most part, and makes a good companion on a trip to the beach.

An Intriguing Mix Of Sterling's Short Stories
Admittedly this isn't Sterling's best short story collection, yet it does contain an intriguing set of 11 tales which run the gamut from slightly hard science fiction ("Storming The Cosmos") to humor ("Hollywood Kremlin"). Sterling is at his finest writing lean, lyrical cyberpunk prose in the tales I mentioned. Yet anyone expecting a literary classic comparable in quality to William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" may be disappointed. Still, Sterling, as always, is intriguing to read for his ideas and his uncanny knack at conjuring plausible near future scenarios, as well as his fine writing.

A mixed bunch of stories
In this book, you will find 11 stories by Bruce Sterling and two collaborations. All but one of the stories has prviously appeared in magazine form between 1985 and 1991.

Most of the stories here are well worth reading. Especially "Hollywood Kremlin" and "Are You For 86?" which introduce Leggy Starlitz, one of Sterling's enduring characters. Also, the two collaborations, "Storming the Cosmos" and "The Moral Bullet" respectively with Rudy Rucker and John Kessel, are very good.

There are also one or two stories here which quite fankly should not have seen the light of day. "The Sword of Damocles" is the sort of exercise often tackled in writer's workshops and that is where is should have stayed.

There is not as much hard science in here in some of Sterling's other books but that does not detract from this collection. Indeed, a number of the best stories would escape all but the broadest definition of SF.

In the Leggy Starlitz tales, Sterling lays out lots of technical trivia in the same style as do many thriller writers. His facts are often wrong and self contradicting. Often laughably so and that does detract from the writing.

This is not the best collection to introduce you to Sterling's short fiction. I would recommend "A Good Old Fashioned Future" as an introduction but if you read and enjoy that and want more, you will not be disappointed by this book.

If you enjoy this book and want to read something in the same vein, I'd suggest William Gibson's collection "Burning Chrome" or the anthology "Mirrorshades" edited by Bruce Sterling.

Third World Posse
"Apocalypse is boring," so spaketh Chairman Bruce, in his mission to overcome the faux-Terminator after-the-bomb scenarios which typify so much contemporary SF hack-work.It's been a long time coming since J. G. Ballard's classic planetary-disaster novels; those who do SF in his wake must write their way to new levels of subtlety and informed speculation, become a legitimate participant in the great Futurological Debate, rather than just another cynical doomsdayer-cum-road-warrior writing in the megalomaniacal glare of Oppenheimer's bomb-God.In light of Sterling's admonition, it is peculiar to admit that the stories in *Globalhead* have an inescapable post-Nuke groove to them, symptomatic of Sterling's coxcomb-jingling portrayal of disaffected Third World spaces.A far subtler apocalypse, but still great fun.

"Our Neural Chernobyl" (my personal favorite) is a stunning hybrid of high comedy, dead seriousness, and throat-grabbing economy which the remainder of this collection will never surpass.The old-school SF theme of intelligence-maximization is treated with breezy hep-cat irony and panache, a counterculture of renegade "gene-hackers" riding the god project of biotechnology.Cagey, brilliant, underhanded, hilarious, dead-on modern fiction.

The last twenty pages of "Storming the Cosmos" reaches a pinnacle of revisionist SF, in the glassed-in detention cell of a Soviet gulag for dissident rocket-scientists, the purveyors of a protean technology that *actualizes* the subjective imagination of its observer (i.e. an experimental substance that changes shape and function according to the minds which possess it).When the conservative, obstructionist members of blackguard Soviet science abduct the item, the device *becomes* an antique rocket, replete with hoary, mind-blowing (literally) repercussions.Just read the story.

"Jim and Irene" hits a tender note, the possibility of trans-cultural romance in a dingy, saturated, postmedia world.It goes a long way towards justifying the travails of relationship-related stress and paranoia, the feasibility of making human connections at the heart of a Baudrillardian desert, postmodern Nothingness encroaching upon our air-conditioned havens of glass and steel.

"The Gulf Wars" points to the cyclical barbarism of Middle East violence and warcraft, in a brash little comedy about two hapless army engineers sucked into an Arabian time-warp to die the good death.But by now Sterling in beginning to lose his edge....

"The Shores of Bohemia", notable for its extrapolation of animal-empathy cults in the future, simply does not pay the reader back for his/her efforts, as the arch-narrative of Gaia vs. Artifice and the propaganda-value of Titanic architecture (see Sterling's *Wired* travelogue "The Spirit of Mega") comes on a bit conventional and, well, conceptually worn-out.

Things pick up with "The Moral Bullet", the precursor to Sterling's superb *Holy Fire*(1996), where a pharmacological fountain-of-youth corners the black market run by paramilitary Mafioso competing for urban territory, a lawless after-the-Fall wastelander fantasy.Sterling grooves hard for about twenty pages, but the story's denouement seems rushed, desperate, unsatisfying.

In the hackneyed genre of Lovecraftian satire, "The Unthinkable" is a rare triumph.The military-industrial complex has assimilated the necromancy of the Great Old Ones in a new arms race for weapons that attack the very dreams and souls of the enemy.Despite my weighty paraphrase, the piece is really quite funny.

"We See Things Differently" offers a very intelligent, very wily indictment of monotheistic Islamic culture, while providing a convincing scenario for the survival of such religious traditions in the total-media zone of Western tech-wealth.An Islamic secret agent journeys to the heart of American rock culture to reap the whirlwind of his martyrological devotion to Allah.

"Hollywood Kremlin" introduces Leggy Starlitz of *Zeitgeist*(2000), the pragmatic middle-aged worldweary go-getter trying to help a grounded Russian aviator complete his sortie.Like so many Sterling protagonists, Starlitz is an inspiring blend of cool optimism and brute adaptation to the caterwauling world around him, largely forsaking acid-spray cynicism for the ethos of pragmatic global cooperation.(Until the very end of the story, that is.)The Starlitz double-feature continues with "Are You For 86?", where Leggy becomes a smuggler of do-it-yourself abortion pills (a drug called RU-486), pursued by fundamentalist Christian soldiers (in death's-head masks, black robes, and wielding plastic scythes no less!) across the Utah desert.The story's climax at the State Capitol and Museum is both intellectual and action-packed, Sterling's trademark double-play.

And finally, there's "Dori Bangs," a pseudo-mainstream fantasy of star-crossed Beatniks coming to terms with their artistic mediocrity in a commodified universe of death....

Suffice it to say, my summaries don't do justice to level of intelligence at work in these narratives.So much of what matters here is contained in the brilliant minutiae which hang on every descriptive passage, which color every extended dialogue. (Sterling's in the details.)While not as ambitiously original as the Shaper/Mechanist cycle of the mid `80s, these stories are all satisfying in their own brash, silly, madcap, populist way; even the boring ones are worth reading, as "meta-journalism" or political satire.Though a part of me hesitates to recommend them to non-SF enthusiasts.There are simply too many in-jokes. ... Read more

Amazon.com
In an era when life expectancies stretch 100 years or more and adhering to healthy habits is the only way to earn better medical treatments, ancient "post humans" dominate society with their ubiquitous wealth and power.By embracing the safe and secure, 94-year-old Mia Ziemann has lived a long and quiet life. Too quiet, as she comes to realize, for Mia has lost the creative drive and ability to love--the holy fire--of the young.But when a radical new procedure makes Mia young again, she has the chance to break free of society's cloying grasp.Book Description
The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. Meanwhile, the young live on the fringes of society, ekeing out a meagre survival on free, government-issued rations and a black market in stolen technological gadgetry from an earlier, less sophisticated age.

Mia Ziemann is a 94-year-old medical economist who enjoys all the benefits of her position. But a deathbed visit with a long-ago ex-lover and a chance meeting with a young bohemian dress-designer brings Mia to an awful revelation. She has lived her life with such caution that it has been totally bereft of
pleasure and adventure. She has one chance to do it all over. But first she must submit herself to a radical--and painful--experimental procedure which
promises to make her young again. The procedure is not without risk and her second chance at life will not come without a price. But first she will have to
escape her team of medical keepers.

Hitching a ride on a plane to Europe, Mia sets out on a wild intercontinental quest in search of spiritual gratification, erotic revelation, and the thing she missed most of all: the holy fire of the creative experience. She joins a group of outlaw anarchists whose leader may be the man of her dreams...or her undoing.  Worst of all, Mia will have to undergo one last radical procedure that could cost her a second life.

In Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling once again creates a unique and provocative future that deals with such timeless topics of the human condition as love,
memory, science, politics, and the meaning of death. Poginant, lyrical, humorous, and often shocking, Holy Fire offers a hard unsparing look into a world that could become our own.


From the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (37)

My favorite Sterling book
I actually took a class in SF as Literature in college learned that the best SF was supposed to tell you something about people.Unfortunately, there is a lot of SF that doesn't even try, but this book was a nice example of setting up a futuristic setting and then looking at people.Think about what would happen to a very old woman if she REALLY did have the same body AND brain of a teenager again.Would she act in ways her 60 something children would approve of?Sterling is not my favorite, but this is worth a read.

Not Free SF Reader
A realised version of the old people are boring meme. Rejuvenation
treatments are available to those that can afford them, and these lead
to, of course, those very elderly being in control through wealth and
influence. They tend to lead static, safe, placid lives to protect
their investment in themselves.

So, any change can only come through the young who avoid any of the
existing technology. Here, one of the former group crosses to the
latter, slumming to some degree.

Like an Altman movie
Previous reviewers here have touched most of the bases. This is a meander, not a nail-biter. It reminds me of one of the Sprawling Robert Altman films like "Nashville" with numerous characters and set pieces strung loosely together.

Sterling occasionally seems to be trying to show how witty he is. But I found much to enjoy in this book.One pleasure, a cyber-punk mainstay, is utter confidence in the wordplay depicting the fabulous computer networks of a future world, with wearable super-power communication hardware, etc.

I appreciated, actually, that the story took more interest in its amusing characters than in plot development to some sort of climax. That said, there is occasional action and excitement. It's true the central Mia / Maya character wasn't deeply drawn, but I liked her and her adventurous spirit.

Altogether a fun, light read that made me think a bit.

Surprisingly Excellent
This book was a big surprise to me.I have been a fan of the Cyberpunk or Movement genre since the 80's, and while Gibson and Rucker have captivated me with almost every book they write, Sterling's work has always... lacked something for me.I've enjoyed his short stories more than I have his novels, and have given them a fair shot.Most of them I would rate about a 3.

This novel however, I place squarely in the full 5 star category.The best works of fiction, be they SciFi, Horror, Literature or what have you, are those which make one reflect upon oneself and the nature of existence.This book falls into such august company.A few of the reviews here mention the lack of action or resolution, but I think that they have missed the point.Mia/Maya is discovering both what it means to be an individual and what the nature of life is.She is both an observer and a participant as she is neither truly old or young.Her "wanderjahr" is an exploration and evolution of self and as such, despite the futuristic trappings resonates with the individual quest for the self and what lies beyond it in all of our lives no matter where we are on life's journey.I would hope that everyone makes such a journey in their lives (whether literally or metaphorically), or better yet, experiences life as a continuous unfoldment of same.Highly recommended, in my opinon Sterling's absolute best.

Sterling's best novel -- "A+"
_____________________________________________
Mia, a 94-yr old woman at the close of the 21st C., tries a new life-
extension treatment.She emerges in the body of a thrill-seeking
20-yr-old... you say you've seen this story before?Not as
related by master extrapolationist, storyteller & all-around fine
writer Bruce Sterling.

Let's go into the polity, the medical-industrial complex that rules the
world,where "the whip-hand of coercive power is held by
smiling & stout-hearted medical rescue personnel.And by social
workers.And by very nice old people..."

"There were, of course, some people who disagreed with
the entire idea of life extension.Their moral decision was
respected & they were perfectly free to drop dead."

The story-line issimple:a bildungsroman, the wanderjahr of a
95-yr-old girl thru 21st C. Europe.

We're at a fashion show in fin-de-siecle Roma.Mia is getting ready:


..they put the wig on & she left human perfection for a
higher realm.It was a very smart wig.This wig could have leapt from
her scalp like a supersonic octopus & flung its piercing tendrils right
thru a plaster wall...It was a staggeringly pretty wig, a wig in rich,
solid, deeply convincing, faintly luminescsent auburn, a wig as
expensive, as cozy & as well-designed as a limousine...When it
curled lustrously about her neck & shoulders it behaved the way a
woman's hair behaved in daydreams...

The models were old women, and they looked the way that modern
old women looked when they were in truly superb condition ...
They showed none of the natural signs of human aging, but they were
just a little crispy, a little taut.The models were solemn and sloe-eyed
and dainty and extremely strong...

Their clothes were decorative and columnar and slender hipped and
without much in the way of a bustline...The clothes were
splendidly cut...Rather ecclesiastical, rather bankerly, rather like the
court dress of high-powered palace eunuchs from the Manchu
Forbidden City...


Well.I could go on, & probably would if I had a scanner, or was a better
typist....but you should be picking up the flavor of the book, the
richness and density of invention.Sterling at his best reads something
like a collaboration between Tom Wolfe & John McPhee.Folks, I've
been reading this stuff for 40 years. and I'm hear to tell you, it don't get
much better than this.

Highly recommended.

Review copyright 1996 by Peter D. Tillman ... Read more

Amazon.com
The entertainment industry rules on the planet Reverie, a world founded by Moses Moses as an experiment in corporately controlled equality. Instead, the experiment has caused Reverie to mutate into a landscape of decadence and class separation. Miles above the surface, the ultra-wealthy live in orbital homes, watching the surface citizens' home-produced videos of sex and extreme violence. The title character of The Artificial Kid, Arti, is the most popular of the Combat Artists. These futuristic mirrors of professional wrestlers or American Gladiators confront each other in superhero-esque battles (although the Combat Artists' contests are real) within a complex system of honor, ritual, and conduct. Arti has reached the height of his fame--equally loved by his fans and friends and despised by his competitors. However, he is not entirely who he seems to be, and when the planetary founder mysteriously returns, The Artificial Kid finds himself embroiled in a battle for power that's not ready for prime time. Bruce Sterling, best known for his nonfiction work, The Hacker Crackdown, and the classic cyberthriller, Islands in the Net, presents a seminal, vivid, and turbulent future in The Artificial Kid. The Artificial Kid is a work of satirical social commentary with the breakneck pace of a Hong Kong action film. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Not Free SF Reader
A wealthy man indulges in a sociological experiment, but creating his
own personal corporate society. The incredibly wealthy live above the
planet, those not so, on it.

The media is king, and a reality violence show is the main
attraction. This is sport by way of Rollerball and The Running Man, and
the best protagonist of this mayhem is The Artificial Kid.

Hilarious, Delightful Early Bruce Sterling Novel
With "The Artifical Kid", a young Bruce Sterling demonstrated his excellence in writing comedic novels, to which he would return much later, in full force, in novels like "Holy Fire" and "The Zenith Angle", among others. While his second novel isn't nearly as polished as his later classic "Schisimatrix", it does explore in embroyonic form, some of the same issues of identity and what it means to be human, that he did quite remarkably well in his mid 1980s work. I couldn't help but laugh as I worked my way through the pages of Sterling's early novel, observing that it's nearly as funny as some of Harlan Ellison's best satirical short fiction. For anyone who wishes to understand Sterling's development as a leading member of the cyberpunk literary movement, then this early novel of his is required reading.

Good idea poorly executed
I'm a complete geek and avid reader of hard sci-fi.I like Neuromancer from William Gibson, Snow Crash and Diamond Age from Neal Stephenson, and Diaspora and just about everything else from Greg Egan.

But I can't recommend "Artificial Kid" by Bruce Sterling.The ideas behind the story are good.His descriptions are visibly good, but it reads neither like a good story, nor like a tech manual.

The problem isn't isolated to this book either."Difference Engine" also reads slowly.I can't even pinpoint exactly what it is, other than Bruce Sterling's writings are VERY slow to read and hard to stay focussed on the story.It's almost as if the acting is poor.Dialog, inner and outer, just seems adolescent.

It's the Def, Bruce!
The only problem I had with this book is that the exclamation of "Death!" and/or "Thank Death!" was not slurred as in "That's the Def, man!" which is a common slang term heard on New York City playgrounds.

Other than that, I was gripping the pages wide-eyed in fear for my life at whatever was going to happen next. For real.

Not bad, entertaining
The Artificial Kid was a fairly short but fun read.The Kid himself is agreat character and his friends were all pretty original as well.For thefirst few chapters it looks like it might be a highly entertainingadventure.After that it gets sort of bogged down and takes a newdirection, but on the whole I found it worth the effort.I liked thevarious warring clans, the individual combatants, the follicle mites andthe whole concept of televised (or the equivalent) combat art.

Things Ididn't like about the book (don't worry, nothing really revealing here):the Flying Island, Crossbow and the Chairman's transformation, a climax youwouldn't exactly call exciting.Also, the Crossbow Body was a pretty shakyand only vaguely accounted-for concept. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Bizarre and beautiful
YEAR'S BEST FANTASY 6, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, is an engaging anthology of the absurd, the fantastic, the beautiful, and the horrifying, comprising twenty-three stories written by some of the best in the industry. The tales range from light and whimsical, as in "Still Life with Boobs" by Anne Harris, to dark and chilling, as in Laird Barron's much-acclaimed novella, "The Imago Sequence," which has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award in the long fiction category for 2005.

The book comes in with a tiger in Yoon Ha Lee's elegant parable "Eating Hearts," and goes out with a tiger, in Connie Willis's smartly crafted homage to H. L. Mencken entitled "Inside Job." Kelly Link's outstanding "Monster" is a tongue-in-cheek modern-day version of Beowulf in a boys' summer camp; and Bruce Sterling's satirical "The Denial" brings to mind the genius of Isaac B. Singer. Authors include Esther M. Friesner, Neil Gaiman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Jeff VanderMeer, Patrick Samphire, Gene Wolfe, Delia Sherman, Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout, Gavin J. Grant (husband to Kelly Link), Candas Jane Dorsey, Timothy J. Anderson, Claude Lalumière, Deborah Coates, Heather Shaw, Garth Nix, Jonathon Sullivan, and Liz Williams.

Award recipient David G. Hartwell is the senior editor at Tor/Forge Books, the publisher of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, and the author of AGE OF WONDERS.

World Fantasy Award winner Kathryn Cramer is an editor at THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION. She has also co-edited the outstanding anthologies, THE ASCENT OF WONDER, THE HARD SF RENAISSANCE, and the YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION series.

YEAR'S BEST FANTASY 6 is highly recommended reading for anyone who enjoys variety in the fantastic.
... Read more