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A Good Old-Fashioned Future : Bruce Sterling
by Lilly Hunter
In the Science Fiction literature of today, there are many different visions of how humanity's future might turn out. Some take place "in a galaxy far away" and have princesses, wizards and thinly-disguised WWII dogfights in space. Others take place on Earth, in a near future extrapolated from where we are now, following up trends and technologies already in existence. This is a newer kind of Science Fiction, usually referred to as "Cyberpunk". It began to be established in the mid-1980s by authors such as William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Neil Stephenson and Bruce Sterling.
Bruce Sterling's "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" belongs to this second category. A collection of seven short stories originally published in various SciFi mags during the 1990's, it has for the most part aged very well. There are a couple of amusing misses in terms of Sterling’s abilities as a futurist, but forgivable.
As one can guess from the name, the first story, "Maneki Neko" takes place in Japan and explores a social structure that might someday arise from the combination of the internet, mobile phones and our growing "connectedness". For those who like the novels of William Gibson, there are echoes of his book "Idoru" in this story. This is perhaps not so surprising: Sterling and Gibson are old friends and have even written a novel together, "The Difference Engine" which belongs to the sub-genre,"Steam-punk" in which alternative pasts (as opposed to alternative futures) are written about.
A maneki neko, or "beckoning cat" is a Japanese figurine of a gilded cat, with one paw raised. It is supposed to bring good fortune. Interestingly, “a cat’s paw” in English can mean a person used by someone else in order to achieve some aim. In this story, it has become the symbol of a vast international network of people who collaborate in a kind of "network gift economy".
During the 1980s & 90s, a type of barter network started to emerge in parts of North America and Europe whereby a dentist for example, would fix a house painter's teeth in return for having a room painted in her practice. This was worrisome to government, because it effectively cut the taxman out of the loop. This story takes this phenomenon from reality, and exaggerates both the network's activities and the reaction of government to it. This is a very tightly written story, very cinematic - you have no idea what to expect next and the action builds and builds towards the end of the story.
The second story, "Big Jelly" takes place in the golden land of Venture Capital, Start-Ups and generalised flakiness known as California. It was written together with Rudy Rucker, who is a professor of Computer Science who tends to write rather tongue-in-cheek SciFi books himself.
"Big Jelly" is the archetypal 'mad scientist unleashes dangerous technology on unsuspecting world' story, so familiar from 1950's SciFi films. It features a rather amusing young Texas oil millionaire. It is easy to imagine him as part Jim Nabors, part Owen Wilson. He is young and rich, but at the same time a "hick". Bruce Sterling lives in Austin, Texas and was probably making good use of personal experience when he created the hilarious dialogue that ensues between the Texan investor and his Californian wizz kid. Though written in a light-hearted style, there is a serious undercurrent. A lot of proper science is referred to as well as some more controversial theories. For example, there are hints of Wolfram's Computational Universe - "life's just a pattern of behaviour", plus an open reference to a somewhat disreputable idea put forth by Rupert Sheldrake called morphic resonance, though the latter is presented as pseudo-science.
One of the most enjoyable things about this story is the way in which the characters' attributes are revealed through their "accessories". Revel Pullen, the Texan, wears an odd combination of classic denim ranch overalls - "Can't bust 'ems" with equally classic snakeskin cowboy boots, but mixes this with high-tech designer Italian sunglasses and a mobile phone the size of a cigarette pack. Wait a minute. Reading this story in 2008, it seems odd that an enormously rich young guy would have such a big, clunky phone. Then you realise that the story was published in 1994, when cell phones were relatively rare, horribly expensive and big as shoes. What a miss, Bruce! You can now fit two or three cell phones into a cigarette package!
Several of the stories in this collection feature characters taken from the full spectrum of human sexuality, which is unusual in SciFi. The main character in Big Jelly, Tug Mesoglia, is a gay male Californian programmer, approaching 40 and single. Another reminder of this having been written in 1994, is that Tug is portrayed as having camp behaviour and even dresses up in women's clothing at one point. His gayness is as exaggerated and picturesque as Revel's rugged Texan manliness. Tug drives an expensive sports car and dresses like "a depraved British schoolboy". This difference between them is an excellent dramatic device, and is even embodied in their names - tug and pull. Incidentally, "mesoglia" is the scientific term for the "jelly" that jellyfish are made out of, an appropriate name indeed.
"The Littlest Jackal" is an amusing parodic combination of the name of an old US TV show called "The Littlest Hobo", (starring a German Shepherd) and the code name of the famous professional assassin/terrorist/spy "The Jackal". This story may be one of the few you will ever read that takes place in Finland. One of Sterling's preoccupations as a writer is with small networks of people who live outside of normal society but who, in some way, pose a threat to it. For example, he has written an important book of non-fiction about computer hackers, "The Hacker Crackdown". "The Littlest Jackal" is about a liberation movement with quite overt references to the Baader-Meinhoff group. Though the character of the Jackal is quite engaging, this is probably the weakest story in the book. There is no interesting technology explored and there is a strange sub-plot that involves trying to cheat a very old and famous Finnish author of children's books out of some intellectual property rights. By the end of the story you may feel completely baffled.
The fourth story, "Sacred Cow" takes place in a dystopic future UK (circa 2050) where Mad Cow disease has killed off most of the population. Britain is being visited by a troupe of Indian "Bollywood" film people, who are shooting in the UK because it is so cheap. It should be mentioned right up front that Sterling is a huge Bollywood fan, so this story must be seen as work of love, rather like the Star Trek references that sometimes turn up in non-SciFi films such as "Fight Club". Although this story is funny in parts, its basic premise is false: BSE has not turned out to be a major plague and so the story feels horribly dated. It would have been better to have made the plague some "mysterious disease" similar to BSE. Thankfully, it is the shortest piece in the book, only about 18 pages long.
The final three stories are linked together by a chain of shared characters. "Deep Eddy" is the first of them. One can wonder at the name, recalling all the "fast Eddies" that exist in the sports world, but Deep Eddy is actually the name of the very first public swimming pool ever built in Texas (in 1916) and something of an institution in Austin where Sterling lives. The Deep Eddy of the story is an American in Germany, sent by his secret network to deliver a data disk to an "information guru" in Dusseldorf. The year is 2035. Unfortunately, Eddy has unlucky timing, as the city is involuntarily hosting a "wende", a take-back-the-streets/G8 meeting-spontaneous-protest-rally type of phenomenon. This makes his stay there both more dangerous and more complicated than planned. He is met at the airport by a high-tech enabled female bodyguard. He becomes attracted to her, in a über-geek kind of way.
There is plenty of delightful "tech" in all three stories and they all make use of "spex", spectacles that are also computer screens offering enhanced vision and access to databases.
Bruce Sterling is very interested in design in general, especially in an urban context (http://www.viridiandesign.org/manifesto.html), which comes out well here. There are some odd design decisions taken though, such as having beanbag seating on planes and city buses (would that really be safe?), and having riot police wear pink armour (“a soothing colour”). All three stories are packed with interesting sociological ideas as well. In this one, to take an example, a new type of crime, "skin theft" is rampant. Genetic samples are stolen from the well-to-do in fancy restaurants, and a year later the victims are contacted and told that they have a new-born child who is being held captive for ransom.
There is another mobile phone snafu in this story - but find it yourself!
The second in the trilogy is "Bicycle Repairman", features Lyle, a close friend of Deep Eddy, in his squat in a Mall in Chattanooga in the US. Two years have passed. Deep Eddy never came back from Europe, but sends stuff by post to cycle repairman Lyle for safe keeping. Lyle lives in his shop, which is affixed to the ceiling of a defunct Mall similar to the Bridge community in Gibson's Bridge Trilogy (Visual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties). This trilogy cannot be recommended highly enough. So if you enjoy these final stories in "A Good Old-Fashioned Future", you know what to read next!
One day Lyle receives a weird set-top box from Eddy, which turns out to have functions that can cause havoc in national politics. A ninja-like government agent comes calling to try to recover the box. Lyle calls the City Spiders, a group of urban climbers who helped him hang up his shop from the roof and they help him rid himself of both the box and the girl.
The final story, "Taklamakan", features Spider Pete, the climber who came to Lyle's rescue in "Bicycle Repairman". Taklamakan is an immense, cold desert wedged in between China, Mongolia and Tajikistan. This place must have come to Sterling's notice when, in the late 1980s, a number of very unusual mummies were unearthed there. These mummies, some 4,000 years old, were very tall (one over 2 metres), had Caucasian features and reddish-blonde hair. An intriguing find, and it is easy to imagine how it kicked off thoughts of what else might be hidden in such a desolate place, perhaps for millennia.
Right now, in 2008, Russia is advertising for people who would be willing to spend three years in a simulated deep-space environment, in order to study the effects of boredom, isolation and limited dietary variation on humans. Sterling has imagined a project like this, a hidden compound, where three large cylindrical "spaceships" are placed in the dark with fake stars on the walls. Inside are people. Do they know that they are not really in Space?
Spider Pete and Katrinko, a world-class climber and a "neuter" (a person who has chosen to forego developing reproductive organs as this grants an 8% metabolic advantage) fly in to the area to find out what is going on there, equipped to the teeth with high tech gear most of which does not exist yet. Some of the gear is loosely based on mountain climbing gear, but generally speaking the technology described in this story is a real tour de force of creative thinking.
A Good Old-Fashioned Future is a good old-fashioned inspiring read, full of suspense, cutting edge technology and absolutely lovable characters. If you like the mindset of this book, have a look at Bruce Sterling’s blog as well: http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ .
Review by Lilly Hunter
Published August 11th 2008