Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.
A Good Old-Fashioned Future
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.