Articles with the Tag Bruce Sterling

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling

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Cover of Globalhead


Globalhead
Bruce Sterling
339 pages
published in 1992

Good science fiction doesn’t predict the future; it allows the future to recognise itself in it. Globalhead is drenched in the zeitgeist of Post-Reagan America, yet occasionally there’s a glimpse of the far flung future of 2021 to be recognised. AIDS virus based RNA wonder drugs as the gimmick in its very first story, foreshadowing the very real mRNA Covid-19 vaccine I got just weeks ago. A character called Sayyid Qutb in “We See Things Differently” provides another mild shock. These glimpses of a still to be born future are jarring considering the stories in here are barely if at all science fiction, more slipstream perhaps, a term Sterling popularised at the time these stories were written. The most recognisable sfnal story here is “The Unthinkable”, a Chtuthlu Mythos inspired Cold War riff on Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, itself an inspiration for Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War”.

What to make of the Bruce Sterling as seen in this collection? Best known at this time as the second half of “William Gibson andd…”, one of the “fathers of Cyberpunk”. As an editor he had created the anthology that would pin down and solidify the genre, as well as its main propaganda zine. As a writer, his version of cyberpunk took a very different road from the post-Gibson consensus he himself had helped establish. As a non-fiction author, his cyberpunk interests would lead him to write a book — published the same year as this collection — about the early hacker movement(s), the development of the early internet and how the law responded to it. But little is visible of this cyberpunk guru in this collection. No jamming with console cowboys in cyberspace; a bit of low tech phone phreaking for quarters is as cyber as it gets.

But one of the central tenets of eighties cyberpunk does shape the stories here though, the idea of America as a tired, broken country, clapped out and overtaken by others. William Gibson’s Neuromancer famously contained no American brand names, while so much of its imitators were obsessed by the idea that the future was Japanese, not American. By the late eighties the false dawn of Reagan’s morning in America had faded, as had the very real fear of an imminent nuclear dawn. What remained was the feeling that America was tired, shagged out and left to rot by its friends and enemies alike. “Jim and Irene”, The Moral Bullet”, “We See Things Differently”, “Are You for 86?”, even “Dori Bangs” are all set against this backdrop, either with future explicitly collapsed America or in a present that just feels that way.

The other two major obsessions in Globalhead are Islam and the collapsing Soviet Union, sometimes together as in “Hollywood Kremlin”. Both make sense in context. While Iraq was still a faithful ally, Lybia and Iran were the great bogeymen of the eighties, every Arab a terrorist. Sterling has a much more positive view of Islam. In “The Compassionate, the Digital”, the Union of Islamic Republics has created AIs that have mastered teleportation, while “We See Things Differently” has a reporter from another united Islamic Middle East coming to America to interview a new firebrand rock star. “The Gulf Wars” opens with a familiar image of burning oil smoke over a Middle Eastern city, only to pull back and reveal its set during the Late Bronze Age Assyrian/Elamite Wars. The contemporary Gulf War it refers to is the Iraq-Iran War, rather than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

“Storming the Cosmos” is a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, a romp set in the high tide of Soviet space exploration, with a KGB stooge being forced to go on an expedition to the Tunguska Impact site in Siberia and finding ….something. “Hollywood Kremlin” has the first appearance of Leggy Starlitz, a sort of hapless trickster figure here involved in black market smuggling of Afghanistan sourced consumer goods into the Soviet Union by way of Azerbaijan, at time of writing still a Soviet Republic, barely. It and the second Starlitz story, “Are You for 86?”, in which he is involved with a feminist gang smuggling abortion drugs into the American South are clearly not science fiction. Neither are “Jim and Irene” or “Dori Bangs” even if they have a sfnal gimmick embedded in their story of lonely outcasts finding some measure of happiness in each other. The latter story is somewhat infamous as it stars actual, if already dead at the time characters, rock critic Lester Bangs and underground cartoonist Dori Seda.

The most ‘proper’ science fiction stories here are the opening story, “Our Neural Chernobyl”, about what happens when you mix d.i.y. genetci engineering with the hacking ethos, written in the form of a book review, always a chad move. The other one is “The Shores of Bohemia”, which doesn’t look like it’s science fiction until one cunning detail reveals its hand. This story in some ways looks forwards to Holy Fire, Sterling’s 1996 post-singularity post-cyberpunk novel set in a world ruled by a gerontocracy. The disruption that easily available immortality could bring is also a theme of “The Moral Bullet”.

Not every story in Globalhead worked for me. As a whole though it is an interesting look into what Sterling was thinking about at the cusp of the nineties, reacting to a world that was quickly moving out of its comfortable Cold War straitjacket. I can’t help but feel that he look slightly further than his contemporaries when using these events as inspiration for his stories.

Contents, taken from the isfdb:

  • 1 • Our Neural Chernobyl • (1988) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 11 • Storming the Cosmos • (1985) • novelette by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling
  • 65 • The Compassionate, the Digital • (1985) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 73 • Jim and Irene • (1991) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 119 • The Sword of Damocles • (1990) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 131 • The Gulf Wars • (1988) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 152 • The Shores of Bohemia • (1990) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 188 • The Moral Bullet • (1991) • novelette by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling
  • 216 • The Unthinkable • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1991) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 224 • We See Things Differently • (1989) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 249 • Hollywood Kremlin • [Leggy Starlitz] • (1990) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 285 • Are You for 86? • [Leggy Starlitz] • (1992) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 322 • Dori Bangs • (1989) • short story by Bruce Sterling

Schismatrix Plus — Bruce Sterling

science fiction
Published on 1 Comment on Schismatrix Plus — Bruce Sterling

Cover of Schismatrix Plus


Schismatrix Plus
Bruce Sterling
319 pages
published in 1996

As a literary movement, cyberpunk has had the misfortune to be dominated by not just one particular writer, (William Gibson) but by one particular novel: Neuromancer, which ever since its first publication in 1984 has served as a template for what is and isn’t cyberpunk, stultifying the genre almost from its birth. I do not blame Gibson or Neuromancer for this, but rather the legion of mediocre writers who jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon after it, churning out third and fourth rate copies. Everything that was original and good about cyberpunk got lost in this flood, anything that deviated from the Neuromancer template shoved aside.

Which unfortunately included Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, which never quite got the acclaim it deserved. Coming out only a year after Gibson’s Neuromancer, it should’ve taken its rightful place beside it as one of the acknowledged classics of the genre. However, this never quite happened. Somehow, cyberpunk had already solidified too much for Schismatrix to fit in comfortably. It was just too different from the low life with high tech template put forth by Neuromancer and its imitators. Schismatrix‘s influence would only be felt later, in writers like Charlie Stross and Neal Stephenson, after cyberpunk had crashed and burned.

For me personally, Schismatrix was one of the seminal cyberpunk novels, one of the few available to me when I was still almost entirely dependent on the Middelburg library for my science fiction fix. Together with of course Neuromancer and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series I’d discovered at the same time, it was a first taste of modern science fiction, because until then the library mainly had stocked Golden Age and New Wave science fiction, not so much new stuff.

What Schismatrix showed me was a future in which space stations needed not be clean and sterile, but could actually decay and smell funky. A future in which space travel was boring, something you had to do to get from one place to another, not an adventure or a noble striving to be free of the ties of Earth. That was new to me.

Looking back, Schismatrix was of course very much influenced by the Cold War environment in which it was written, with its Solar System divided between Shapers and Mechanists. The first are those who use genetic enginering and psychological training to shape their bodies and minds, while the Mechanics use cybernetics and software. In the 23rd century, these are the conservative faction struggling for supremacy. Caught up in this battle for power are the various independent and not so independent colonies on the Moon and in L5, ruled by or allied to one faction or another.

The Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic is one of these colonies, ruled by ancient Mechanist families, whose innate conservatism strangles the possibilities for the younger generations in the colony. In hindsight, a very eighties concern as the baby boomers came of age and started grappling with political power. Something Sterling would also come back to in the later Holy Fire. Abelard Lindsay and Philip Constantine are two friends who’ve both been trained as Shaper diplomats in nominal service to the colony, rebellious and wanting to make a grand gesture to change its politics. That fails, it kills Vera Kelland, the woman they both loved and sets them against each other. Constantine remains at the colony, Lindsay is exiled.

As Lindsay moves from colony to colony, Constantine stages a coup and assumes control of the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic. His presence remains as a menace in the background, driving much of the plot of the first half of the novel, as Lindsay attempts to get away from his influence. Ultimately he ends up on an asteroid colony originally founded by a Shaper clan and now taken over by a Mechanist cartel. His attempts to keep peace between the two factions fail and open war breaks out, which he and his new love only survive due to the coming of the aliens, the socalled Investors.

The second half of Schismatrix is taken up with the impact their arrival has on the Solar System’s political scene and economy, as it’s soon clear they care nothing for the Shaper/Mechanist squabbles. Détente sets in, but isn’t kept. In the meantime the struggle between Constantine and Lindsay continues, half hidden in the everyday political manoeuvring of the various powers. This part of the story stretches over decades and centuries.

Unlike Neuromancer, Schismatrix has dated much less, even if its politics are very eighties. Sterling has a knack for creating believeable, lived in, dense political and cultural futures and a scope that’s at easy with centuries and the entire Solar System to play in, in contrast to Gibson’s more cramped, Earthbound futures. Nevertheless there are similarities. The dirty secret of the cyberpunks is that, despite their rebellious stance, they were science fiction True Believers, confident that humanity’s future lies in space and in both novels that future is in progress. If you squint hard enough, they could be part of the same future.

Apart from Schismatrix itself, Schismatrix Plus also contains the Shaper/Mechanist short stories originally collected in Crystal Express:

  • Swarm (1982)
  • Spider Rose (1982)
  • Cicada Queen (1982)
  • Sunken Gardens (1984)
  • Twenty Evocations (1984)