Crystal Express (short stories)

Short stories deal with genetically altered humans, cyborgs, space travel, a world governed by multinational corporations Cyberpunk and Beyond... The literature of science fiction is, to employ the customary buzz word, the literature of "extrapolation," but science-fiction writers vary enormously in their ability to "extrapolate," to envision a futuristic milieu of ceaseless change in which the metamorphosis of humanity becomes an inevitable concomitant. This relative rarity of genuine visionary inspiration makes all the more remarkable the appearance in 1982 of Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," the first of five stories set within the author's richly imagined Shaper/Mechanist universe. In this series the entire solar system has become the setting for unremitting conflict between the genetically altered Shapers and the cybernetically augmented Mechanists, with the factional struggles, space-age technologies, even a dialectical metaphysics, all brilliantly developed by Sterling. "Technology has unleashed tremendous forces that are ripping society apart," explains a character in "Swarm"; through the Shaper/Mechanist sequence one witnesses the evolution of mankind from human to posthuman to god. The remaining stories in Crystal Express display the dazzling range of Bruce Sterling's talents: in the near-future "Green Days in Brunei," the moribund nation-state has been superseded by a global communications network controlled by multinational corporations, while "The Beautiful and the Sublime" is the author's smiles-of-a-summer-night divertissement, told with inimitable wit and panache. In "Flowers of Edo" an ex-samurai must do battle with the demons of progress, while "Dinner in Audoghast" presents a chilling prophecy out of medieval Africa. From hard-core cyberpunk technologies to global Greenpeace polemics to haunting historical fantasies, Bruce Sterling has emerged as both a serious and insightful futurist and a towering figure in American imaginative fiction. This first collection by Sterling brings together a dozen of his evocative, inventive stories. "Spook" tells of a future intelligence agent who is subjected to an operation that removes the psychologically limiting Veil implanted in his head, and then finds freedom untenable because it brings realization of all the suffering he has caused. "The Little Magic Shop" is a whimsical story about a life-extending elixir, with a twist. Five of the stories are from the Shaper/Mechanist series, set in a future in which the two races war for the universe's resources. "Swarm" tells of a Shaper who craftily gathers some genetic material from the alien Swarm race with the intent of creating a slave population, but whose plans backfire spectacularly when his understanding of the Swarm proves less advanced than his technology