Subject: Review of GLOBALHEAD by Bruce Sterling

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper)
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 07:07:56 GMT

GLOBALHEAD by Bruce Sterling
        Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-56281-9, 1994, 339pp, $5.99
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper

     This collection of thirteen stories was published in hardcover by
Mark Zeising, but this is the first edition  available to a wide
audience.  And a good collection it is, too, with two Hugo nominees
("Our Neural Chernobyl" and "Dori Bangs") and one Nebula nominee ("Dori
Bangs").  Thank goodness a few publishers are still publishing single-
author collections.

     GLOBALHEAD is not the name of any of the individual stories, but
is rather a description of Sterling himself, one of the few science
fiction authors who tries to write from a global perspective.  (Ian
McDonald is another.)  "Storming the Cosmos," for example, takes place
entirely inside the Soviet Union, with all its characters from within
its borders; Sterling and his co-author Rudy Rucker have no need of
American or British characters "to give the readers someone to identify
with."  The readers are expected to identify with a character because
that character is a human being, not because he or she is of a
particular nationality.  In "Jim and Irene" Sterling does give us an
American in addition to the Russian, but they are equal characters.
The same duality is in "The Unthinkable," with its echoes of "A Walk in
the Woods."  And while "Hollywood Kremlin" is set entirely in
Azerbaijan, its main character also appears in "Are You for 86?," a
story set in a future United States.  (The stories appear consecutively
in the book.)

     We get a similar global outlook in "The Compassionate, the
Digital," and "We See Things Differently," which use the Islamic world
as their background.  "The Gulf Wars" is set in the Mideasts of the
past and present.

     The last straddles the line between the stories I have already
mentioned and those even more foreign, those far removed in time as
well as in space.  There's "The Sword of Damocles" set in ancient
Greece, or at least some Hollywood image of it (and the
Hollywoodization is intentional).  "The Shores of Bohemia" is set in a
far-future Europe.  And though "Dori Bangs" is set in the recent United
States, it's a world that did not exist--as you will see.

     There are a couple of stories set in the United States; "Our
Neural Chernobyl" and "The Moral Bullet" are each set in a future
United States where all is not well.  But one of Sterling's special
strengths is his ability to make us understand a foreign (alien)
culture.  His point is not that we are all alike, however; "We Look at
Things Differently" is a direct rebuttal to that suggestion.  But we
CAN undersand each other, at least in part, and it is that level of
feeling that Sterling brings to his stories.

%A   Bruce Sterling
%B   Globalhead
%I   Bantam Spectra
%C   New York
%D   November 1994
%G   ISBN 0-553-56281-9
%P   339pp
%O   paperback, $5.99 [1992]

--
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | [email-masked]
There's always an easy solution to every human problem -
neat, plausible, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken