Tags
1980s, 1985, 1990s, 1996, Ace Books, Bruce Sterling, BSFA Award nominee, cyberpunk, drugs!, evolutionary transcendence, genetic engineering, Nebula Award nominee, Open Road Media, post-cyberpunk, Ron Walotsky, science fiction, Shaper-Mechanist Universe, space opera, transhumanism
Bruce Sterling was one of the progenitors of the cyberpunk movement, earning the nickname “Chairman Bruce” for his work editing the Mirrorshades anthology and writing novels like Islands in the Net, Schismatrix, and The Difference Engine (coauthored with William Gibson). To some extent I feel that Sterling has been overshadowed by Gibson, but that could just be my perception—the friend who introduced me to Gibson was dismissive of Sterling’s work when I picked up a copy of Schismatrix, which is a bias I’ve carried around for about a decade. Most likely it’s an issue with me, since Sterling’s won an armload of awards for his work, so here I am reading Schismatrix Plus to rectify that.
There’s a war on. On the battlefields of ideology, you must choose between humanity’s numerous factions, the most important being the Shapers—those who alter their bodies through genetic modification and mental training—and the Mechanists—those who modify their bodies through computer software and external prosthetics (e.g., cyberware). In this balkanized future, countless schisms continue to divide posthumans into branching splinter groups based on technology and philosophy. Abelard Lindsey should know, an exiled Shaper diplomat turned outlaw sundog. Betrayed by his friend and colleague Phillip Constantine, Lindsey begins his own grand tour of known space, falling back on his kinesics and genetic training as he crosses paths with the numerous factions that spring up over hundreds of years of posthumanity’s history.
Sterling’s kaleidoscopic vision of the future is awash in big ideas and sprawling concepts; there’s a drug for everything, or a piece of technology to make your life better, and posthumanity is a fragmented series of city-states evicted from earth scattered among the stars. Some of the developments are mind-boggling, some are eye-opening, others are just silly. There’s the group of pirates—a sovereign nation-state, last remnant of a failed mining syndicate—that structures itself ala American government, replacing their names with titles like First Justice and Secretary of State. There’s the genetically modified geisha who sweats perfume and pheromones, and later becomes an entire ecosystem, buildings grown from flesh and bone. Or take the race of alien Investors, who buy and swindle their way across the galaxy and make first contact to rip humanity off. Those are just some of the highlights from the first section, it’s a non-stop chain of brilliantly bizarre (or bizarrely brilliant) concepts fired at machine-gun speed.
Defining Schismatrix Plus is not easy; it has the grandeur and scale of a space opera, touring a high-tech solar system augmented with the jargon and technological futurism of cyberpunk. Actually, with its focus on transhumanism—posthumanism, per Sterling—it reads as one of the first postcyberpunk novels, and I would not be surprised if this influenced authors like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.
The plus in the book’s title refers to its composition: the 1985 novel Schismatrix plus five short stories, comprising the entirety of the Shaper-Mechanist universe. “Swarm” is about one of the other 19 alien lifeforms in the universe, a hive-minded insectoid race and an attempt to leverage them as an asset in the human factions’ war. In “Spider Rose,” an aged Mechanist trades a valuable gem for an alien pet, getting more than she bargained for in the process. “Cicada Queen” expands on some of the background of Schismatrix, showing events in the C-K city-state Lindsay helps create, while “Sunken Gardens” expands on the Martian terraforming Lindsay helps usher in. “Twenty Evocations” is the most experimental of the stories that follows the wild life of one Shaper. These are placed after the novel, and there’s some debate whether it’s best to read them first; they do a bit more to explain some of the key concepts, the universe’s history and factions. But the novel also has its own… majestic grandeur, for lack of a better term, that the short fiction often lacks.
And it has that grandeur because the Shaper/Mechanist universe isn’t the same gritty megacorporations stuff that the word ‘cyberpunk’ brings to my mind. It’s still “high-tech low-life” though, but the tech goes far beyond virtual interfaces and digital sentience. There is the space opera element, yes, but it’s more that this is a novel about posthumanity—the end result of enough genetic manipulation and wundertech to split the human animal into divergent species. This future holds up pretty well, in that I can see it—for all its pessimism and bizarre transformations—coming to fruition. Sterling was writing our future in style and theme, in human pettiness and dreams, even if the tech doesn’t come to pass. And I think that was a pretty impressive accomplishment.
On its most primitive level, humanity operates in groups—us-and-them, friend and stranger, similarity versus the other—tribes huddling together in the glow of the campfire, envious and fearful of the other tribes lurking in the darkness. Today, those boundaries are set by ethnicity, religion, geo-politics, and culture. Life moves in clades, comes Sterling’s ever-present refrain; in this vision of the future, technology and ideology are the demarcation lines, having become one and the same. There are times when the factions band together or enter periods of detente, but over hundreds of years any lasting peace is trodden under the ambitions of the Shapers, or the Mechanists, or one emergent ideology or another. If you think this sounds grim, there is a silver lining of hope—by the end of their journey, Lindsay and the other long-lived characters have made realizations about life, leading to the creation of a post-posthuman species. I’d argue that the novel’s central theme of transcending humanity also ties into its theme of the eternal pursuit of happiness, giving our posthuman society very human flaws and motives.
In all honesty, I read a few pages and expected this was going to be a meh read for me—my reading preferences don’t really lean towards gonzo postcyberpunk, unless you count Transmetropolitan. But, that’s why I don’t make assumptions and go into every book as a blank slate. Schismatrix is a wild, ideas-a-sentence ride, a frighteningly vivid look at three hundred years in the future. It’s hard to keep track of things when twenty years can go by in the space of a paragraph break, and the bizarre universe will cause some readers’ eyes to roll. But for pure sensawunda, backed by some subtle but poignant philosophizing, Schismatrix impressed me. Its sweeping vision covers hundreds of years in as many pages, and while it’s demanding, it can also be very rewarding. I didn’t quite fall in love with it… but I came close. And I’ll definitely give Sterling more consideration when I spot his work on the bookshelves.
Thanks to Open Road Media and Netgalley for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an open and honest review (though to be completely open and honest, I have a dead tree edition somewhere around here); Open Road is releasing the ebook version on 30 December 2014.
realthog said:
A great review. I thought Schismatrix was a wonderful novel, and the couple of other Sterling novels that I’ve read have been excellent. What he’s very good at, I think, is conveying that tomorrow really will be different from today, and that all kinds of ethical and behavioral norms that we today consider to be central to the human condition may very well not be in the future.
To my shame I’ve never read Schismatrix Plus.
As I learned when he attended a UK Milford many years ago, Bruce is also one of the nicest, most open-hearted people you could ever meet. He does talk very loudly but, as he’s from Texas, one can forgive him this.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Thanks! I agree, as you put it so succinctly, Sterling creates a future that’s very much different from the present, rather than putting contemporary society in spaceships and calling it a day. A lot of SF overlooks changes to cultural and behavioral norms, because it’s hard, or in favor of technology.
To be honest, the “Plus” part—Sterling’s previous short-stories—didn’t impress me as much as the Schismatrix, though they are a nice bonus.
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realthog said:
I think Bruce is better at novels than at short stories, to be honest. I’m probably talking bullshit, but it seems to me that his best ideas need the scope of a novel to build themselves up; his more superficial notions, the ones small enough to be fitted into short stories, are often a bit on the jejune side.
As I say, that’s probably just me blethering. His contribution to modern SF is incalculable; thank goodness he happened.
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fromcouchtomoon said:
I really haven’t paid much attention to Sterling before, other than knowing that he and Gibson have worked together, and The Difference Engine is one of those “need to reads” that I keep forgetting about. He put out a fake news story about human extinction earlier this week (I think I RTd it) which put him back on my radar. And now this.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
The Difference Engine is a good one for your list. Keep calm and read more Gibson. 🙂
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Jesse said:
There are some people who swear by the Plus in Schismatrix Plus. But I’m with you: the novel is better. This is interesting because, the novel is actually a few novellas welded together, which is why it possesses more of an episodic feel based on setting than a true intro-body-climax-resolution structure.
I’d support your assumption that Sterling is perceived as sitting in Gibson’s shadow, despite the fact Sterling has been much more involved in genre as a whole. Continuing with assumptions, my guess is this is because Sterling is more indirect where Gibson is often direct (in terms of style and usage of ideas). Secondly, as for many readers cyberpunk = Neuromancer, when they encounter a text by an author associated with cyberpunk they automatically expect Neuromancer 2 (Case in Space??), and when they don’t get it, can be dismissive. I’m not accusing you or your friend of this, only stating that Sterling is more of an acquired taste but has no fewer fingers on the pulse of cyberpunk or science fiction at large. I really like Islands in the Net and Holy Fire, but I would consider Zeitgeist his magnum opus. It’s savvy in ways Gibson is not.
Have you read any other Sterling titles?
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admiral.ironbombs said:
I did not know Schismatrix started off as novellas, but it makes sense—it did feel very episodic at times. And that would explain why the plot would jump forward several years at a time.
I agree with your analysis; the world of Neuromancer—and, really, the visual aesthetic created by Blade Runner—is very direct, and identifiable, and often assumed to be cyberpunk’s default. I can imagine some readers picking up Schismatrix and asking “Where are the data cowboys?” Yet it’s still very much cyberpunk… a far-future cyberpunk that looks at how culture and ideology changes as time and technology advance.
This is the first of Sterling’s works I’ve read; I have a copy of Holy Fire, so it will probably be the next of his books I read.
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