Name: Ascendancies
ISBN: 9781596061132

Bruce Sterling

Presents a collection of science fiction stories, including the selections from the "Shaper/Mechanist stories," the "Leggy Starlitz stories," and the "Chattanooga stories."

The Best of Bruce Sterling

Ascendancies

Gavin

Sterling is broad. He's most famous for techno body horror, but his historical fantasies and economic stories are distinct and equally good. In fact I think his Exotic (But Non-Japanese) Cyberpunk is probably his key style. Here’s his Balkan SF, roadside kiosk as vanguard of the future:

  These strangers and foreigners expressed odd, truncated, malformed ideas of what he had been doing. Because they were the Voice of History.

He himself had no such voice to give to history. He came from a small place under unique circumstances. People who hadn’t lived there would never understand it. Those who had lived there were too close to understand it. There was just no understanding for it. There were just…the events. Events, transitions, new things. Things like the black kiosks…

To the neighborhood, to the people, he was a crippled, short-tempered old landlord. To her, the scholar-bureaucrat, he was a mysterious figure of international significance. Her version of events was hopelessly distorted and self-serving. But it was a version of events. 

This stuff is harder than it looks. Witness the many laughably dated K00L stories of the 90s. (Gibson.) This is dated, but it's not the tech or the slang that does it. It's the excitement about the internet as ontological shift, about cultural hybridisation, postmodern whoah; also the urgent grappling with Islamic philosophy and politics. (I shouldn't say 'dated'; matured.)

Sterling prefigures half of recent SF. We have a grand, mindless, terrifyingly efficient foil (a la Watts), a profiteering parasite civ (Pohl, Vinge), a genetically labile bodysnatcher (Tchaikovsky, Corey), early modern magic realism (Chiang, Borges), colonialism and cosmopolitanism as the original first contact (Stephenson), Western ideology as alien (Chiang), a paean to the technician and the technologist (Stephenson, Gibson), antihuman technologies (Gibson, Stross, Watts), even boringly transcendent evaporation as natural endpoint of conscious life (Banks). Sterling feels like a skeleton key for the last twenty years.

The Shaper stories are nasty - one notch short of body horror, three notches past psychological horror, economic horror: I love it. Looking for one line to catch his essence I plumped for

  Tons of predigested fungal pap went into the slick blind jaws at one end.

Then

  “This urge to expand, to explore, to develop, is just what will make you extinct. You naively suppose that you can continue to feed your curiosity indefinitely. It is an old story, pursued by countless races before you. Within a thousand years—perhaps a little longer—your species will vanish.”
“You intend to destroy us, then? I warn you it will not be an easy task—”
“Again you miss the point… Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours—your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain—can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete. Your own genes have been altered, and you, Captain-Doctor, are a crude experiment. In a hundred years you will be a relic. In a thousand years you will not even be a memory. Your race will go the same way as a thousand others.” 
…

Stone-faced children wandered aimlessly through suburban halls, dazed on mood suppressants. Precious few dared to care any longer. Sweating Marketeers collapsed across their keyboards, sinuses bleeding from inhalants. Women stepped naked out of commandeered airlocks and died in sparkling gushes of frozen air. Cicadas struggled to weep through altered eyes, or floated in darkened bistros, numbed with disaster and drugs.


Ranked: 
1. ‘Green days in Brunei’
2. 'Twenty evocations'
3. 'Dori Bangs' (only if you love Lester Bangs like I do)
4. 'In paradise'
5. 'The little magic shop'
6. 'Hollywood Kremlin'
7. 'The Blemmye's Strategem'
8. 'Are you for 86?'
9. 'Spider Rose'
10. 'The littlest jackal'
11. 'Dinner in Audoghast'
12. 'Cicada queen'
13. 'Maneki Neko'
14. 'Kiosk'
15. 'Deep Eddy'
16. 'Swarm''
17. 'Bicycle repairman'
18. 'Taklamakan'
19. 'We see things differently '
20. 'Our neural Chernobyl'
21. 'Sunken gardens''
22. 'The compassionate, the digital'
23. 'The sword of Damocles'

All worthwhile up to "We See Things Differently".



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'Brunei' is glorious. It contains four or five intellectual feints. It's about the communitarian appeal, and the individualist appeal.

  “Here at least people really care and watch over each other…”
She gritted her teeth. “Watching. Yes, always.” 

 It's a presumptive decoding of Malay culture. (“The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories.”) It's a great love story, a modern romance, a particular male romance. One character, initially depicted as decrepit and ridiculous, turns out to be a revolutionary colossus. Turner makes a grand conversion to human-centred technology, Gross National Happiness kind of stuff - and then this conversion is immediately subverted. The plot is driven by conveniences and I don't care at all. 

The women worked on, wrapped in the lamp’s mild glow. Innocently, they enjoyed themselves, secure in their usefulness. Yet Turner knew machines could have done the sewing faster and easier. Already, through fishing smacks, as he watched, some corner of his mind pulled the task to computerized pieces, thinking: simplify, analyze, reduce.

But to what end?… People in the West talked about the “technical elite”—and Turner knew it was a damned lie. Technology roared on, running full-throttle on the world’s last dregs of oil, but no one was at the wheel, not really… “The “technical elite” were errand boys. They didn’t decide how to study, what to work on, where they could be most useful, or to what end. Money decided that. Technicians were owned by the abstract ones and zeros in bankers’ microchips, paid out by silk-suit hustlers who’d never touched a wrench. Knowledge wasn’t power, not really, not for engineers. There were too many abstractions in the way. 

(Why is eight million regarded as a fortune of global renown though? Eight million what? CAD??)

—-

‘Magic Shop’ is great fun. Initially it looks like a great gag: a fantasy protagonist with no interest in mysteries, treasures, princesses, vengeance, or Journeys.

Later:

  O’Beronne gave him a poisonous glare. “You’re a hundred and forty years old. Hasn’t the burden of unnatural life become insupportable?”
James looked at him, puzzled. “Are you kidding?” 


--- 

A couple of these stories make me queasy. This is hard to do!

Part of this is Sterling's habit of having horrible narrators. One is an Islamist assassin, and his ideology is so galling because it is not only false (e.g. Western perfidy in Iran). I realised only halfway through that the old label for Sterling was "postmodern". It says something that that label has become so marginal and forgettable in the last 10 years.

The Starlitz stories are particularly strong. Starlitz is like Stross' Manfred Macx - an agent of the future - but in a curious amoral way. He runs guns for the Russian mafia and for psychotic Finnish nationalists. He lusts over trends and capital and flashy collectibles. He embodies the future but not progress: change in a nonmoral sense.

The undergrad revolutionary Aino is very tragic. Her mind is totally consumed by post-Marxist revolutionary fervour - but Marxism without hope, the nationalist perversion of the International. I recognise her, her inhumane mind-killed purity. it breaks my heart.

  I I envy her historical experience so much. There’s something so direct and healthy and physical about hijacking planes. 



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'Maneki Neko' is an exquisite portrait of networks, the gift economy, and another sweet vision of a kind of digital culture we haven't gotten yet. Replace money with a terrible god who can solve the problem of double coincidence. Also the brutality and inexorability of 'Elua'. (The cat thing is also an egregore, of course. How better to overthrow a government than to charm literally everyone and destroy its tax base?)

—-

Excellent pastiche of cranks (Prigogine is an antishibboleth):

  I sniffed at the phenethylamine, the body’s own “natural” amphetamine. I felt suddenly dizzy, as if the space inside my head were full of the red-hot Ur-space of the primordial de Sitter cosmos, ready at any moment to make the Prigoginic leap into the “normal” space-time continuum, the Second Prigoginic Level of Complexity… 

“We’re past the Marxist thing,” said Khoklov, warming to his theme as the pill took hold. “Now it’s different. This time Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption: Top to bottom: Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell anything: the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We’ll sell the soil and the forests and the Russian sky. We’ll sell our souls.”

“Any system of rational analysis must live within the strong blind body of mass humanity, Mr. Dertouzas. If we learned anything from the twentieth century, we learned that much, at least”

Ascendancies The Best of Bruce Sterling