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
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