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Title: A Good Old-Fashioned Future: Stories by Bruce Sterling ISBN: 0-553-57642-9 Publisher: Spectra Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Stellar collection of stories from cyberpunk's visionary
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Sterling's best collection so far
Comment: With one or two exceptions, "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" exhibits the best Sterling short fiction I've read so far...the concluding three, beginning with "Deep Eddy," form a sort of quasi-novel that shows Sterling doing what he does best: providing widescreen views of _believable_ near-futures, peopled by sympathetic characters who find themselves in predicaments of sometimes overpowering weirdness in a world already steeped in the Philosophy of the Ejector Seat.
Arguably the best of the stories here is "Big Jelly," a fevered collaboration with Rudy Rucker, whose motto sums up Sterling's shared vision nicely: "Seek Ye The Gnarl!"
This is a spendid, lingering collection, more coherent and immediately enjoyable than "Crystal Express" or "Globalhead."
Rating: 3
Summary: An uneven collection
Comment: 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.
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Title: The Zenith Angle by BRUCE STERLING ISBN: 0345460618 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 27 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Globalhead by Bruce Sterling ISBN: 0553562819 Publisher: Spectra Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1994 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0060523867 Publisher: William Morrow & Company Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson ISBN: 0399149864 Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons Pub. Date: 03 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Quicksilver : Volume One of The Baroque Cycle (Stephenson, Neal. Baroque Cycle, V. 1.) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0380977427 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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