Bruce Sterling: Taklamakan

Bruce Sterling (1954- ), journalist and SF writer, was the chief polemicist behind the launch of "cyberpunk" SF in the 1980s (see Sterling note above). "His main interest," says The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "continues to be the behavior of societies rather than individuals and the perfection of SF as a vehicle for scientific education and political debate."

Sterling's pseudonymous presentation (as Vincent Omniveritas) of the Movement in his small press fanzine, Cheap Truth, and elsewhere, particularly in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, invigorated the 1980s in SF. Sterling, William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, and John Shirley, the four central figures of the Movement, positioned themselves as radical reformers of hard SF, and attracted many followers and imitators. But in spite of Sterling's own stance, the Movement was not received as Radical Hard SF in the US, nor immediately influential in that way, though it did set the stage internationally.

The fact is that although the Humanist wing of younger SF writers more or less agreed with Sterling's real world politics, they did not agree with his literary stance. Most of them simply did not want to write fiction with much science in it. There is abundant evidence that some writers wanted to gain literary acceptance from the mainstream literary establishment, and were willing to sacrifice genre popularity, and to reject any public stance in favor of science and technology as useful in solving problems in fiction, to get it. While the old guard right wing hard SF writers were the enemy, and neither agreed with Sterling's stand on science nor on politics. They were, after all, to be swept away, or redirected, by Sterling's new broom. So the left wing element emerged mostly in Canadian, Australian, and UK writing in the 1990s.

Ironically Sterling's polemical stance infected popular culture with his ideas and he became a famous cultural figure. Now Sterling is a major voice of his generation, a successful revolutionary, and an environmental activist. His picture has been on the cover of Wired. His stories, from pure fantasy to hard SF, are collected in Crystal Express (1989), Globalhead: Stories (1994), and A Good Old Fashioned Future (1999).

"Taklamakan" is one of his best stories of the '90s, a vision with real world political implications, truly bizarre SF images (one thinks perhaps of Brian W. Aldiss in his Hothouse stories), and told in an accomplished literary style. Sterling is one of the best prose stylists in SF, and it shows here.