Ascendancies
Authors: Bruce Sterling
Ascendancies
The Best of Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Contents
Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
Part I: The Shaper/Mechanist Stories
Part II: Early Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Compassionate, the Digital
Part III: The Leggy Starlitz Stories
Part IV: The Chattanooga Stories
Part V: Later Science Fiction and Fantasy
Introduction
by Karen Joy Fowler
My very first conversation with Bruce Sterling was about mass outbreaks of hysterical dancing. One of us was shockingly well-informed. Other topics we have discussed over the years: the Fox sisters and their toe-cracking séances, the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now Texas, the writings of Lafcadio Hearn plus the modern Japanese response to the âAnne of Green Gables' books (the one subject leading inevitably to the other), Sasquatch sightings in the Washington territories, cyclical patterns in Chinese politics, feudal messianic movements. If the list trends (it does) toward my own interests and obsessions, this is because one of us is shockingly polite. There may be a subject Sterling cannot discuss with ease and erudition, but I haven't found it yet. Nor will you.
What I notice first about this new collection is the two groups of linked stories. The Shaper/Mechanist grouping is set in the far future. The place is space. These stories constitute some of Sterling's earlier work. The second group takes place in the near future and right here at homeâEurope, Japan, Chattanooga, etc. This second group was written later but they happen earlier. It's just like the two Star Wars trilogies. This makes them tricky to talk about.
The protagonists of the first set, which is the last set, are barely human or not at all so. They have names like Spider Rose. The protagonists of the second set, which is the first set, are completely human. They have names like Spider Pete. Leggy Starlitz. Deep Eddy. The females in the near future are trained, armed, and earnest. The females in the far future are bulbous and have many eyes. What strikes me is how within the linked stories Sterling's tone is consistent, but from the first group to the second has changed completely.
The Shaper/Mechanist work is serious, even apocalyptic. The landscapes are grim and the plots grimmer. In contrast, the tone of the near future stories is detached and witty. Sterling is having fun and has chosen to do so conspicuously. This is true of his sentences as well as his plots. He's not the only one having fun. Sentences like “[double entendres] rose to his lips like drool from the id,” certainly improve
my
mood. So do phrases like “Pamyat rightism with a mystical pan-Slavic spin” and “autonomous self-assembly proteinaceous biotech,” at least when, like this, they're tossed about like confetti. A juggler appears briefly, wearing smart gloves, flinging “lit torches in flaming arcs three stories high.” A dead soldier we'll never see again is described as having “come down from the heavensâ¦a leaping, brick-busting, lightning-spewing exoskeleton, all acronyms and input jacks.” Things are “fast, cheap, and out of control.”
Europe may teem with terroristsâsome of them Finnish nationalists, some of them devout Islamists, some of them Irish soccer fans. The web may have compiled Orwellian dossiers accessible to anyone with a bit of tech and a tolerance for burnt eyelids. The Chinese may be burying inconvenient ethnicities underground and pretending it's space travel. But Sterling is too interested in it all to be gloomy. It's not all bad news, of course. Gene-spliced ticks dispense athletic performance enhancers. You store them in your armpits!
His protagonists are just as unflappable as he is. The near future Sterling hero is nimble, fluent in the language of the moment, even-tempered even in defeat (though feminists do seem to make Leggy surly.) Most of all, this protagonist tends to be lucky. He's not himself an activist, though he's surrounded by them (and they don't look good)âidealists, terrorists, capitalists, sociologists, and all of them agents of mayhem. Inside the chaos, the Sterling hero looks for a niche, an angle, an obsession. His goals tend to be short term; his primary talent is in staying afloat when the water is really, really cold.
I don't mean to make these characters sound interchangeable. Leggy is slicker; Eddy is more romantic; Pete is more disciplined; Lyle is more centered. But they all share a certain innate Sterling-like cheerfulness.
Besides these linked stories, the collection contains other futures, some of them in the future, some of them not. Sterling is so often characterized as a futurist, it's easy to forget that his range extends backwards as well as forwards, that he's as interested in the futures of the past as he is in those of the future. (Who could trust a futurist who wasn't?)
“Dinner in Audoghast” takes place in Northern Africa around the year 1040. In it, an opulent evening's entertainment is marred by a leprous doom-prophesizing beggar. Part Cassandra, part Ozymandias, the story is the pure distillation of one of Sterling's recurring themes. What does “Dinner in Audoghast” have in common with “The Blemmye's Stratagem” (11
th
century, Holy Land), “Telliamed” (Marseille, 1737), “Flowers of Edo” (Kabukiza District, Edo, mid 1800s), “Our Neural Chernobyl” (Earth, 2056), “Swarm,” (2248, planetoid circling Betelgeuse), “Spider Rose” (2283, habitat orbiting Uranus), “Cicada Queen” (2354, suburbs of the Czarina-Kluster), and “Sunken Gardens” (2554, Mars)?
In all these stories, the future is descending like a foot on an anthill. There can only be one Lobster King. If you think you're that guy, then maybe your happy ending is only one exoskeleton away. I'm guessing you're not.
Three of the stories hereâ“The Little Magic Shop,” “The Sword of Damocles,” and “Dori Bangs”âare metafictional and experimental. “Dori Bangs” is noteworthy for being openly heartfeltânot a move Sterling makes oftenâand for ending in poetry. Sterling's neither a writer who depends much on the white space in a story nor one who lingers at a resonant image. His style is and always has been exuberant, abundant, a combination of speed, noise, action, and, most of all, the dizzying accumulation of detail.
But take a look at the last paragraphs of the last story, “The Blemmye's Stratagem.” It seems to me that what we have there is a poetic pause. Knowing how much Sterling admires the hearty, artless, genre stuff, I can only assume that any shift toward the literary is temporary and has come upon him by accident. Probably it would be rude to notice. So I've said nothing of the sort. You mistook me.
What Sterling tends to be admired most for is the level of invention in his work. Inventions that for other writers would underpin whole stories are crammed in here end over end. They often have nothing to do with the plot, but they have everything to do with the impact. More than the characters, more than the events, these tossed off inventions often feel like the point, the purpose of the story. One reads with the growing suspicion that maybe Sterling lives rather closer to the future than the rest of us do.
That's a good line, isn't it? It's not mine.
And the faster the future comes at us, the better Sterling's mood seems to get. So these stories are not only fun to read, but also, taken as a group, oddly comforting. If Sterling sees what's coming more clearly than I do, and he's not upset by it, at least not until 2248 or thereabouts, why should I be?
Admittedly, Sterling's comfort is the cold sort. In order to enjoy it, we have to avert our eyes from some troubling parallels between events on the ground in the far future story “Swarm” and the near future story “Taklamakan.” We have to stop minding so much about the terrorists and such like. But, and speaking just for me here, I wouldn't believe in anything much warmer. Even from the pen of a world renowned, often quoted, much admired futurist like Bruce Sterling.
Foreword
by Bruce Sterling
Ascendancies
is a compilation of my science fiction stories over the past three decades. This book is a career summary of sorts, so I feel a certain need to pull the fireproof curtain, bring you back into the hot, grimy forge here, and explain how these works came about.
I started reading science fiction stories at the age of thirteen. Before that time, I liked to read encyclopedias. In those pre-electronic days, encyclopedias were the densest textual knowledge I could find. There was something very refreshing to me in the way encyclopedias baldly tackled every conceivable issue wholesale. I thrived on that approach. Still, I didn't write any encyclopedias. I tried to write stories.
My earliest, faltering stories, written as a young teen, concerned two simple topics, (1) everything that ever now or formerly existed and (2) anything I saw fit to make up. In a word, they were encyclopedic. My work hasn't changed all that much since those days. I started as a young omnivore, I worked my way up to dilettante, and if I live long enough, I'll be a polymath.
Eventually, I became a science fiction writer, mostly through the kindly efforts of other people. A lot of authors loudly moan that writing is a lonely, neglected profession, but I never lacked for help and succor. Loved ones were positive, mentors and colleagues were thoughtful and honest, the fan community was supportive. I wrote almost all these stories in Austin, a particularly readerly city. You wouldn't guess it from the dire, edgy, hard-scrabble tone of some of these texts, but life was sweet.
As an oil-company émigré kid much given to globetrotting, I quite liked it that there were aliens in science fiction. It particularly pleased me that so many of those aliens were the writers. Not just a host of deeply alienated American writers, whom I idolized. There were people like Stanislaw Lem: a Polish Communist was probably the best science fiction writer in the world. William Burroughs. Burroughs was a queer beatnik junkie. He was canaille. You couldn't even mention his name to teachers, to parents. Jules Verne, that hundred-year-old French Bohemian. And Italo Calvino. Calvino was doing things with ink on paper like nobody else on Earth. Calvino clearly had some kind of distinct agenda; you could really smell the midnight oil burning there. “
Cosmicomics
” Whatever that was, that Italian guy was doing it on purpose.
I deeply admired practically every form of science fiction, especially the kinds that weren't entertaining. I had a lasting professional interest in kinds of science fiction that people could barely endure reading. Victorian technothrillers. Outdated space operas. Soviet SF. Ticked-off feminist SF tracts: I took particular interest in those because it was so clear that I wasn't supposed to understand them.