Bruce Sterling

The Caryatids (2009)

This is my first BS read. While enjoyable, I wasn't drawn in to the narrative enough to immerse myself in it. Maybe I'm too accustomed to SF with BDO's, xenomorphs, taboo breaking, and mind bending twists. I read The Difference Engine (written with W.Gibson) a while back and enjoyed the altern...

Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007)

Bruce Sterling, one of the best practitioners of science fiction and every kind of writing that can be presented using the tropes of sci-fi, i.e. fantasy, finally allows us to get a glimpse of his entire range of literary creativity. The stories are unlike most of the contemporary science fiction...

The Zenith Angle (2005)

Brusce Sterling is preoccupied in this book with the transformations Cybersociety went through as a result of the September 11 terror attacks and of the dotcom and telecoms busts. To be honest the characters and events weren't quite as interesting to me as was the ambient commentary on events in ...

Islands in the Net (1989)

As far as I can tell so far, the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia, launched in 2011, aims to be authoritative in the manner of traditional reference works: broad in its perspective, knowledgeable in its scope of reference (entries are apt to allude to many styles, trends, subcategories, and th...

Holy Fire (1997)

WARNING: Spoilers? maybe kinda/sorta; but the review might not mean much to you if you haven't read it anyway. Thus:----There's a scene--about halfway through the novel--when Paul says to Maya: "I want you to prove to me that you're not human yet still an artist." Right there? That's basically...

Zeitgeist (2001)

Zeitgeist is exceptional, particularly in this sense: it's one of the very few near-future thrillers that has tumbled into the recent past almost unscathed, without becoming stale and irrelevant. Yet, anyway.Sterling's novel came out during The Year 2000, and it captures the jittery sense that ma...

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1993)

When ‘The Hacker Crackdown’ - written by the cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling – was released in 1992, it was a hugely acclaimed journalistic study of the cyberspace of the late 80s and early 90s detailing the affairs and people who have influenced this chaotic electronic frontier. Written during...

A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999)

Globalhead (1998)

This collection of short stories by Bruce Sterling is pretty good. Some of the stories are stronger than others. I particularly liked Storming the Cosmos, Jim and Irene, The Moral Bullet and Hollywood Kremlin. I wasn't real taken with Our Neural Chernobyl or Dori Bangs; not because of content ...

Involution Ocean (1988)

A good book that could have used a better editor. Sterling is brilliant at alien ecology, but occasionally schlocky at other things. He'll ellide key action sequences or spend pages setting up characters who disappear for the rest of the book. And his science has some holes, or at least fuzzy are...

Crystal Express (1990)

The history of mankind in space had been a long epic of ambitions and rivalries. From the very first, space colonies had struggled for self-sufficiency and had soon broken their ties with the exhausted Earth. The independent life-support systems had given them the mentality of city-states. Strang...

Schismatrix Plus (1996)

What a great read this was. I've never been much of a fan of cyberpunk and I'm not particularly a fan of the authors generally noted to be founders of the genre (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc.), but I really loved this book and it has put Bruce Sterling near the top of my list for sci-fi w...

The Artificial Kid (Context, San Francisco) (1997)