Bruce Sterling, along with Bill Gibson, is widely recognised as one of the pro-genitors of that great late twentieth-century SF strand, Cyberpunk. The general view of cyberpunk has settled around the idea that it is about nihilistic and ammoral / immoral spotty techno-nerds, jacking off over the promise of new technology [jacking in], against a backdrop of postmodernist disintegration and free trade mania. The general view of the cyberpunk fan, therefore, has settled around the idea that it's readers are much the same. Of course, there have been a few 'cyberpunk' novels and stories that fit this description. It is - typically, in SF - ironic that this is the image cyberpunk has. Most of it has been, on some level at least, a critique of this world-view. The argument that the world portrayed is a merely fictional creation is, in some ways, an insult to the 'cyberpunk' author.

Softcover jacket, UK edition, Gollancz SF, 2001

Sure, it would take talent to create it, but, as with much great SF, the talent here has largely been in holding a mirror to the world we live in now, only tweaked slightly in reasonably straightahead extrapolation. The fact that this is not always recognised could be either terminally negative ['wow, are these guys offbeam'], or fantastically positive ['wow, it was right under our noses, but only these guys got it']. William Gibson has been granted the lions share of plaudits for his 'cyerpunk' stories. He has been far from alone in the field, of course, and it can be fun to spot his precursors, too. Does some of Bester's, Dick's or Brunner's work count? Burroughs, maybe? What about DeLillo and Pynchon...? And what of his 'post-' friends: Do we count Eric Brown, Richard Calder or Simon Ings? Are writers like Quick good enough to count, or such pale imitations that they can't? Are Lucius Sheperd, Pat Cadigan or Neal Stephenson as good, or better than, Gibson? And who cares, anyway, about this barely read ghetto of a barely read genre in a barely literate world?

To my mind Bruce Sterling has always been the best of the lot. Like all the 'real' 'cyberpunk' writers, his concerns are very contemporary, with a dash of tomorrow. His portrayal of 'zitty goths' has rarely been the traditional pathetic immersion in teen angst. Nor has his portrayal of a grey-shaded urban sprawl. The nearest he has come to the caricature of a 'cyberpunk' writer is probably The Artificial Kid, which had an aesthetic concern that doesn't quite fit, either. Like the best of the 'cyberpunk' writers, his fiction has always inventively burst beyond the narrowness of the definition, while having the true essence of what was originally meant by 'cyberpunk'. That essence is hard to define. The list of pre-cursors to Gibson gives a hint of what is really going on here. The SF book chain Forbidden Planet created a whole new section within their stores for the Burroughs / Ballard / Baudrillard / Dick / Cyber continuum. They named it Slipstream.

"Slipstream" seems to me to be a very good fast and loose word for what we find in common between these great writers. Sterling, though in my view high on the best of the cyberpunk writers list, comes a little lower on the 'slipstream' writers list. The writers here all have wide literary merit, with a density of prose that has often drawn the eye of the mainstream in a way that 'cyberpunk' rarely has. Nevertheless, I will put aside the term 'cyberpunk' for evermore now, and hope that Sterling will forgive me making him a medium-to-big fish in a larger pond, instead of a giant in a small one. There is, in the wider context of Slipstream, a slightly different sub-group that he could be seen to belong to. I have given this no name, and will drop all labels after this paragraph, anyway. But this other subset, which again includes Gibson and Stephenson, has this defining feature - they all write short stories that contain densely packed ideas, decribing or implying whole worlds in a way that many novelists, with their much broader canvas, cannot. Indeed, Gibson especially seems to me to exist in both these camps. His novels always lack something, with ideas thinly spread [great ideas, though], whilst his short stories contain idea-bombs that struggle against the constraint of the short story. With Sterling, this is a wonderous speciality. Few can match his whole-new-worlds-by-implication-alone genius [one story, particularly, which does is Ian McDonald's Winning]. His talent at telegraphing truly deep ideas in condensed form is wonderful. Often, they come so thick and fast that it seems an amazing waste. Other writers would write multi-volume epics around just one of these information bombs.

Certainly, Sterling has written novels, and certainly many of the ideas he expresses in all his fiction have things in common. But he is at his best with shorter fiction, and his inventiveness usually transcends the repetition that comes with common themes. His is also a very transparent writer. He will communicate difficult ideas with ease [Rudy Rucker, an occasional collaborator of Sterling's, also shares this rare ability]. Ironically, it is probably this very ease that keeps Sterling, and others like him, from mainstream plaudits. The mainstream literary establishment prefers obfuscatory prose in dense novels that could say all that they have to say in two pages, but prefer to do in nine-hundred. Few mainstream novels succeed in saying anything new about the world we live in, indeed, they specialise in looking backwards nostalgically. I believe that only 'science fiction' can really acheive this. And, it seems to me, so do writers like Lessing, Atwood, Rushdie... all of whom have mainstream fame, but only say anything modern when they rattle off an SF tale, or indulge in that other slipstream analog of SF, magic realism.

To look forward is to gaze into an alien world. Indeed, so is looking at the present, for most people. Sterling's new worlds are always identifiably projected out of this one, and are no less 'alien' when given a contemporary setting than they are when set in the future. Sterling has his finger well and truly on the scientific and cultural pulse.

The book I will look at this week is his third published volume of short stories, the others being The Crystal Express and Globalhead. All of these collections should be tracked down and read. They all contain real gems. My own personal favourites have always been his Shaper-Mechanist stories. These tales share a background of future human evolution. In them, the human race has divided into three subsets. Those who are most like ourselves are the out-evolved no-hopers, stuck at home on an environmentally fucked-up Earth. The other 'humans' have become space-faring. Indeed, some can survive in a vacuum. How? Well, the two subspecies of man have evolved this ability, and others, through manipulation of their environment. In one case, the manipulation has been of their technical environment - the Mechanists, who have embellished their bodies through mechanical augmentation. In the other case, the manipulation has been of their genetic / biological environment - the Shapers, who have augmented their bodies through genetic manipulation and biotech embellishment. They are, at one and the same time, quite alien to each other, and more alike than they are aware.

The stories are, of course, as much about the debate today on over-reliance on technology / the ethics of genetic control / etc..., as they are about weird folk having fun in outer space. The morality of their / our future in these stories is complex. There is no black and white / good and evil dichotomy portrayed. The changes must be taken as read, good and bad. Sterling's position is subtle. While, on the one hand, the Extropian movement may well have been deliberately lampooned by Sterling in these stories, I do not doubt that they are also being glorified on some other level. Beauty is where it is, never mind our qualms about it's meaning.

The current batch of tales also contain common themes, with three of them running along a time line that shares characters at different stages of their lives. The themes are all very contemporary, and, as I said at the beginning, each story is also laced with almost incidental ideas that could be given whole tales of their own. In the background is the world today. Disintegrating nations, growing but ever more 'dysfunctional' urban environs, environmental catastrophe seemingly a blink away, gobalizing capital. Journalistically photographing how he thinks the future may be, it is for the reader to project onto Sterling a moral intent. I'm sure, though, that Sterling is much more technophile than technophobe, whatever qualms he may have. A common strand in much of his fiction, where moral intent is more easily read by virtue of Sterling's non-fiction articles for Wired magazine, can best be expressed:

"Vive la revolucián digitale!"

Maneki Neko, the first of the stories, features those cute little ceramic 'We do not take cheques' cats that we all see in Chinese takeaways. The ones in this tale are in Japan. They are given as a gift wishing good fortune. They serve as a kind of NVDA digital sabotage in this story. The theme, as with several stories here, is - sort of - Balkanization. In this case, not of a physical territory, but of the Infobahn. Information demands to be free, we are told. If an information 'economy' was based on exchange and co-operation on the part of the individuals on the Infobahn, how much of a threat would the resulting 'economy' be? Bill Gates and the US NSC obviously fear it, hence their plans in the nineties to introduce the Clipper Chip [a subject Sterling has waxed lyrical against in the pages of Wired]. In this story, Sterling's 'innocent' protagonist really sees no problem with his exchange economy lifestyle. An assistant federal prosecutor from the States thinks differently, berating Tsuyoshi so:

    "'Listen, pal, I know more about your set-up, and your kind of people, than you think I do. I've been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you're getting all this time?'

    "She pointed a finger at him. 'Ha! Do you ever pay taxes on those? Do you ever declare that income and those benefits? All the free shipments from other countries! The little homemade cookies, and the free pens and pencils and bumper stickers, and the used bicycles, and the helpful news about fire sales... You're a tax evader! You're living through kickbacks! And bribes! And influence peddling! And all kinds of corrupt off-the-books transactions!'

    "Tsuyoshi blinked. 'Look, I don't know anything about all that. I'm just living my life.'

    "'Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government-approved, regulated economy!'"

When did you last take advantage of a free @snail site? A web-site with minimal advertising? A free download of "someone else's" music software? A counter for your web-page? This is the here-&-now writ large. This is the Future [well, one of 'em].

Next comes humorous little tale, Big Jelly. Here the fun story operates as a less successful vehicle for the really cool ideas. But it is the ideas we're here for, so let's just look at them. A Texas oil field starts to ooze a gel-like substance that seems to have some kind of life. It transpires that it might be a physical extrapolation of some mathematical evolution algorithms put together by a jellyfish fanatic. An oil man gets together with the math guy to try and find a way of getting cash from this weird new crop. It is not in their control, really. They, like us, merely observe the becoming of something new on the face of the earth. This is a story that could have been written by Paul di Filipo or Rudy Rucker. It has fun elements, and is really about cool math / new physics ideas. This is an inevitable theme, on some level, in much of Sterling's work. Chaos and complexity theory, and especially strange attractors, will rear their heads often in these stories of continuity and change. Only SF, or other writing that allows SF in, can deal with these funky new ideas, and yet they are what everything is about!

    "'Your software got into my primeval slime?' said Revel slowly. 'How exactly is that s'posed to happen?'

    "'Mathematics represents optimal form, Revel,' said Tug. 'That's why it slips in everywhere. But sometimes you need a seed equation. Like if water gets cold, it likes to freeze; it freezes into a mathematical lattice. But if you have really cold water in a smooth tank, the water might not know how to freeze - until maybe a snowflake drifts into it. To make a long story short, the mathematical formations of my sintered jellyfish represent a low-energy phase space configuration that is stably attractive to the dynamics of the Urschleim.'"

Shades of Vonnegut's Ice-Nine! The story also brings in the nature of the market in our present / near future, as Revel sets out to begin a "paradigm-shatterin' postindustrial revolution" as they market their product:

    "'Ain't you ever heard of just-in-time manufacturing? Hell, in Singapore or Taiwan they'd have already set up six virtual corporations and had this stuff shipped to global markets yesterday!'"

Third up is The Littlest Jackal. This story concerns the convergence of interests of a number of disparate parties, some more up to date than others, in a little bit of empire building in the Baltic Sea. This was written in, and is set in, the mid-1990's. The backdrop is post-Soviet Russia, the Balkan wars and the proposed expansion of the European Union to include Scandanavian nations. The pull and the push of it all, as Kate Bush would say. The up-to-date party [Leggy Starlitz] is basically after a little economic empire-building, and he casts a cynical eye over the others. The out-of-date parties are, paradoxically, partly right up-to-the-minute! One character is a roving for-hire terrorist of the Red Brigade / Day of the Jackal type [Raf the Jackal, who appears in Sterlings latest novel, Zeitgeist, a review of which follows soon]. He is past his sell-by date by virtue of his unrepentant seventies commie worldview. He has a little follower, the Littlest Jackal of the title [Aino].

Softcover, US edition, Bantam Spectra, 2001

She is the paradox. She shares much of Raf's landless terrorist mentality, but bolted onto a nationalist outlook that sits well with the Balkanization in the nineties. Every possible fringe loon / state police group you can think of gets involved as the little seperatist movement sends ripples through the Infobahn. News travels Tinnanamen fast. Everyone wants a slice of the pie. But what is the pie? For Leggy it's Japanese manga toy product tie-ins. For Raf it's black-market online money laundering [plus generally debauched murder and rape]. And for Aimo it's a breakaway Åland Island Liberation Front nationalist movement. Her movement numbers twenty, but as Sterling points out, although the IRA, ETA, and the PLO were bigger, the Åland Liberation Front:

    "was bigger than Germany's Baader-Meinhof. It was bigger than France's Action Directe. It was about as big as the Japanese Red Army, and considerably better financed. A group of this sort could change history. A far more primitive conspiracy had murdered Abraham Lincoln."

It's all very sad really [and scary - witness the reference to Shoko Asahara and Japan's Aum Supreme Truth cult], and gives a fair snapshot of the devolving politics of this time, agianst the centralizing backdrop of corporate Earth. My review of Devolution in the United Kingdom, to follow soon, looks at some positive aspects of devolution, seperatism, and municipalization. This story illustrates the downside.

The development of the post-Cold War world is an ongoing concern. In The Littlest Jackal Sterling talks of Kaliningrad. He compares it to Hong Kong, and would, if he wrote the story today, no doubt compare it also to Shanghai.

    "They say they're going to make Kaliningrad into a new Russian Hong Kong. The old Hong Kong is about to be metabolized by the Chinese, so the mafia figures it's time for Russia to sprout one. They'll make this little Kaliningrad outpost into a Baltic duty-free zone cum European micro-buffer state."

"Sacred Cow", the next story, is perhaps the weakest. This is set in a post-BSE Plague Britain, in the Lancashire / Greater Manchester town of Bolton. The protaganists' are Indian film crew, using the UK as both a cheap location, and as a bolt-hole from the powerful near-future India's income revenue service. The characters idiomatic English is rendered in 'Goodness Gracious Me' raj tones, which grate a little. The description of the electronic music that a local youth provides for one of the soundtracks comes across as very Aphex Twin / Squarepusher / Jega. The story was written in 1993, so the context for this extrapolation was definately there. But, as this is set a good deal further into our future, is not as prescient as it seems.

There is an element of cod-exoticism demonstrated here, too. The EurAsian locations Sterling often chooses give the stories an exoticism in the States, no doubt. They are also integral to novels like Holy Fire. Although I have bumped into him often enough in London to know it to be true objectively, it is apparent from the stories alone that Sterling is well travelled in Europe, so he is not the worst offender when it comes to 'random' exoticism. The Gibson / Bear / Stephenson 'let's chuck in some local color' attitude [in the two former cases, Voudun, in the latter something at least vaguely similar] can seem crass, unconvincing and annoying. In some of Sterling's stories [Green Days in Brunei comes to mind] the same is true. In this volume I have found less to be irritated by in this, as he generally deals with 'unusual' locations fairly well. But his references to Bolton's nineteenth-century core annoyed, as the only bit left that could conceivably be seen this way is the Town Hall and the small crescent of stone council offices by it. The success in this story is the telegraphed post-Plague history of Indian ascendancy.

The final three tales here are linked in that they share a character in each, the physical location of Chatanooga being the nexus for those people meeting. The near-future history of the first, Deep Eddy, being followed by later episodes in the same 'universe' [Bicycle Repairman, and Taklamanka].

This near-future posits a post-Cold War scenario, after the vicissitudes of the global politico-economic attempts to ride out the power-vacuum chaos and find a new stability. The strange attractor steadies out in a world dominated by three powers: the Asian Co-operation Sphere, Europe, and NAFTA, all of whom, situation normal, use the South as a [war]gameboard. The appellation, 'NAFTA', is, of course, a little dated, but the spirit lives on. It was as good a guess as any. The Asian tiger is not as dead as people say, so the only weak link in his analysis is probably complacent old Europe.

In Deep Eddy a young would-be of that name arrives in Düsseldorf, smuggling data. This character is the nearest to the [I promised so I won't mention it by name...] type of stereotype that Sterling has to offer here, though Eddy's mate Lyle in the next tale is a close call from another direction. The proximity of his name to Fast Eddy is no co-incidence. Nor is the chaos theory parallel. The German city is in the throes of a strange attractor-like occasional social vacillation known as the Wende [turn / change]. His appearance, during what are obviously events central to people's understanding of the overall party / revolution, is indeed a deep eddy in the chaotic currents. Like an eddy in water, whorls of spinning sub-eddies flow off, investing the characters in the last two stories with their own attraction for zeitgeist altering events.

This event in Düsseldorf features the typically Sterlingesque mixture of sub-cultures and ethnic minorities. The chaotic edge at which they meet generates history. These zones are often violent, but the stuff of life. Without them a dead stasis would smother us all. In the US city of Chatanooga, Sterling's slums are invested with this function, just as the Balkans today, eighteenth-century Paris, New York's Central Park / the Bowery, London's Soho, and Sterling's shaper-mechanist asteroid belt are. This is trad [that word] territory, but of course transcends it. For a brilliant fictional and non-fictional treatment of this reality, check out, respectively, Dhalgren and Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, both by Sam Delany.

Düsseldorf fulfills the same function for Sterling here, as Prague did for him in Holy Fire. Eddy's parcel contains a copy of Elias Canetti's Crowds & Power, a book that grappled with chaos theory before it was called that. The events today that Canetti would be writing about are the events that Sterling is into, and inventing a future for.

Genetics is back of one of Sterlings 'cool' ideas during the Deep Eddy story. Criminal syndicates are "stealing skin":

    "'It's a new kind of swindle; they take a bit of skin or blood, with your genetics, you see, and a year or so later they tell you they have a newborn son or daughter of yours held captive, held somewhere secret in the South... Then they try to make you pay, and pay, and pay...'

    "'You mean they're kidnapping genetics from the people in that restaurant?'

    "'Yes. Brunch in the Rhein-Spire is very prestigious. The victims are all rich or famous.' Suddenly she laughed, rather bitter, rather cynical. 'I'll be busy next year, Eddy, thanks to this. A new job - protecting my clients' skin.'

    "Eddy thought about it. 'It's kind of like the rent-a-womb business, huh? But really twisted.'"

The Chatanooga story, Bicycle Repairman, takes place some years later. Lyle is in receipt of mail for his former 'flat-mate', Deep Eddy. What is effectively an AI correlate of a top senator is involved in the overt plot here. But, again, the real interest is in the slum area that Lyle lives in. A zone of supposed freedom, where the usual illegal entertainments for outsiders are more or less 'allowed' to occur. An area for liberty in an otherwise heavily controlled future city:

    "'I told you this is a very dangerous area,' Kitty muttered.

    "'It's not dangerous,' Mabel told her.

    "'No?'

    "'No. They're all too broke to be dangerous. This is just a kind of social breathing space. The whole urban infrastructure's dreadfully overplanned here in Chatanooga. There's been too much money here too long. There's been no room for spontaneity. It was choking the life out of the city. That's why everyone was secretly overjoyed when the rioters set fire to these three floors.'

    "[...] Mabel waved her arm at the door. 'If you knew anything about modern urban geography, you'd see this kind of, uh, spontaneous urban renewal happening all over the place. [...]'

    "[...] 'Yeah, zones like this turn out to be extremely handy for all concerned. For some brief span of time, a few people can think mildy unusual thoughts and behave in midly unusual ways. All kinds of weird little vermin show up, and if they make any money then they go legal, and if they don't then they drop dead in a place really quiet where it's all their own fault. Nothing dangerous about it.' Mabel laughed, then sobered."

Sterling's own view is probably a good deal less jaundiced than this characters. I expect that his own interpretation of this sort of place is more positive. But the place is the same. And the 'controlled' nature of the experiment can only determine where it takes place, for it will spontaneously erupt elsewhere if crushed there. If Hegel was alive today, his concept of Weltgeist might well be more libertarian in nature than the statist version he developed in the nineteenth century. But the idea that an absract world spirit exists, and that it alights in a country for a while, then moves on to the next historical locus, is not so far removed from more recent chaos theory interpretations of historical change. The Wende is, perhaps, the Weltgeist manifest in a new and more varied / chaotic world.

The last story, Taklamakan, also runs on from Deep Eddy, this time a little further off into the future. It features another tale of ethnic diversity. In this one, the solution is neither to have vibrant postmodern multi-ethnic cultures, nor to have decentered communities of affinity groups working together seperately. In this tale tribes that are inconvenient are put onto star-ships and sent off on 400 year journeys to the stars. Only they aren't. They're really in deep nuclear-testsite caves with fake stars on the walls. In the cave are repair robots / security guards of a very different order - self-evolved "Autonomous self-assembly proteinaceous biotech" with added radiation. This story is a sort of cross between Asimov's Nightfall [or Watson's Life in the Groove] and Blish's Surface Tension, with cold war / Schwarzenegger / Aliens attitude added.

All in all, this collection once again affirms Sterling's status as one of the best SF writers around at the moment. And for all those who 'don't like SF', but have made that judgement on the basis of so-called 'escapist drivel' like Star Wars, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, stories like those told by Sterling are terminally relevant and can only be told in that despised genre.