Subject: Review of Bruce Sterling's GLOBALHEAD

From: [email-masked] (David M. Chess)
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 18:38:35 GMT

While most of the stories in Sterling's first collection, Crystal
Express, are about the comparatively distant future (or past),
and therefore reasonably unlikely to run up against reality in
the lifetime of any current reader, the stories in Globalhead are
set much closer to now, and some have already expired.  Also, I
think the collection suffers somewhat from Sterling's success:
since he most definitely has a following, the editor has felt
free to include some somewhat riskier stories.  This has some
good results, and some more questionable.  Overall, though, I
would recommend the book heartily to Sterling fans (who probably
already have it).  Fans of SF with contemporary settings may also
prefer this collection, although for the general SF reader I'd
recommend Crystal Express first.

Roughly half of the stories in Globalhead are concerned with
relations between or among the U.S., the (former) USSR, and the
Islamic world.  "Storming the Cosmos" is an odd surreal story
about a KGB informer and a Soviet scientist who find an odd
something that may or may not be an alien star-drive, after a
chaotic trip through morasses of Soviet hierarchy, their own
psyches, and (of course) Tunguska.  It isn't dated, because it's
set in the past anyway.  And while the subtext on the nature of
Soviet politiculture may no longer be directly relevant, it no
doubt applies to various fragments of the connections that I
found not quite convincing enough.  The ending could have been
left off entirely; of course, then it would have been utterly
straight fiction.  In "The Unthinkable", disarmament talks aren't
about nulcear bombs and submarines, but about the hideous
Radiance of Azathoth, and leviathans; it's saved from being cute
by the darkness of the ending.

"The Compassionate, the Digital" and "We See Things Differently"
are about two aspects of Islam.  The first is a rather odd and
unfinished-feeling story (or perhaps story outline) about Islamic
AIs being sent "into the fabric of spacetime"; perhaps Sterling
will sometime write the story, and we'll find out what that
actually means!  "We See Things Differently", on the other hand,
is a very well crafted little piece, in which an America gliding
into chaos is seen from the viewpoint of a intelligent Muslim.
While the narrator's ultimate mission turns out to be rather
depressingly stereotyped, the overall characterization is very
rich (although I can't judge its accuracy).

"The Gulf Wars" and "The Shores of Bohemia" remind me more of the
stories in Crystal Express, for no apparent reason, and I liked
them both.  The first deals with things that all wars have in
common; the second, set in a distant and interesting future, is
about (as Sterling is usually about) change and how people react
to it.

"Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Sword of Damoclese" and "The Moral
Bullet" all struck me as unfinished, and somewhat disappointing.
"The Sword of Damoclese" in particular seems unstarted, let alone
unfinished.  These are the stories that I venture to guess might
not have been anthologized if not for Sterling's previous success.
On the other hand, they aren't awful, and are worth reading; maybe
you'll like them more than I did, as they're all experimental in
some sense.

Also experimental is "Dori Bangs", a novel piece of speculative
biography: what if two people (real people, I assume) that Sterling
admired, and that died young, had met, and partially redeemed each
other?  He may have started yet another genre here, or this may
remain a worthwhile anomaly.

Then there are the two Leggy Starlitz stories.  Starlitz is a
strange apolitical jack of all trades who has a mysteriously
infinite store of cash, and who can't be videotaped ("Either the
battery's dead, or the tape jams, or the player blows a chip
and just starts blinking twelve o'clock...").  The stories show
him as part of a black market operation in rural Azerbaijan
("Hollywood Kremlin") and then in California helping a pair
of feminists doing some smuggling of their own ("Are You for
86?").  The stories are fun, and Leggy is quite a character;
I suspect we're seeing Sterling as he is tempted to create a
series with an aspect of himself as the protagonist ("...you
don't know -anything- about machinery.  The way you talk about
it, you'd think technology was for what people -need-!").
And of course "Leggy Starlitz" is obviously a rearrangement
of "Galtz Sterliyg", which looks vaguely like "Bruce Sterling".
"Are You for 86?" makes its first appearance in Globalhead,
which may mean that we'll see more of this character, if
Sterling succumbs to temptation; should be interesting...

%A   Sterling, Bruce
%B   Globalhead
%I   Bantam Books / Spectra
%C   New York
%D   1994 (hardcover 1992)
%G   ISBN 0-553-56281-9
%P   340pp
%T   Our Neural Chernobyl
%T   Storming the Cosmos
%T   The Compassionate, the Digital
%T   Jim and Irene
%T   The Sword of Damocles
%T   The Gulf Wars
%T   The Shores of Bohemia
%T   The Moral Bullet
%T   The Unthinkable
%T   We See Things Differently
%T   Hollywood Kremlin
%T   Are You for 86?
%T   Dori Bangs

- -- -                          |    "Now for heaven's sake, behave like
David M. Chess                  |      A civilized person, or I'll fling
High Integrity Computing Lab    |       you over the balcony!"
IBM Watson Research             |    -- Sterling, the Artificial Kid