From /tmp/sf.4258 Tue Feb 1 03:53:37 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!uunet!news.sprintlink.net!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: chess@watson.ibm.com (David M. Chess) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Review of Bruce Sterling's CRYSTAL EXPRESS Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <9311171510.AA14611@presto.ig.com> Date: 18 Nov 93 02:35:29 GMT Lines: 119 If you know Bruce Sterling primarily through MirrorShades, Islands in the Net, the Difference Engine, and perhaps Green Days in Brunei, you associate him with a certain sort of cyberpunk; a rather light (as opposed to lite) near-future cyberpunk, in which not everyone is evil, and technology can sometimes be a positive force. You don't associate him with the classic "fly around in outer space meeting strange aliens" sort of sf. To the delight of the reader in me and the writhesome envy of the wannabe writer in me, the stories in Crystal Express show that Sterling can in fact do that sort of story, and at least a few other kinds, just as elegantly. The book is divided into three parts, labeled "Shaper/Mechanist", "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy Stories". This was a Bad Idea; it tends to imply that this is really three collections bound together to make pagecount, whereas in fact all the stories are nicely bound together by some common themes and outlooks. I would suggest ignoring the division, and perhaps reading the last four stories (the "Fantasy" ones) first. Sterling is fascinated by change. This is part of what makes him a significant modern writer; he understands that change is itself a thing, and that all changes, even if wildly different in context and content, still have some flavors in common. Three of the four stories in the "Fantasy" section (_Telliamed_, _Flowers of Edo_, and _Dinner in Audoghast_) and one in the "Science Fiction" section (_The Beautiful and the Sublime_) are about cultural change, large-scale paradigm-shift, recrystalization of human reality. The "Fantasy" stories are so labeled because they are set in the past, but there are no swords or sorcerors here. These are lovely little atmosphere pieces, about more or less archetypal (but still very human) people reacting to the change of the world: the Age of Faith gives way to the Age of Reason, Tokyo rises from the ashes of Edo, the high culture of XIth century West Africa glimpses its coming end, and people struggle with what it means to be human now that machines can be intelligent. These are all wonderfully done, and show that Sterling does not write about technology because he likes shiny electronics, but rather because of the crucial part it plays in human messing-about. (The fourth story in the "Fantasy" section, _The Little Magic Shop_, is, unless I've missed something, just a romp. You'll like it, but you wouldn't buy the book for it.) The five stories in the "Shaper/Mechanist" section are set in a common future which change has mostly overwhelmed. There are still human beings of some sort doing something or other on Earth, but we don't hear much about them; the action is in space, where humanity has fragmented into an unspecified number of factions. The blur of technology, rapidly shifting allegiances, and perhaps the subtle machinations of the alien Investors ("We like a competitive market") keep culture fluid, unsettled, and somewhat violent. Mars is being terraformed, the Shapers are playing with human genetics (if you breed IQs of much over 200, they either go insane or take off for parts unknown), and the Mechanists use emotion-suppressing drugs and gradually merge with their machines. Or other stuff. _Swarm_ and _Spider Rose_ show us two examples of the wild things that evolution can do with life; it's a big universe, and there must be some very strange entities out there. I admit that this is one of my favorite themes, so I may be overlooking weaknesses of other kinds in the stories, but I enjoyed them very much ("[untranslatable] is not really a literature. It's really a kind of virus."). The other three Shaper/Mechanist stories focus more on inter-human relations, and what people will do with, for, and to each other in a world where there are no constants ("Here we sit, products of technologies so advanced that they've smashed society to bits."). Again Sterling is showing us change, this time change as a way of life. His characters are also interested in change, both cultural and cosmic; the four Prigoginic Levels of Complexity that the Posthumanists study are Ur-space (the de Sitter cosmos), normal space-time, life, and intelligence (and perhaps something else beyond). What haven't I touched? _Green Days in Brunei_ is a fine moist novelette about technology, hope, making-do, and the importance of your local BBS. It differs from most of the other stories in Crystal Express in that the people here have managed to avoid being swept away by change, and are picking and choosing which technologies they will allow to touch them, and how they will allow themselves to be changed. In that sense, it is almost anti-cyberpunk. _Spook_, on the entirely other hand, is the kind of antihero cyberpunk that I've never liked much: there are -no- sympathetic characters (the one non-evil person that gets even a bit part is casually destroyed, his "mind... shattered like a dropped vase", by the protagonist), and one can almost be glad that everyone will probably destroy each other eventually (although it's a pity that they'll probably take the whole planet with them when they do). I suppose in a different mood, or perhaps before I had a wife and kid, I might have gotten a dark pleasure out of it. Altogether, Crystal Express is a tasty and elegant study of the various sorts of express humanity is constantly finding itself on. On the other hand, the stories are not preachy or scholarly; even if all this talk about cultural paradigms and the constancy of change bores you to death, and all you want is a good story and some mind-stretching, Crystal Express is highly recommended. %A Sterling, Bruce %B Crystal Express %C New York %D 1990 %G 0-441-12423-2 %I Ace Books %O First published by Arkham House, 1989 %P 278 pp. %T Swarm %T Spider Rose %T Cicada Queen %T Sunken Gardens %T Twenty Evocations %T Green Days in Brunei %T Spook %T The Beautiful and the Sublime %T Telliamed %T The Little Magic Shop %T Flowers of Edo %T Dinner in Audoghast - -- - David M. Chess / "...net.net.god, High Integrity Computing Lab / I wanna be IBM Watson Research / a net.god..." From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 01:41:51 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!wupost!udel!news.sprintlink.net!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Miburi-san Wexelblat) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Review of Bruce Sterling's GLOBALHEAD Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <9402141440.AA21410@media.mit.edu> Date: 15 Feb 94 00:17:57 GMT Lines: 46 Globalhead by Bruce Sterling Review Copyright (c) 1994 Alan Wexelblat OK, maybe someone other than Bruce Sterling could have written a story titled "Are You For 86?" Rudy Rucker comes to mind. But pair that bizarrely funny adventure of Leggy Starlitz with the heartache of "Dori Bangs" and you've got a combination unique to Bruce Sterling. GLOBALHEAD is a collection of thirteen Sterling stories, all of which have been printed elsewhere before though a couple -- like "We See Things Differently" -- have only appeared in odd places (SEMIOTEXT(E) SF in that case). The stories date from 1985 to 1991, mostly from '89, '90 and '91. I should at this point remind readers who haven't heard of me before that (a) Bruce is a friend of mine and I'm therefore somewhat biased in reviewing his work, and (b) I hate reviews of collections where the reviewer felt that s/he had to say something about each story. So with that in mind, I will say that this story does nothing to dispel my belief that Sterling truly excels at the short story form. He rarely wastes words and the impact of his stories is undeniable. He treats standard American themes like rock and roll with the same intensity as he treats Islamic religious futurism or Soviet retro drug trips. Unlike his previous short story collection, this one is not organized topically; rather the stories seem interspersed short with long to give the reader a break. That's probably about the only organization possible with stories that range from straight-up hard science to acerbic postmodernist to satirical social commentary (go Leggy!) I had to restrain myself from reading straight through, though -- it's that enjoyable. Lastly, three words about Mark V. Zeising: buy his books. Mark is another friend, and one of the finest small-press publishers in the business. He produces a number of books like this one -- work by well-known authors that aren't available anywhere else. His catalog is a treasurehouse of useful and fun reviews of the books he prints (many) and stocks from other publishers (quite a few). Write to him at PO Box 76, Shingletown, CA, 96088 -- or catch him at any of the dozen or so cons he attends every year. %A Bruce Sterling %T Globalhead %I Mark V. Zeising %G ISBN 0-929480-69-4 %O $29.95 %D 1992 From rec.arts.sf.written Tue Oct 4 15:05:18 1994 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!pipex!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!jussieu.fr!univ-lyon1.fr!swidir.switch.ch!newsfeed.ACO.net!Austria.EU.net!EU.net!uunet!illuminati.io.com!nobody From: stefanj@pentagon.io.com (Stefan E. Jones) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Heavy Weather (review) Date: 3 Oct 1994 14:56:02 -0500 Organization: Illuminati Online Lines: 39 Message-ID: <36pnki$ek@pentagon.io.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pentagon.io.com Heavy Weather By Bruce Sterling It's 2031, and the Earth is in shabby shape. The economies of the worl have been disrupted by private electronic currencies, drug-resistant plagues ravage every country, and the Greenhouse Effect has disrupted climates and weather around the globe. The U.S., intact but battered by political crises and loss of arable land to drought, turns away from the future and watches television. In a depopulated West Texas, the Troupe, a gang of high-tech nomadic meteorologists, chases tornadoes across the weed choked landscape. Their leader, charismatic mathematician Jerry Mulcahy, hopes to gather enough data to predict the Big One; a massive, possibly _permanent_ killer tornado he believes will strike the Midwest. Enter Alex Unger, tubercular scion and brother to Jerry's lover and partner, Janey. Alex, kidnapped from a sleazy Mexican clinic after a "lung enema," tries to fit into the Troupe and find reasons to stay alive; Janey wonders whether her career plans can survive her relationship with Jerry; Jerry singlemindedly drives the Troupe with its rendezvous with destiny, in the heart of the tornado equivalent of a Richter 9.0 earthquake. _Heavy Weather_ is oddly low keyed and narrow of focus for a Bruce Sterling story. It's about tough people coming to terms with bad weather, bleak landscapes, hard times and a crumbling society. The heroes can't save the world; indeed, it' debatable whether they can save themselves. The story holds together nicely until just before the end, when it takes an odd turn and concludes on an ambiguous, halfheartedly optimistic note. I'm far from disappointed with _Heavy Weather_. The Troupe's encounters with storms are hair raisingly evocative, and the carefully extrapolated technology is wonderfully imagined. But some elements -- like Jerry's evil brother Leo and his creepy friends -- seem grafted on, perhaps to fulfill a need for villains with a human face. And one of the characters has a change of heart that's puzzling and suspiciously, well, _wholesome_. Fans of Sterling's unparalleled ability to weave chillingly realistic near future scenarios won't want to miss _Heavy Weather_. As a novel, it leaves something to be desired. Stefan Jones From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Nov 9 11:31:19 1994 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: chess@watson.ibm.com (David M. Chess) Subject: Review of Bruce Sterling's GLOBALHEAD Message-ID: <199410311710.JAA05267@presto.ig.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: The Internet Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 18:38:35 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 111 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 From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Dec 12 10:52:34 1994 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!pipex!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!news.hal.COM!decwrl!netcomsv!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: ecl@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper) Subject: Review of GLOBALHEAD by Bruce Sterling Message-ID: <9412081004.ZM1105@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: The Internet Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 07:07:56 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:699 rec.arts.books.reviews:108 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 | Evelyn.Leeper@att.com There's always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken From rec.arts.sf.written Fri Apr 7 16:52:48 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.books Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!trane.uninett.no!due.unit.no!nac.no!Norway.EU.net!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.starnet.net!wupost!news.utdallas.edu!corpgate!bcarh189.bnr.ca!nott!cunews!freenet.carleton.ca!FreeNet.Carleton.CA!aa692 From: aa692@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Alayne McGregor) Subject: Review of HEAVY WEATHER by Bruce Sterling Message-ID: Sender: aa692@freenet2.carleton.ca (Alayne McGregor) Reply-To: aa692@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Alayne McGregor) Organization: The National Capital FreeNet Date: Mon, 3 Apr 1995 01:09:18 GMT Lines: 58 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.written:94536 rec.arts.books:116855 HEAVY WEATHER by Bruce Sterling reviewed by Alayne McGregor After you've read this book, you'll never look at a thunderstorm in the same way. It's about storm chasers, in a 21st century Texas where global warming has screwed up the weather so badly that what we call massive tornados and hurricanes now are only piddly little F-2s, F-3s, or F-4s, compared to the really heavy weather. These chasers are after the big prey -- an F-6 tornado, the type that can take apart a city and maybe never stop. [Think logarithmic here: an F-6 tornado is 6 orders of magnitude bigger than an F-1, not just six times bigger.] Starting with a breakout from a Mexican underground medical clinic, this book pushes you on as fast as the megaforce winds in the shit- kicking, Texas-huge storm scenes, where you're seriously wondering how the hell the characters are going to outrun those winds. It's the story of Dr. Jerry Mulcahey, a genius mathematician who thinks he can model megastorms, and who has assembled a Storm Troupe in the parched, abandoned wilderness of Texas (where no one lives anymore after the aquifer dried up), to follow storms, verify his models, and wait for the F-6. It's also the story of Juanita (Jane) Unger, who thinks she may have finally found a reason to live in following Mulcahey and spending her fortune on subsidizing the Troupe, and her brother Alex, who doesn't believe in much of anything except trying to keep his lungs clear enough to stay alive, and whose self-obssession threatens (and then perhaps saves) the Troupe. I don't know if Sterling has got the technical details right in this book: it's not my area of expertise. But I know he's got the feel of a society flying apart in a storm of its own making, where the natural calamities are only the final push. I am intensely bored by disaster novels. I think everything was said in _When Worlds Collide_ some forty years ago, and the only novelty is in how the human race will be blown apart this time. But the F-6 is only peripherally what this book is about: it's about people's fascination with cataclysms and how they survive. You may not agree with the ending, but it's a mighty fine ride. %T Heavy Weather %A Bruce Sterling %C New York %D 1994 %I Bantam %O hardback, $21.95 US, $29.95 CDN %G ISBN 0-553-09393-2 %P 310pp -- Alayne McGregor aa692@freenet.carleton.ca alayne@ve3pak.ocunix.on.ca mcgregoa@cognos.com From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri Apr 21 11:22:09 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!news.kth.se!nac.no!telepost.no!Norway.EU.net!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!noc.netcom.net!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Subject: Heavy Weather and Crashcourse (REPOST) To: sf-reviews@presto.ig.com Message-ID: <9504051703.AA00573-repost@media.mit.edu> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@netcom6.netcom.com X-Now-Playing: Nothing Organization: The Internet X-Dj-In-The-House: Wex Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 21:11:40 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 168 Something Old, Something New. Two authors and one bookstore reviewed. Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling Crashcourse by Wilhelmina Baird Reviews Copyright (c) 1995 Alan Wexelblat It's a measure of how hellishly busy my life has become that a Bruce Sterling book could sit on my shelf for this many months before I would set aside time to read it. Of course, I did want to finish "Stories from the Nerve Bible" first, but that's another review. Anyway, I took it on a plane flight to Denver with me and immediately devoured it. I had heard Sterling read the opening chapter at ArmadilloCon and early scanned the description of Alex's painful and bizarre treatments at a 21st-century south-of-the-border _clinica_. There's something about hearing Sterling's voice as you read that really powers along a twisted scene from a book like this. Unfortunately, much of the book doesn't live up to the opening promise. It's not a bad book by any means, but it's disappointing to me and I'll try to share why. Unfortunately I can't do it without talking about the ending; if you want to avoid it entirely skip down to the Baird review below. First off, the novel's structure is fairly close to Sterling's previous solo novel "Islands in the Net." Once again, much of the story is told through the eyes of a woman, in this case Alex's sister, Jane/Juanita. Jane snatches Alex from the clinica and takes him along with her band of post- apocalypic crazies, the Storm Troupe. These Troupers, led by Dr Jerry Mulcahey, are tornado-chasers. In Sterling's future, global warming has kicked up the heat cycle of the atmosphere, and Texas' famous Tornado Alley is spawning dozens of killer twisters that are shredding the state and Oklahoma as well. [As I write this, Boston is in the grip of 22 degree temperatures and 45 mph winds -- during the first week of April! Never let it be said Sterling doesn't do his science homework. Yesterday's sudden lightning storm was a vivid reminder of what I had read.] Mulcahey, however, has predicted something even heavier in the air -- a tornado of magnitude F6. Something of roughly the proportional magnitude maintains the red spot on Jupiter; an F6 might well be a permanent feature of the Earth's atmosphere and might do untold damage. Sterling's post- slacker Troupers know they can't do a damn thing about how screwed up the weather is, but they're determined to at least document it. Unlike the rest of the Troupe, Alex doesn't believe in Jerry's mathematical mania, but he is drawn to the peace and serenity of the Troupe as a place to live out his last days. Then there's the mystery of Jerry's older brother, who is clearly some kind of major spook, and who is starting to take a perhaps-unhealthy interest in the Troupe's activities. [Warning: *Major* Spoilers follow!] With all this setup, with this interesting premise, and these well-drawn characters I expected Sterling to do a lot. But the book doesn't deliver, really. We get to see a lot of how the Troupers live and interact and the effect that they have on Juanita and Alex (and vice versa). We get to see the F6 arrive and what happens. And then it's all over and everyone goes home. Literally home in some cases. Jane becomes a mother, marries Jerry who goes to teach at UT Austin, and they move into a place that, if I'm not mistaken, is exactly the Sterling household in Austin. It's boring. Alex ends up in a conventional relationship with someone he's met on the net (how 90s!) in a support group. I wanted more. I wanted blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. I wanted, in Sterling's own phrase, prose that "dances on the tabletops." And it's not here. Sterling no longer seems willing to push the envelope; he has grown up and his life and writing are now grounded in a reality that won't go away. This doesn't make him a bad writer -- in many ways his prose and plotting are more under control and readable now than ever. But it does mean I have to adjust what I expect from a Sterling book. [*end* of spoilers] Having finished the Sterling book too soon, I needed new material for the second leg of my trip, this one to CA. I stopped in the Tattered Cover, Denver's fine bookstore. I have to say that I'm very impressed with this place. Their policy of charging full cover for everything stopped me from buying a lot, but I was really impressed by their selection. >From an SF/Fantasy reader's point of view, they really have their act together: the selection is huge, they separate out all the spinoff series from the real books and they make a real effort to keep stock of relevant earlier works. Nothing is more frustrating than to pick up an interesting new book and see "Sequel to XXX" on it when XXX is nowhere to be found on the shelves. They also keep relevant back works in good supply, such as all of Brust's Dragaeran novels and all of Bujold's Vorkosigan books. The Tattered Cover stocks many different authors, not just the "names." They mark new arrivals on the shelves and have little tags for Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy award nominees as well as posted lists of Novel category winners for the past 20 years. I quickly scanned their Horror section and though I'm not enough of a horror fan to judge it seemed like they had it similarly well-organized. I'll be back in Denver in early May and plan to stop in again; if you live near there or are passing through you should plan to do the same. Now if we can just talk them into something like a 10%-off-cover policy... Anyway, I was browsing their shelves when I came across a new book by Wilhelmina Baird. The author's name was vaguely familiar, so I picked it up and immediately saw that it was some kind of sequel to an earlier work. To my delight the earlier book, "Crashcourse," was right there. In addition, "Crashcourse" has blurbs by both William Gibson and Pat Cadigan. So I bought it. Buying a book based on who blurbs it is probably a fool's proposition, but given how much I trust Cadigan I figured it was worth a $5 gamble. And it certainly paid off. Baird's prose does indeed "kick butt." Her future is not per se cyberpunk, but it has that edge of street struggle, petty-criminal heros, high-tech techno-wizardry, and bad-ass combat action you expect from the genre. One difference, which I liked, was that the computer tech doesn't centrally feature in the characters' lives. It's there, but it's part of the background, out of sight until you think about it. I feel this is very much the way we're headed now and I like stories which can incorporate high tech without necessarily being *about* high tech. "Crashcourse" is about two things, really. The first is the surface story of three street survivors who are caught up in the promise of glamor offered by the chance to 'act' in a movie. Except that this movie is a sick blend of COPS-style real-life action and RUNNING MAN-style gladatorial spectacle writ large. If you're an actor you don't know the script and you are more likely than not to end up really and truly dead for the entertainment of the eventual audience which gets off on vicariously living the 'real lives' of the street people. The second thing, and what for me sets this author apart, is that the book is also about a love quandrangle. The trio of Cass, Moke and Dosh are obvious; Baird sets up a standard trio situation where each of them is in love with someone who doesn't requite the feeling. The fourth, though, is a real surprise and since that character is key to the plot I'm just going to let you figure it out for yourself. The story is written from Cass' point of view and she's a good solid female lead. Baird doesn't slight her male characters, though; they have depth and complexity as well. Some of the secondaries are pretty stereotypical, unfortunately, but since they're not on-stage too much it didn't bother me too much. The story moves along quickly, not least because the movie company wants action aplenty in its flicks. Baird has some first-novel stutters and spends too much time explaining her world, but that's understandable. This books doesn't dance on the tabletops, but it sure sweeps aside the cups and plates. I'm looking forward to the next one. %A Sterling, Bruce %T Heavy Weather %I Spectra/Bantam %C New York %D 1994 %G ISBN 0-553-09393-2 %O $21.95 (US) %A Baird, Wilhelmina %T Crashcourse %I Ace SF paperback %C New York %D 1993 %G ISBN 0-441-12163-2 %O $4.99 (US) From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri Apr 21 11:24:21 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!news.kth.se!nac.no!telepost.no!Norway.EU.net!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!noc.netcom.net!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: aa692@freenet.carleton.ca (Alayne McGregor) Subject: Review of HEAVY WEATHER by Bruce Sterling (REPOST) Message-ID: <199504030130.VAA10071-repost@freenet2.carleton.ca> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@netcom6.netcom.com Organization: The Internet Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 21:11:32 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 59 HEAVY WEATHER by Bruce Sterling reviewed by Alayne McGregor After you've read this book, you'll never look at a thunderstorm in the same way. It's about storm chasers, in a 21st century Texas where global warming has screwed up the weather so badly that what we call massive tornados and hurricanes now are only piddly little F-2s, F-3s, or F-4s, compared to the really heavy weather. These chasers are after the big prey -- an F-6 tornado, the type that can take apart a city and maybe never stop. [Think logarithmic here: an F-6 tornado is 6 orders of magnitude bigger than an F-1, not just six times bigger.] Starting with a breakout from a Mexican underground medical clinic, this book pushes you on as fast as the megaforce winds in the shit- kicking, Texas-huge storm scenes, where you're seriously wondering how the hell the characters are going to outrun those winds. It's the story of Dr. Jerry Mulcahey, a genius mathematician who thinks he can model megastorms, and who has assembled a Storm Troupe in the parched, abandoned wilderness of Texas (where no one lives anymore after the aquifer dried up), to follow storms, verify his models, and wait for the F-6. It's also the story of Juanita (Jane) Unger, who thinks she may have finally found a reason to live in following Mulcahey and spending her fortune on subsidizing the Troupe, and her brother Alex, who doesn't believe in much of anything except trying to keep his lungs clear enough to stay alive, and whose self-obssession threatens (and then perhaps saves) the Troupe. I don't know if Sterling has got the technical details right in this book: it's not my area of expertise. But I know he's got the feel of a society flying apart in a storm of its own making, where the natural calamities are only the final push. I am intensely bored by disaster novels. I think everything was said in _When Worlds Collide_ some forty years ago, and the only novelty is in how the human race will be blown apart this time. But the F-6 is only peripherally what this book is about: it's about people's fascination with cataclysms and how they survive. You may not agree with the ending, but it's a mighty fine ride. %A Sterling, Bruce %T Heavy Weather %I Bantam %C New York %D 1994 %G ISBN 0-553-09393-2 %P 310pp %O hardback, US$21.95, CA$29.95 -- Alayne McGregor aa692@freenet.carleton.ca alayne@ve3pak.ocunix.on.ca mcgregoa@cognos.com From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Sep 24 21:59:11 1996 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!solace!eru.mt.luth.se!news.algonet.se!news.uoregon.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.erols.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!usenet From: sfreviewer@aol.com (SFReviewer) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 18 Sep 1996 16:56:18 -0400 Organization: America Online, Inc. Lines: 54 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu (Graystreak) Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: Reply-To: sfreviewer@aol.com NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu Keywords: author=Ernest Lilley X-Newsreader: (ding) Gnus v0.94 Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling Review Copyright 1996 Ernest Lilley We are too soon old, too late smart. - Yiddish folksaying From crone to European runway model, Holy Fire takes us on a breathless search for sex and self through the internal adventure of an old woman suddenly turned young by a radical life extension technology. In her new self, she forsakes the dryness of her former life in order to seek the Holy Fire, the conceit of the generation's artistic vision. In the end, it is provided more by the acceptance of self. Bruce Sterling's latest book may well be his best. I was easily caught up in this world of human and post humans, not to mention post-canines, and wholeheartedly recommend it to both genre and non-genre readers alike. Life extension figures into much science fiction, more so as the population ages, but often as a side bar to the main story. As we come to grips with the problem in real life, the measure of difficulty represented by serious life extension is reflected in fiction. Larry Niven's (Ringworld) tree of life root gives way to Kim Stanley Robinson's (Blue Mars) complex and piecemeal bolstering and replacement of one's failing body. Bruce Sterling, with typical panache and expressing the consumer expectation of a generation of aging boomers, takes both tacks. In setting up the story, he introduces us to Mia, a vital, if very careful, woman of 94 (incidentally the age my own Grandmother died a few years ago - a vital, if very careful woman) who has maintained herself in the accepted way: diet, exercise, and the expensive avoidance of death. After the death of an old lover and an encounter with a young woman living the very vivid life of youth she realizes that she cannot continue her desiccated, post-sexual, post-human existence. Enter the big gamble approach to life extension. Essentially by regrowing her body in a vat while she's in it she emerges young, vital, and out of control in a rush of hormonal energy she had almost forgotten existed. She is most definitely not the old woman who entered treatment, and escapes her treatment consortium to live on the run among the artists and gypsies of Europe. The internal consequences of life extension are the crux of this book, and the reader is whirled along in the vortex created by Mia, now Maya, as she integrates her new and old self and comes to accept coming of age for a second time. This time around though, she definitely has the advantage of fore- and hindsight. The characters have that noir edge of rebellion that makes Sterling s writing so attractive, but it is tempered by the central character having been the establishment, and carrying her comprehension of the structure of society with her through the hubub of dissidence and youth. From a technical standpoint, I was most intrigued by the author's premise that if one replaces the 10% or so of brain tissue that dies off in the course of a lifetime change in the basic self is inevitable. As a reader, while I enjoyed Mia's romp through the new old world, I think that Sterling's choice of a artificially beautiful central character in the throes of the hormones of youth and the glitter of art, echoes something of the beginning premise of the book. We never really grow old, though we may pretend, as we long for that powerful confusion and energy that slips away with time. From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Dec 30 22:47:43 1996 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!Zeke.Update.UU.SE!columba.udac.uu.se!newsfeed.sunet.se!news00.sunet.se!sunic!mn6.swip.net!plug.news.pipex.net!pipex!multicast.news.pipex.net!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!cliffs.rs.itd.umich.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!news!wex From: agapow@latcs1.cs.latrobe.edu.au (p-m agapow) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Postview: "Crystal Express" by Bruce Sterling Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 19 Dec 1996 17:00:38 GMT Organization: Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Biologists Lines: 54 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:1174 "Crystal Express" by Bruce Sterling A Postview, copyright 1996 p-m agapow A short story collection including: "Swarm," in which a trade ambassador has to deal with a complex and very alien species; "Spider Rose," in which an ancient pilot dealing with the same aliens finds herself with an extremely odd deal; "Green Days in Brunei," in which an engineer struggles with a backward but wealthy kingdom; "Dinner in Audoghast," where, in an ancient and renown African trade city, a group of learned men grow irritated over a prophet's foretellings. I found Sterling's second and most recent collection "Globalhead" something of a disappointment. It seemed like the deep structure of the stories had been sacrificed for the superficial details and that much effort was spent for little result. The stereotyping of Moslems and Russians was also unpleasant. Looking back at his first collection tends to reinforce this view, with some of the symptoms of later malaise being visible. But there's a lot that's good here, very good. There are four Shaper/ Mechanist stories set in a decaying solar system beset by fighting between the biology-crazy Shapers and the engineering maestro Mechanists that haven't dated a bit in the more than 10 years since publication. Perhaps one day short shelf-life will be recognised as trait of cyberpunk. Although I am not as charmed by "Green Days in Brunei" as many people were, it is a genial story and the accompanying SF pieces are energetic and gritty. The story "Spook" about an saboteur is particularly fun: "You want me to destabilize them. Make their paradigm untenable. Provoke the kind of cognitive dissonance that will cause them to crumble from within." Oddly, Greg Egan's "Chaff" bears a strong resemblance to this story. Finally four fantasy pieces give Sterling the opportunity to wax lyrical over intricate historical and cultural details. But here, as opposed to similar and weaker parts of "Globalhead," there is more than just the details. There's variety and a story to carry it along. The Shaper/Mechanist stories are likely to crop up again in the soon to be released "Schismatrix Plus," but even if you read that the remainder of the pieces in here come highly recommended. [***/interesting] and boutique beer on the Sid and Nancy scale. %A Bruce Sterling %B Crystal Express %I Ace %C New York %D 1990 %G ISBN 0-441-12423-2 %P 278pp %O paperback, Aus$13.95 paul-michael agapow (agapow@latcs1.oz.au), La Trobe Uni, Infocalypse [archived at http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~agapow/Postviews/] From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Jul 6 13:04:25 1999 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!howland.erols.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!sdd.hp.com!gatech!18.181.0.27.MISMATCH!sipb-server-1.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet From: pm@postviews.freeuk.com (p-m agapow) Newsgroups: aus.sf,rec.arts.sf.reviews,uk.media.books.sf Subject: Postview: "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 01 Jul 1999 17:32:48 -0400 Organization: Infocalypse Lines: 98 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu User-Agent: MacSOUP/2.4 (unregistered) X-Complaints-To: abuse@freeuk.net X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se aus.sf:1871 rec.arts.sf.reviews:2388 uk.media.books.sf:927 "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling A Postview, copyright 1999, p-m agapow It is the late 21st century. Every year medical science comes up with new and bizarre schemes to extend the human lifespan. Every year the population gets older and older. Every year the old consolidate their power and wealth a little more. Mia Ziemann is typical of the elderly elite: 94 years old, physically and mentally fit, wealthy and on the A-list for experimental life extension. But when her treatment regresses her body to that of a 20 year old, she flees her medical keepers and escapes to Europe with the key to an elusive database ... The description above and that on the back of the book, makes the plot of "Holy Fire" sound leaden and unoriginal. Elderly person realises their life has been passionless, takes one last chance at adventure, celebrates youth, etc. In fact, that is an accurate description of what happens. Fortunately, Sterling's world is much more interesting than this synopsis might suggest. Unfortunately, his world is more interesting than the plot. As always with Sterling, the niceties please. To receive life extension, patients invest money for decades in biomedical companies. So much money is tied up in this investment that the global economy is long-term stable. Housekeepers for the elderly double as benevolent government spies. Emergent diseases require constant sterilisation of clothes and utensils, and combating with friendly microbial flora. "Post-canine" dogs have implanted computers for intelligence so they may speak and act as servants. Net access businesses keep a backlog of old equipment to access ancient data and protocols. It's an interesting world. In one of my crueler moments, I characterised the plot of Larry Niven's "Ringworld" as "Louis Wu - and his mates - go to the Ringworld, hang out for a while and then go home." (As distinct from "Ringworld Engineers" which is "Louis Wu - and his mates - go to the Ringworld, have sex with aliens, and then don't go home.") Along this line of reasoning, the plot of "Holy Fire" is "Maya Ziemann is old, becomes young, runs away to Europe and mixes with a lot of Eurotrash." Sadly, if this book were stripped of its SF fittings then it would contain barely enough to fill a very slim airport lounge book. Mia gets a job working in a shop. Mia hangs out with arty types. Mia travels to a new city. Mia boffs a young stud. It's the sort of action that would be rejected from an Australian soap opera as too mundane. Perhaps we find out so much about the world because there is so little happening. I don't wish to bleat on about "Holy Fire"'s faults, making it sound worse than it actually is, but another point bears airing. The dialogue, much of which concerns the eponymous holy fire (what it is, I still do not know) seems to have been written by drunken arts students: "Intimacy was not a prospect that appealed. It would take a woman of enormous self-abnegation and tolerance to endure the torment of that much clarity on a day-by-day basis. If he had a girlfriend she would sit across the breakfast table from him with fork in hand, and every day she would be impaled on the four steel tines of his intelligence and his perception and his ambition and his self regard." Say what? "We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bath in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian ... there is no more strength left in normality; there are only routines." "What you just said. It's so beautiful." It's like Ed Wood crossed with Baudelaire. It's characters babble about being post-human and the singularity, but their behaviour is as if they were in a sex-and-shopping novel by Jilly Cooper. Although not bad as the heroine of "Islands in the Net", Mia drifts through the plot, doting on boyfriends and drifting from job to job, being propelled by the actions of other people. I suspect that some may think that "Holy Fire" is a feminist novel or that it has a strong female lead. It takes more than a female protagonist to satisfy either of those objectives. Is Postviews getting too crabby about wanting a plot? Hardly - "Heavy Weather" has little plot still came across as tremendously exciting and vibrant. "Schismatrix" was mainly a Cooks Tour of an interesting world, but still compelled. A mildly disappointing entry, Postviews awaits Sterling's next book with hope. [**/ok] and drunken conversations at a student party on the Sid and Nancy scale. %A Bruce Sterling %T Holy Fire %I Bantam Spectra %C New York %D 1996 %P 358pp %G ISBN 0 553 57549 X %O paperback, US 6.50 Paul-Michael Agapow (p.agapow@ic.ac.uk), Biology, Imperial College "We were too young, we lived too fast and had too much technology ..." From rec.arts.sf.reviews Thu Mar 8 13:20:02 2001 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!feed2.onemain.com!feed1.onemain.com!europa.netcrusader.net!205.252.116.205!howland.erols.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!dreaderd!not-for-mail Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu From: danny@anatomy.usyd.edu.au (Danny Yee) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Book Review - Holy Fire Organization: Anatomy and Histology, University of Sydney Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 06 Mar 2001 14:54:02 -0500 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.4 Lines: 43 NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Trace: 983908443 senator-bedfellow.mit.edu 8790 18.85.23.65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2830 Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling Copyright (c) 2001 Danny Yee At the end of the twenty-first century the world is dominated by a medical-industrial complex devoted to life-extension technology. Those who don't abide by the rules don't get access to the more expensive treatments and, having survived plagues in the first half of the century, a cautious gerontocratic elite run things -- largely benevolently, but also rather boringly. When ninety-four year old Mia Ziemann, a respectable medical economist, undergoes a novel treatment which gives her the body and brain of a twenty year-old, she breaks loose. Going underground in the avant-garde circles of central Europe, she attempts to find liberation and fulfillment in art. Sterling packs a lot into _Holy Fire_, but the plot is relatively slow -moving: the result is definitely no cyberpunk thriller. He gives us an assortment of fascinating characters, a complex and surprisingly plausible imagined future, lots of neat throw-away ideas -- enhanced dogs, translating wigs, living cities, and more -- and some serious philosophical exposition, something which usually kills a novel, but Sterling pulls it off. Some of the larger themes include the psychological effects of aging, the balance between creativity and security for both individuals and societies, and the nature and source of artistic inspiration. _Holy Fire_ may lack mass appeal, but it is a success both as a novel and as a philosophical exploration: I recommend it to anyone who likes intelligent science fiction. %T Holy Fire %A Sterling, Bruce %I Phoenix %C London %D 1996 %O paperback %G ISBN 1-85799-884-7 %P 296pp %K science fiction An HTML version of this book review can be found at http://dannyreviews.com/h/Holy_Fire.html along with more than five hundred other reviews. http://danny.oz.au/ Danny Yee's Book Reviews http://dannyreviews.com/