Bruce Sterling- Cicada Queen (Year's Best SF #1)

Bruce Sterling was to Cyberpunk as Charles Bernstein was to Language Poetry, or perhaps as Ezra Pound was to Modernist Literature--the movement's chief theorist, booster, architect, propagandist, as well the enemy of the old and worn out. His pseudonymous fanzine Cheap Truth, trashed the SF establishment and promoted a new group of writers who were less concerned with the "sense of wonder" than with technology, socioeconomic critique and femme fatales in mirror shades.

While the most famous of the cyberpunks, William Gibson, set most of his work in a hardboiled near future, Sterling created the Shaper-Mechanist universe, a deep future in which two groups (the gene modifying Shapers and the "post-human" Mechanists) wage a holy and economic war on one another.

"Cicada Queen" is a key story in this world, following a Shaper named Landau as he is initiated into a powerful Mechanist clique and becomes caught up in industrial espionage. Of course the plot is mostly a rack on which Sterling hangs his world-describing coats. The writing is dense, filled with jargon, but also poetic. One of my favorite bits: "...I turned to face my friends, and I was chilled at the raw emotion on their faces. It was as if they had been stripped of skin and watched me with live eyes in slabs of meat."

The Market here clearly extrapolates from the early '80s heroic era of capitalism, with its coked-up stock traders and junk bonds. But it still reflects reality 27 years later:

"Odd how these financial institutions tend to drift from their original purpose. In a way, the Market itself has made a sort of Prigoginic leap. On its face, it's a commercial tool, but it's become a game of conventions and confidences. We Cicadas eat, breathe and sleep rumors, so the Market is a perfect expression of our zeitgeist."

"Yes," I said. "Frail, mannered, and based on practically nothing tangible."

Rating: 8 of 10.0

The Year's Best Science Fiction Series

This is first post in a series reviewing the stories published in the Gardner Dozois-edited series of anthologies called the Year's Best Science Fiction. Beginning in 1984, Dozois--then editor of Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine as well as countless themed anthologies--began publishing these weighty surveys of short fiction. At a time when the SF novel market began favoring bloated trilogies, movie & TV tie-ins and military space opera, Dozois (following in the footsteps of the groundbreaking IASFM editor Sheila Murphy) was keeping the flame of tight, focused storytelling alive in the genre. He either discovered or fostered the careers of many writers who went on to fame: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick, Connie Willis, Orson Scott Card, etc.

I probably would have given up on SF as kid stuff, had I not begun reading IASFM and these anthologies at a crucial point in my teen years. Writers like John Kessel and Lucius Shepard were not just great genre practitioners, but literary stylists--certainly the equal of the mundane authors in that other anthology series Best American Short Stories.

Dozois snagged the lion's share of great stories of IASFM, but these anthologies allowed him to also present tales that had been sold to competing magazines like Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog & Omni, as well as from smaller publications.

The introductions to each volume are overviews of the entire SF field--including novels, movies & TV. These can be slightly depressing as it always seems that SF magazines are folding and publishing houses cutting back.

When the first volume came out, in 1984, SF was already entering a sort of renaissance, with energetic new writers publishing their most intense work, usually in short form. Many of these writers appear in the very first volume:
Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, John Kessel, Kim Stanley Robinson. Alongside them are writers whose careers began a decade or more earlier--James Tiptree Jr., Avram Davidson, Gene Wolfe--as well as a few grandmasters from the golden and silver ages--Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg.

It will be interesting to revisit the stories in these anthologies, and to read the many, many of them I never got around to. Also, I look forward to following the series into the 1990s and 2000s when I was not following SF very closely.

Next up: The first story in the first anthology-- "Cicada Queen" by Bruce Sterling.

Into the Fire by Richard Laymon

Richard Laymon: was he a skilled shockmeister or he was just channeling a demented teenage boy with a permanent boner? After reading three of his books I'm still torn. In the Dark was a great horror tale about a creepy game that ends up going way beyond creepy. The book had a female viewpoint character, something Laymon may have done well to stick with because when his main characters were male, as in Island, the focus became so crudely sexual that Beavis & Butthead would find it a bit much. Not that I'm a puritan, but when a character is being chased by a madman and all he's thinking about is boobies, it strains believability.

Into the Fire has two main characters, one male and one female, and is thus a mixed bag. The two storylines don't merge until late in the book, so it almost feels as though you're reading two novels: One, the story of Pamela, a woman who is kidnapped by a psycho only to be saved by a man named Sharpe who drives a bus full of mannequins and taken to a tiny town where bad people find their way into the cafe's hamburgers. The other, the story of Norman, a college kid who pics up the wrong hitchhikers and ends up going along on a multi-state murder spree.

Both stories start off with a lot of promise and suspense, but Norman's eventually becomes ridiculous--mostly because of his obsession with female body parts. When Norman is first forced into giving a ride to an Elvis emulating sociopath (who is suspiciously reminiscent of the Kid from The Stand) I was pretty intrigued. But by the end I was tired of these characters and waiting for the one interesting figure--the strange avenging angel named Sharpe, to show up and blow everyone away.

Rating: 3.5 of 10