From Publishers Weekly
The 13 entries in this welcome fourth collection from postcyberpunk Sterling (Distraction) run the gamut from SF to ghost stories, but all deal with the impact of the strange, be it supernatural or scientific, on the individual. "Junk DNA" (with Rudy Rucker) deftly captures the fast-paced ethos of the 1990s, with its dot-com startups and meltdowns, as does "Code," in which a male computer geek, faced with that most troubling of all creatures, a woman, reduces our patriarchic civilization to a system he can hack. "User-Centric," told as a series of corporate e-mails among a team launching a new product, spins into something far odder as we learn what that product is. In an intriguing time-travel tale, "The Blemmye's Stratagem," an abbess and an assassin work for a man who can only be an alien. Sterling is that rare author who writes witty, humorous thought-experiments centered on great ideas. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Sterling's short stories run the gamut of sf's potential suggested by the diverse headings of this collection's sections, which include "fiction for scientists" and "the past is a future that already happened." An example of fiction for scientists is a story about talking bugs that was inspired by an entomologist's paper on firefly biology. Stories of the past as future that has happened include the ghost story "The Denial" and a semihistorical piece about the Crusades and encountering aliens, "The Blemmye's Stratagem." Sterling's work resists those oversimplified descriptions. His stories run deeper than can be accurately suggested by a phrase, into the realm of decisions yet to be made and currents of political thought that resonate with the contemporary reader. "User-Centric" is a further example; stemming from the fascination Sterling contracted, while serving as "visionary in residence" at a design school in California, for the way designers work and think, it demonstrates thinking outside the box taken about as far as it can go. Sterling is a perceptive and far-seeing storyteller, whose work features both entertaining surfaces and penetrating commentary. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Bitingly satiric-and quite often brilliant."
Book Description
I'm a science fiction writer. This is a golden opportunity to get up to most any mischief imaginable. With this fourth collection of my stories, I'm going to prove this to you. With these words, Bruce Sterling—author of New York times Notable Books of the Year and one of the great names in contemporary fiction—introduces his latest collection of thirteen tales. If you're familiar with his cyberpunk creations you won't be disappointed, but these stories range far beyond the limits of future technology. Visionary in Residence takes the reader to places never imagined and certainly where no one has ever been.
About the Author
from reason.com:
"In the 1980s, Bruce Sterling became a leader of the 'cyberpunk' revolution — a literary movement that combined the artistic ambition of science fiction’s 1960s New Wave with the hard-core speculation associated with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke. Cyberpunk’s chief theme was the way technologies evolve us even as we evolve them, and its influence can be seen in almost every science fiction writer of note today, from Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds to Cory Doctorow. Neuromancer author William Gibson may have been the best-known of the cyberpunks, but the movement’s chief theorist and propagandist was Sterling, whose writing covered far more territory than that of his peers...."
Sterling lives in Austin, Texas. He is a design professor "at the moment" — the "Visionary in Residence" at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
He has appeared on Nightline, The Late Show, MTV, and is the author of nine novels, three of which were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Difference Engine, co-written with William Gibson, was a national bestseller. He has also published three short-story collections and two nonfiction books. He has written for many magazines, including Newsweek, Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review, and Wired, where he has been a contributing writer since its inception. He does public speaking "as a hobby," and has addressed academics, market experts, experimental media groups, phone regulators, state bureaucrats, and architects, among others.
"In the 1980s, Bruce Sterling became a leader of the 'cyberpunk' revolution — a literary movement that combined the artistic ambition of science fiction’s 1960s New Wave with the hard-core speculation associated with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke. Cyberpunk’s chief theme was the way technologies evolve us even as we evolve them, and its influence can be seen in almost every science fiction writer of note today, from Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds to Cory Doctorow. Neuromancer author William Gibson may have been the best-known of the cyberpunks, but the movement’s chief theorist and propagandist was Sterling, whose writing covered far more territory than that of his peers...."
Sterling lives in Austin, Texas. He is a design professor "at the moment" — the "Visionary in Residence" at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
He has appeared on Nightline, The Late Show, MTV, and is the author of nine novels, three of which were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Difference Engine, co-written with William Gibson, was a national bestseller. He has also published three short-story collections and two nonfiction books. He has written for many magazines, including Newsweek, Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review, and Wired, where he has been a contributing writer since its inception. He does public speaking "as a hobby," and has addressed academics, market experts, experimental media groups, phone regulators, state bureaucrats, and architects, among others.
