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1. Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling by Bruce Sterling | |
Hardcover: 552
Pages
(2007-09-25)
list price: US$38.00 -- used & new: US$25.05 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 1596061138 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (1)
good synopsis of Sterling's works |
2. Tales of Old Earth by Michael Swanwick | |
Paperback: 280
Pages
(2001-09-09)
list price: US$16.95 -- used & new: US$2.49 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 1583940561 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" is a mythic, Zelazny-tinged tale of time-transcending, world-hopping humans, monsters, and gods. In the Hugo Award winner "The Very Pulse of the Machine," the stranded surviving member of a Jupiter mission may have discovered the secret of the moon Io--or may be going mad. In "The Dead," the corporate mania for profit reaches a shocking nadir of exploitation. "Mother Grasshopper" explores a planet that might be the weirdest ever to appear in science fiction (a huge claim, but true). In the World Fantasy Award winner "Radio Waves," a peculiar science-fictional ghost in a strange and frightening afterlife recovers his memory, and regrets it. Tales of Old Earth has one minor but potentially annoying problem: it doesn't give copyright information for the individual stories, so you can't see where, or when, they first appeared. Other books by Michael Swanwick include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Griffin's Egg, Stations of the Tide (a Nebula Award winner), and The Iron Dragon's Daughter (a New York Times Notable Book); and the collections Gravity's Angels and A Geography of Unknown Lands. --Cynthia Ward Customer Reviews (6)
I like Swanwick and I enjoy SF short fiction . . . just not most of these
Some of the Best Michael Swanwick Stories. A User's Guide to Michael Swanwick by Bruce Sterling (foreword). 'Ice Age' (short story) Amazing Jan 1984. There are quite a number of stories here that have either won an award or were at least nominated. Scherzo with Tyrannosaur is a 2000 Hugo winner. And The Very Pulse of the Machine is likewise a Hugo winner, but of the year 1999. All those awards merely state the obvious: Read these tales. Swanwick is excellent in the short story and novelette regions but I'm as of yet unfamiliar with his novels. This collection was for me an introduction to Swanwick the writer, and I'll probably pick up one of his novels in the near-future. This is a fine collection, one of the best in years. Write more stories, Michael Swanwick!
Incredible
The body of work of a true Master It's unfortunate that Michael Swanwick isn't widely-recognized as the writer that he is.His work is consistently head-and-shoulders above the average work being turned out in the genre.But he writes predominantly short fiction, and short fiction never has, and never will be, recognized by the masses. This is one of the best story collections I've ever read.There isn't a 'dog' in the bunch.Every story jumps out at the reader with its vibrancy.Michael Swanwick is a wordsmith of unparalleled talent.I have no doubt that he's the best writer of the current generation.I highly recommend this collection.
A collection worthy of Borges |
3. Shaping Things (Mediaworks Pamphlets) by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 152
Pages
(2005-09-01)
list price: US$18.95 -- used & new: US$11.67 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0262693267 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Book Description Customer Reviews (12)
Techno-futuristic ruminations on "spimes" and sustainability
This book is a little too short.
A tool, in a way...
Setting the agenda..
important work for more than just designers... |
4. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 368
Pages
(2003-12-23)
list price: US$14.95 -- used & new: US$4.99 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0812969766 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Book Description Customer Reviews (3)
Great ideas in need of an editor.
Clever rundown to the ecological end
Amazing! |
5. Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 336
Pages
(1996-12-01)
list price: US$15.00 -- used & new: US$14.82 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: B000IMV89W Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Customer Reviews (35)
Sterling's Best
A major leap forward for SF
Includes The Novel Schismatrix And (Plus) All Related Stories, 2-1/2 Stars
Prophetic
Bungled Effort by Confused Author |
6. Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 320
Pages
(1995-12-01)
list price: US$6.99 -- used & new: US$3.69 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 055357292X Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Customer Reviews (34)
A harrowing visit to Tornado Alley
Not Free SF Reader
Fun eco-cyberpunk
Not a future to look forward to
hack this storm |
7. Distraction by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 496
Pages
(2000-09-01)
list price: US$14.45 -- used & new: US$24.97 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 1857989287 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Oscar Valpariso, spin doctor to possibly the next president ,is only half human but if he can straighten out his love life and solve a worldwide crisis that only he has noticed, America should be ripe for the taking . . . Customer Reviews (60)
Masterful writing undermined by gross implausibilities.
It's okay
A work of precision intensity and intelligence
Great Near Future Sci-Fi
Confirming once againthe whole genre of Sci-fFi The people who don't like the plot are probably looking for a conventional Triumph of the Individual Against All Odds adventure."Distraction" is that rarity in speculative fiction, character-driven Sci-Fi.For an S-F novel to be character-driven, the character(s) must be recognizable and well-observed, but also modified by some speculative concept.The ability to observe well a person who cannot yet exist requires an intuitive vision that, if successful, confirms the whole genre of Sci-fi as a literary artform.I think Bruce Sterling pulls it off. The whole delightfully wierd rambling plot, about feuding anarchistic nomad bands and the power-grappling over a national Oscar's dark alter-ego, Green Huey, says to him,"I finally got you all figured out... You're always gonna have your nose pressed up against the glass, watchin' other folks drink the champagne. Nothing you do will last.You'll be a sideshow and a shadow, and you'll stay one till you die.But, son, if you got a big head start on the coming revolution, .... you can goddamn have Massachusetts."But Oscar consistantly chooses quietly perserving his own dignity over exploiting his tremendos gifts, which would only re-enforce his alienation. 'Distraction' is for anyone who's ever found their nose pressed up against the glass in this present bewildering Cyber-Age. ... Read more |
8. Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 396
Pages
(1989-02)
list price: US$6.50 Isbn: 0441374239 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Customer Reviews (15)
With respect to the other reviewers...
I'm really surprised at this book. This book surprised me. The title has nothing to do with the book. I had to force myself to read the whole thing and I only did that because it was hard to get (I know now why was out of print). The main character, Laura, and those that surround her are probably the most annoyingly self-righteous cast of characters I've seen. They live in the future, think they know everything, have genetic engineering, yet they still do natural child birth. The criminal element in this book is way more interesting and believable. I re-read my favorite science fiction when I either see it on my self and forget what it was about or every couple of years. Islands in the net is a laborous read that I wouldn't repeat.
Boring Maybe it's just because I've read Bruce Sterling short stories and I know that he can write. Maybe it's because I've read Neal Stephenson and compared to Snowcrash, other books in the cyberpunk genre are plodding. But mostly it's just not a very good book. Set in the 2030 this book concerns a democratic corporation and the information pirates that it's trying to bring to heel. Instead of focusing on the pirates, as Gibson would do, this book concerns itself with the corporate types that are trying to figure out what's going on in the assassinations. The world set-up in this opening is dull. Most of the characters are talking heads to spout philosophical mumbo-jumbo. A church of goddess worshipping prostitutes was probably innovative in its time but Starhawk's fifteen minutes are up, and paganism has moved away from the hippie garbage finally. Halfway through the book it becomes a travelogue of the various places in this world. Here's where it begins to get good. Zelazny compares it to Candide. Sadly it's nowhere near as funny as Candide- which could be the fault of the main character whose nowhere near as innocent or cynical as she would need to be to pull off a Candide. Instead she's simply morally outraged. When the book gets to Africa it begins to pick up, but then the protagonist is rescued by a Noam Chomsky type reporter whose running a guerrila army. This is where the book again falls flat on its face - by presupposing that Noam Chomsky would actually be able to run a workable system - rather than criticize the unworkabiility of current systems. There are moments, but mostly this book is a lifeless remnant of the cyberpunk explosion.
Incredibly underrated, though not for everyone The world Sterling creates alone would make this worthwhile reading, but his characterization is strong and unconventional, and he tells an extremely interesting story that travels all over the world. This isn't really a fast-paced pageturner, and it isn't immersed in hard-science details about how things work in the future--it's more like real life for most of us, where technology is part of the background, and just works. So if those are the kinds of things you value in a SF novel, this may not be your book. But the traditional virtues of plot, characterization, and setting make this an outstanding novel.
Not Sterling's Best |
9. Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback:
Pages
(1986-06)
list price: US$3.95 Isbn: 0441754007 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Customer Reviews (8)
Not Free SF Reader
This is good old-fashioned "hard science fiction"
Pronounced Schiz-mat-rics, With A Short a, 2-1/2 Stars
Prophetic
Not Sterling Silver |
10. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling | |
Hardcover: 352
Pages
(2002-12-17)
list price: US$24.95 -- used & new: US$0.98 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0679463224 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Book Description Customer Reviews (16)
Amazing!
Recommended reading to understand the right questions
Brilliant Futurist Architecture Built on Weak Foundations To take one example, Sterling tells us in one paragraph that a "cruise missile ... is just a rich guy's truck bomb". But in the very next paragraph he emphasizes that there are in fact huge differences between cruise missiles and truck bombs that go far beyond the class background of their users. Cruise missiles are produced and deployed by complex, industrially advanced societies, while truck bombs are used by terrorists who operate beyond the ken of settled governments and civilized society. Another, more serious example of some of the less-than-deep thinking that went into this book is its overall organizational gimmick, which is based on the "Seven Ages of Man" so poetically described by Shakespeare and Marlowe. Sterling emhasizes the chronological aspect of these "Ages" by labelling his chapters as stages. Stage 1 is the Infant, Stage 2 is the Student, and so on. He uses these stages as conceptual launching pads for fascinating riffs on a variety of subjects related to 21st century technology, culture and politics. In the chapter on the Infant, for instance, he writes at length about future bioengineering not just for babies but also adults and what this will mean for huminaty as a whole. In "Stage 4: The Soldier" he speculates on the nature of future warfare. Thus, Sterling is really often talking about cross-cutting themes rather that chronological ages, which is more than a little confusing. Why he did this, except that it is so cool to quote from Shakespeare, escapes me. A final example of Sterling's inconsistency is the subtitle of the book itself: "Envisioning the Next 50 Years". In fact, he often describes trends from the late 21st century, which puts us more than 50 years ahead. So why didn't he just call the book "Envisioning the 21st Century"? Search me. This is a great book, but Sterling's slickness can't completely compensate for these weaknesses. Cool soundbytes, technological virtuosity, cute wordplay and even large dollops of honest-to-God weighty insight are not enough to make up for some rather shoddy underlying illogic and conceptual weaknesses.
Not very good...
Tomorrow Never Knows Sterling's question is: What happens when the winds of change start storming the reality-studio at supersonic speeds?When whiplash upgrades seem to convulse the Zeitgeist every other minute?When dimensions start spinning like nerve-cells in a centrifuge, when ontology itself becomes as fluid as the global market?Leaning into the stormwinds of these queries, *Tomorrow Now* is less a bland Tofflerian forecast than a smoking flak-helmet pocked with the dents, scars, and impact-profiles of paradigm-shifts concussing like hot shrapnel. "Apocalypse is boring," as Sterling likes to say, the last-ditch noctuary of the evangelical, the helpless, the neo-Luddite, the future-shocked.Better to encounter futurity with all the Olympian resources of the secular visionary imagination, with conceptual thaumaturgy and high comedy, with new languages to be learned and created, new disciplines picked up and dropped on the fly, a new world racing a hairsbreadth ahead of social and environmental holocausts that have always accompanied technological innovation.... But hey, enough of my hero-worshipping agit-prop, here are some snapshots from Sterling's globalist Bazaar of the Bizarre: BIOTECH: Let's learn a lesson from our ancestor and brethren, the prokaryote -- let's pay homage to the two pounds of living bacteria that all humans carry within.In the microbe-literate society of the future, the elasticity and survival-skills of the bacterial swarm will make human cloning look like "a simpleminded stunt"(27) by comparison.Genetic engineering will heal the sick, fortify new deadly viruses, darken and transfigure every certainty, pump ontological coolants into the icy elysium of the posthuman.When evolution is reverse-engineered, becoming another stock-option in the industrial market sweep, Homo Prometheus will tap into genetic realms of unprecedented freedom, complexity, beauty, disfigurement, and terror. EDUCATION: Whisked and pummeled by constant change, traditions will corrode, protocols will deliquesce, and canons will bloom with rot like beached whales.Fields of learning and praxis will ooze squishily from discipline to discipline, producing a steady stream of dynamic hybrids to stay on top of the market.Cultural memory will become like Leonard in *Memento* trying to reassemble and deploy his rapidly obsolescing past, swimming inside of whirlpool of innovation, competition, ecological catastrophe, and an elephant's graveyard of accumulating dead tech. DESIGN: When things start to think, when domestic objects "love" you, when Shopping starts to look like Art and Philosophy, "visionary materialism" becomes a tasteless euphemism for a phase of cybernetic immersion that would have given McLuhan the spins.We will all be owned by our machines the way tribal peoples feel "owned" by the horizon, by the regenerative landscape of moon and tide, river and mountain, animal and insect.(In case you mistake my tone, this is not a "good" thing.It is simply inevitable.)We will all be passionate, obsessed fetishists.Think of the current ubiquity of cell-phones and telecom gear, and multiply it a thousandfold, in every direction.Trying to write "predictive" science-fiction in this maelstrom of voices and priorities will be like trying to set up a house of cards inside a wind-tunnel. WAR: Cocksure superpowers trying to net a swarm of locusts in Fourth World zones run by pirates, drug-runners, mercs, ethnic-genociders, and cold-eyed Arab theology students jumping from wreckage to wreckage in the transnational narco-arms bazaar.Just think Belgrade, Kabul, Chechnya, Baghdad, and Mogadishu on crack.And the Third World zones of controlled anarchy embedded in every First World technocracy. LAW, BUSINESS, POLITICS: Will there be much for governments to do in a post-ideological world, where public policy simpers beneath the windfalls of corporate underwriting, where human rights become a browser plug-in, where success and happiness is sold in terraced upgrades to graduated bidders?Will lawyers and legislators and police superstructures be installed as ornamental horticulture, migrant tenants surfing the crest of technology's raw, surging power?Will a democratic electorate retain its passion for activism and involvement, or will we vote with our money, our investments, our channel flipping, our site surfing, our zodiac of recorded purchases and credit histories? DEATH: Sure, the Atomic Age may have decked us out in a cozy, suburban Cold War where mutually assured destruction and commie witchhunts could guarantee rigid cultural identity, war-fever eschatology, and a sober sense of imperialist mission (in short, the technocratic inheritor of Judaeo-Christian End Times), but where's the corporate payoff in that?Why not treat human mortality as another marketing-scenario to be spun, merchandized, glossed and sold?But if Sterling is right, our species may, in the end, "outsmart itself to death, [if] human knowledge is...not compatible with human survival"(264).We've burrowed too deep and too greedily into the planet to give birth and sustenance to our machines.Every species lost in the quest to infect the ecosystem with our ubiquity is a piece of the planetary survival-plan that's been irretrievably eroded by our narcissism, our fear, our all-too-human frenzy for mastery and technique, our Faustian gamble with machine-interface.... All in all, Mr. Sterling puts the Zeit in Geist, and *Tomorrow Now* has enough Plutarchan zing, erudition, and vervy wisdom to keep you buzzing for weeks.Some awesome riffs here.Kept me on tenterhooks throughout.Highest recommendation. --for Ian Vance ... Read more |
11. The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling | |
Mass Market Paperback: 336
Pages
(1993-11-01)
list price: US$7.50 -- used & new: US$1.73 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 055356370X Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Sterling begins his story at the birth of cyberspace: the invention of the telephone. We meet the first hackers--teenage boys hired as telephone operators--who used their technical mastery, low threshold for boredom, and love of pranks to wreak havoc across the phone lines. From phone-related hi-jinks, Sterling takes us into the broader world of hacking and introduces many of the culprits--some who are fighting for a cause, some who are in it for kicks, and some who are traditional criminals after a fast buck. Sterling then details the triumphs and frustrations of the people forced to deal with the illicit hackers and tells how they developed their own subculture as cybercops. Sterling raises the ethical and legal issues of online law enforcement by questioning what rights are given to suspects and to those who have private e-mail stored on suspects' computers. Additionally, Sterling shows how the online civil liberties movement rose from seemingly unlikely places, such as the counterculture surrounding the Grateful Dead. The Hacker Crackdown informs you of the issues surrounding computer crime and the people on all sides of those issues. Customer Reviews (42)
Essential reading on computers, freedom and privacy.
Very worthwile...
EXCELENT BOOK UNTIL THE ''UNDERGROUND'' PART
Learned more about the phone in 12 hours than in 12 years
A near-complete retrospective history of cyberculture... |
12. A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling | |
Mass Market Paperback: 288
Pages
(1999-06-01)
list price: US$7.99 -- used & new: US$4.13 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0553576429 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com These stories have a lot in common. They all take place in the near future, and most are action-oriented, involving colorful characters such as secret agents, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Mafioso's, and revolutionaries. But they are also personal tales that tend to focus on individuals rather than ideas, which makes them hit home more often than standard SF fare. The best of the bunch is probably "Taklamakan," a high-concept piece about two freelance spies sent to a central Asian desert called Taklamakan, where the Asian Sphere is doing some sort of secret research into space flight. "Bicycle Repairman" is set in the same world, but instead of in an Asian desert it takes place in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the spies in this story aren't the good guys. It's a less successful piece than "Taklamakan" but also a good read. Not all of the stories in this collection have the edgy, this-is-what-tomorrow-will-be-like quality that typifies Sterling's best work. But even when Sterling isn't at his best he's entertaining, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future is certainly that. --Craig E. Engler Customer Reviews (14)
Great place to start investigating this smart science fiction writer
The Quintessence of Sterlingism
Stellar collection of stories from cyberpunk's visionary 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.
An uneven collection 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.
Excellent collection of cyberpunk stories All of his interesting sensibilities are there, and he has evolved to new concepts as time goes on and the future we expected changed.The Japanese mega-corp - a staple of early science fiction - is dead.Bruce was ahead of the curve in viewing Russia as an interesting place to do cyberpunk.Certainly as history unfolds, it remains an interesting place. Lastly, the evolution of the writing is good.It maintains the cyberpunk view of the world, undergoing some few modifications for the Internet as it came out, not envisioned, as well as the toys that make cyberpunk fun.Bio Drills that eat sugar, not eating and living on implanted fat for days.The whole Urban spider concept is a fun one that needs to be explored more. Overall, a must read for the old-school cyberpunk fan.Heck, it's a must read in general. ... Read more |
13. The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling | |
Kindle Edition: 352
Pages
(2004-04-27)
list price: US$6.99 -- used & new: US$5.59 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: B000FC1LV0 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com A novel from Bruce Sterling is always cause for celebration, and The Zenith Angle is one of the finest contemporary novels and finest techno-thrillers of 2004. Sterling operates at the cutting edge of both technology and pop culture, and he possesses innumerable literary strengths. However, his strengths don't usually include deeply-penetrating character development, and that injures the believability of The Zenith Angle, which is the portrait of a man undergoing an enormous and shocking transformation. --Cynthia Ward Customer Reviews (38)
I really enjoyed this book
remarkably poor
Er, it's considered a "thriller"??
Where's the beef?
Entertaining to near the end, where it flys off the rails |
14. Visionary in Residence: Stories by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 320
Pages
(2006-02-08)
list price: US$15.95 -- used & new: US$10.28 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: B000TG2IOQ Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Book Description Customer Reviews (9)
Maybe his best collection yet.
some interesting stories but won't drag you back for more.
Very hit or miss
Extropian Infodump
Not as "visionary" as one would wish |
15. Globalhead by Bruce Sterling | |
Hardcover: 301
Pages
(1998)
-- used & new: US$94.11 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0929480708 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Customer Reviews (8)
C'mon, man, you can do a lot better than this . . .
Hits and Misses Sterling is at his best when he is discussing alternative futures close to our own, and he has done his homework in studying two rival cultures that play roles in his alternate universes -- the Muslim world and the world of the old Soviet Union.He creates memorable characters (the international arms dealer/hustler Leggy Starlitz, for instance) and generates a lot of thought-provoking ideas (Will Turing-conscious AI's embrace Islam?Was the Tunguska blast really caused by an alien speacecraft? Will Islam become the dominant superpower -- threatened only by American rock and roill?Will genetically engineered pets capable of human-like thought and speech exist?). Sterling's prose here is not of the quality of William Gibson's, or indeed, as good as Sterling is in other works, such as Schismatrix, or The Difference Engine.It is a good collection of stories, for the most part, and makes a good companion on a trip to the beach.
An Intriguing Mix Of Sterling's Short Stories
A mixed bunch of stories Most of the stories here are well worth reading. Especially "Hollywood Kremlin" and "Are You For 86?" which introduce Leggy Starlitz, one of Sterling's enduring characters. Also, the two collaborations, "Storming the Cosmos" and "The Moral Bullet" respectively with Rudy Rucker and John Kessel, are very good. There are also one or two stories here which quite fankly should not have seen the light of day. "The Sword of Damocles" is the sort of exercise often tackled in writer's workshops and that is where is should have stayed. There is not as much hard science in here in some of Sterling's other books but that does not detract from this collection. Indeed, a number of the best stories would escape all but the broadest definition of SF. In the Leggy Starlitz tales, Sterling lays out lots of technical trivia in the same style as do many thriller writers. His facts are often wrong and self contradicting. Often laughably so and that does detract from the writing. This is not the best collection to introduce you to Sterling's short fiction. I would recommend "A Good Old Fashioned Future" as an introduction but if you read and enjoy that and want more, you will not be disappointed by this book. If you enjoy this book and want to read something in the same vein, I'd suggest William Gibson's collection "Burning Chrome" or the anthology "Mirrorshades" edited by Bruce Sterling.
Third World Posse "Our Neural Chernobyl" (my personal favorite) is a stunning hybrid of high comedy, dead seriousness, and throat-grabbing economy which the remainder of this collection will never surpass.The old-school SF theme of intelligence-maximization is treated with breezy hep-cat irony and panache, a counterculture of renegade "gene-hackers" riding the god project of biotechnology.Cagey, brilliant, underhanded, hilarious, dead-on modern fiction. The last twenty pages of "Storming the Cosmos" reaches a pinnacle of revisionist SF, in the glassed-in detention cell of a Soviet gulag for dissident rocket-scientists, the purveyors of a protean technology that *actualizes* the subjective imagination of its observer (i.e. an experimental substance that changes shape and function according to the minds which possess it).When the conservative, obstructionist members of blackguard Soviet science abduct the item, the device *becomes* an antique rocket, replete with hoary, mind-blowing (literally) repercussions.Just read the story. "Jim and Irene" hits a tender note, the possibility of trans-cultural romance in a dingy, saturated, postmedia world.It goes a long way towards justifying the travails of relationship-related stress and paranoia, the feasibility of making human connections at the heart of a Baudrillardian desert, postmodern Nothingness encroaching upon our air-conditioned havens of glass and steel. "The Gulf Wars" points to the cyclical barbarism of Middle East violence and warcraft, in a brash little comedy about two hapless army engineers sucked into an Arabian time-warp to die the good death.But by now Sterling in beginning to lose his edge.... "The Shores of Bohemia", notable for its extrapolation of animal-empathy cults in the future, simply does not pay the reader back for his/her efforts, as the arch-narrative of Gaia vs. Artifice and the propaganda-value of Titanic architecture (see Sterling's *Wired* travelogue "The Spirit of Mega") comes on a bit conventional and, well, conceptually worn-out. Things pick up with "The Moral Bullet", the precursor to Sterling's superb *Holy Fire*(1996), where a pharmacological fountain-of-youth corners the black market run by paramilitary Mafioso competing for urban territory, a lawless after-the-Fall wastelander fantasy.Sterling grooves hard for about twenty pages, but the story's denouement seems rushed, desperate, unsatisfying. In the hackneyed genre of Lovecraftian satire, "The Unthinkable" is a rare triumph.The military-industrial complex has assimilated the necromancy of the Great Old Ones in a new arms race for weapons that attack the very dreams and souls of the enemy.Despite my weighty paraphrase, the piece is really quite funny. "We See Things Differently" offers a very intelligent, very wily indictment of monotheistic Islamic culture, while providing a convincing scenario for the survival of such religious traditions in the total-media zone of Western tech-wealth.An Islamic secret agent journeys to the heart of American rock culture to reap the whirlwind of his martyrological devotion to Allah. "Hollywood Kremlin" introduces Leggy Starlitz of *Zeitgeist*(2000), the pragmatic middle-aged worldweary go-getter trying to help a grounded Russian aviator complete his sortie.Like so many Sterling protagonists, Starlitz is an inspiring blend of cool optimism and brute adaptation to the caterwauling world around him, largely forsaking acid-spray cynicism for the ethos of pragmatic global cooperation.(Until the very end of the story, that is.)The Starlitz double-feature continues with "Are You For 86?", where Leggy becomes a smuggler of do-it-yourself abortion pills (a drug called RU-486), pursued by fundamentalist Christian soldiers (in death's-head masks, black robes, and wielding plastic scythes no less!) across the Utah desert.The story's climax at the State Capitol and Museum is both intellectual and action-packed, Sterling's trademark double-play. And finally, there's "Dori Bangs," a pseudo-mainstream fantasy of star-crossed Beatniks coming to terms with their artistic mediocrity in a commodified universe of death.... Suffice it to say, my summaries don't do justice to level of intelligence at work in these narratives.So much of what matters here is contained in the brilliant minutiae which hang on every descriptive passage, which color every extended dialogue. (Sterling's in the details.)While not as ambitiously original as the Shaper/Mechanist cycle of the mid `80s, these stories are all satisfying in their own brash, silly, madcap, populist way; even the boring ones are worth reading, as "meta-journalism" or political satire.Though a part of me hesitates to recommend them to non-SF enthusiasts.There are simply too many in-jokes. ... Read more |
16. Holy Fire (Bantam Spectra Book) by Bruce Sterling | |
Hardcover: 326
Pages
(1996-10-02)
list price: US$22.95 -- used & new: US$2.49 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0553099582 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Customer Reviews (37)
My favorite Sterling book
Not Free SF Reader
Like an Altman movie
Surprisingly Excellent
Sterling's best novel -- "A+" |
17. The Artificial Kid (Context (San Francisco).) by Bruce Sterling | |
Paperback: 309
Pages
(1997-08)
list price: US$12.95 -- used & new: US$29.38 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 188886916X Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Amazon.com Customer Reviews (14)
Not Free SF Reader
Hilarious, Delightful Early Bruce Sterling Novel
Good idea poorly executed
It's the Def, Bruce!
Not bad, entertaining Things Ididn't like about the book (don't worry, nothing really revealing here):the Flying Island, Crossbow and the Chairman's transformation, a climax youwouldn't exactly call exciting.Also, the Crossbow Body was a pretty shakyand only vaguely accounted-for concept. ... Read more |
18. Year's Best Fantasy 6 (Year's Best Fantasy) by Bruce Sterling, Esther Friesner, Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Kelly Link, Garth Nix, Connie Willis | |
Paperback: 352
Pages
(2006-09-15)
list price: US$14.95 -- used & new: US$9.28 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 1892391376 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Book Description Customer Reviews (1)
Bizarre and beautiful |
19. Four took freedom;: The lives of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, and Blanche K. Bruce (Zenith books, Z10) by Philip Sterling | |
Unknown Binding: 116
Pages
(1967)
Asin: B0006BMXHQ Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
20. Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling | |
Hardcover:
Pages
(2006)
-- used & new: US$24.90 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0739476572 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
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