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| "This colossal anthology covers the return of sf to themes based in the hard sciences. . . . A very satisfactory overview of a major portion of contemporary sf and a sterling achievement by Tor and the Hartwell-Cramer team."
Booklist
From Paul McAuley's tale of runaway technology ("Gene Wars") to Gregory Benford's story of evolution and murder ("Immersion"), the 41 stories in this annotated anthology provide a strong argument for the revival of hard sf as a major force in the genre in the 1990s. Library Journal |
Bruce Sterling: Bicycle Repairman
Bruce Sterling (1954- ) began his career with the novels Involution Ocean (1977) and The Artificial Kid (1980). In the early '80s he became the center of a literary duststorm by publishing the fanzine Cheap Truth under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas (available on the web at www.io.com/~ftp/usr/shiva/SMOF-BBS/cheap.truth). The first issue was mainly an attack on fantasy: "As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands." For four or five issues, Sterling attacked fiction he found irritating and praised a wide variety of books (most issues had a "Cheap Truth Top Ten" list) with descriptions like these: Past Master by R. A. Lafferty -- "His most decipherable SF novel" -- or A World Out of Time by Larry Niven "Heartening indication that Niven may escape total artistic collapse." Eventually, Sterling came round to the rhetoric for which he is most known and Cheap Truth evolved into the propaganda organ for the movement later known as cyberpunk. When laying out Cheap Truth #6, he took a pair of scissors to a photocopy of David Pringle and Colin Greenland's editorial in Interzone #8 (Summer, 1984), which read:
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Last issue we described Interzone as a magazine of radical science fiction and fantasy. Now we should like to go further and outline (however hazily) a type of story that we want to see much more of in this magazine: the radical, hard SF story. We wish to publish more fiction which takes its inspiration from science, and which uses the language of science in a creative way. It may be fantastic, surrealistic, "illogical," but in order to be radical hard SF it should explore in some fashion the perspectives opened up by contemporary science and technology. Some would argue that the new electronic gadgetry is displacing the printed word -- if so, writers should fight back, using guerrilla tactics as necessary and infiltrating the territory of the enemy. |
At the time, Sterling was one of only a handful of US subscribers to Interzone, and set out to spread this gospel in the US. The Cheap Truth #6 editorial, created using rubber cement and Burroghsian cut-up technique, read:
Thus, in the US, radical hard SF was one of the early names for the Movement that editor Gardner Dozois later christened cyberpunk. Later cyberpunk fiction was characterized by a particular attitude, and specific literary furniture, but early on -- in Sterling's vision at least -- it had centrally to do with reinventing hard SF. Of those writers identified with cyberpunk to whom the term stuck, Sterling is the one most interested in science and technology.
The novel Schismatrix (1985) and the related stories that made him famous were re-released in 1996 as Schismatrix Plus. He collaborated with William Gibson on The Difference Engine (1990), became a media figure who appeared on the cover of Wired, became a journalist who wrote the expose, The Hacker Crackdown (1992), and returned to nearly full-time commitment to science fiction in 1995, with a new explosion of stories and novels, including Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), and Distraction (1998). His most recent novel, Zeitgeist (2000), is fantasy.
This story first appeared in John Kessel & Mark Van Name's anthology of speculative fiction writing from the Sycamore Hill writers' workshop, Intrusions. It's a story growing out of the sensibility of cyberpunk, and not without some ironic commentary on cyberpunk along the way. It's about a messy, high-tech future, gritty and paranoid, lubricated by some of those good old genre juices that have kept science fiction alive and growing in this decade.