Rating: 
Summary: Neat near-future stories
Review: Seven nice, fairly low-key stories set in near future worlds on the verge of becoming terribly strange . . . though not necessarily terrible. If there's a common theme here, it's that life will go on -- and may be a bit more fun -- if the corporate, social, and governmental status quo had some holes blown in it. The best is "Maneki Neko," a genial story set in a Japan where the traditional gift economy has become fantastically enhanced. This one's up for a Hugo. The weakest story is "The Littlest Jackal," another entry in the Siggy Starlitz sequence. Here the underground opportunist finds himself in the company of mercenaries trying to overthrow the local government and establish an off-shore banking haven. Not bad, but not up to the rest of the collection. Strangest is a collaboration with Rudy Rucker about a Silicon Valley startup, synthetic jellyfish, and trouble in oil country.
Rating: 
Summary: Sterling's third collection is a winner!
Review: Sterling is probably the best writer working in the SF field today, and easily the best to emerge during the '90s. His short fiction is wonderful, and the "Deep Eddy" sequence of stories reprinted here are particularly strong. One point though: the story "Taklamakon" listed in the promotional material and Amazon synopsis as original to the book is suspiciously similar to the Hugo-nominated novella "Takalamakan" published in Asimov's last year. Regardless of that, you have to own this one.
Rating:
Summary: Visions.
Review: Taklamakan is some of the most interesting sci-fi I've read ever. The story, the characters and the setting of this world drew me in and riveted me on my chair. I was soaring. The Bicycle Repair Man is stunning also. For any Sterling fans, a great if not a "must" read.
Rating:
Summary: Good stuff from Sterling.
Review: This collection contains seven stories, all previously published in magazines between 1993 and 1998. One story, "Big Jelly" was co-authored with Rudy Rucker. I liked this anthology a lot despite the fact that a couple of the stories were rather weak. Some of the stories seem to have been written by extrapolating current events into the future and these, like "The Littlest Jackal" are the weakest in the collection. Also, in that story, the author mis-places Helsinki north of the Arctic circle and so he has the sun not setting in the summer, that was just sloppy writing. The stories such as "Maneki Neko" (my favourite) and the "Deep Eddy" series, that extrapolate technology are the ones that make the book worth while. In these, Sterling's wry view of the way that technology might change our world is both thought provoking and funny. The last three stories are all set in the same world and they follow the largely unrelated exploits of a group of people living on the edge of a highly technological society. I felt as though the author was taking some of the people that he met while writing "The Hacker Crackdown" and then dropping them into the middle of the 21st century. These are three great stories.
Rating:
Summary: Good stuff from Sterling.
Review: This collection contains seven stories, all previously published in magazines between 1993 and 1998. One story, "Big Jelly" was co-authored with Rudy Rucker. I liked this anthology a lot despite the fact that a couple of the stories were rather weak. Some of the stories seem to have been written by extrapolating current events into the future and these, like "The Littlest Jackal" are the weakest in the collection. Also, in that story, the author mis-places Helsinki north of the Arctic circle and so he has the sun not setting in the summer, that was just sloppy writing. The stories such as "Maneki Neko" (my favourite) and the "Deep Eddy" series, that extrapolate technology are the ones that make the book worth while. In these, Sterling's wry view of the way that technology might change our world is both thought provoking and funny. The last three stories are all set in the same world and they follow the largely unrelated exploits of a group of people living on the edge of a highly technological society. I felt as though the author was taking some of the people that he met while writing "The Hacker Crackdown" and then dropping them into the middle of the 21st century. These are three great stories.
Rating: 
Summary: An uneven collection
Review: This uneven collection points up a lot of what was going wrong for Bruce Sterling in the 1990s: an overconfidence in his own ability to have his finger on the pulse and sometimes seemingly superficial understanding of other cultures replacing in-depth research. This is at its worst in stories like 'The Littlest Jackal', set largely in the Aland Islands between Finland and Sweden - I've been there, and he just seems to use the islands as an exotic locale without any real understanding of the culture or geography. This story also features the return of Leggy Starlitz, the shady gun-for-hire of several stories in Globalhead, Sterling's previous and equally uneven collection. Unfortunately where in those stories he was amusing, here he has out-stayed his welcome and become tedious. I know these stories are an ironic riff on the old cyberpunk assassin theme and the superficiality is probably intended, but still - I don't think it works. Also lightweight is Sacred Cow, which has a great concept (Bollywood film-makers come to Britain to take advantage of cheap labour in a country devastated by mad cow disease), but which largely fails to deliver more than a few cheap laughs. The title character of Deep Eddy (who gets a mention in a couple of other tales) is another of those irritating know-it-alls that Sterlings seems to specialise in at present. Will the geeks inherit the earth? Perhaps he's right, but it doesn't make for interesting characterisation here. Neil Stephenson does this a lot more effectively. However, there are some really good stories in this collection. I've lived in Japan, the setting for Maneki Neko, which in this context appears to suffer from the same faults as the lesser stories in demonstrating no more than a passing grasp of the culture in which it is set. However, having thought about this more, I realised that when I first read this story when it was published in F&SF's 'best of' collection, I really enjoyed its subtleties and humour (like many in that fine collection), and indeed its Japaneseness. Perhaps this time I reread it via Leggy Starlitz instead! The long Bicycle Repairman and Taklamakan, set in the same world as Deep Eddy, are also better, the former a fairly gritty urban tale in a set amongst techie squatters, the latter a effectively dusty and atmospheric tale of some of the same foreign techs and spaceships in central Asia. I also enjoyed the wobbly and wonky Big Jelly which is at least partly down to lunatic collaborator Rudy Rucker's all-round obsession with jellyfish! Sterling started to return to form with the novel, Holy Fire, but for fans of short fiction I suggest going back to his first satisfyingly varied collection, Crystal Express, which featured both early cyberpunk and more tradtional space-and-aliens sci-fi done equally well. Overall this collection suggests that Sterling isn't putting as much effort into his short fiction as he used to, but there are very few writers who start off writing short stories who continue to do them as well or as often as their careers progress. While there are some really worthwhile pieces in here, my reading of them at least was unfortunately coloured by the not so great ones.
Rating:
Summary: Sterling's best collection so far
Review: With one or two exceptions, "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" exhibits the best Sterling short fiction I've read so far...the concluding three, beginning with "Deep Eddy," form a sort of quasi-novel that shows Sterling doing what he does best: providing widescreen views of _believable_ near-futures, peopled by sympathetic characters who find themselves in predicaments of sometimes overpowering weirdness in a world already steeped in the Philosophy of the Ejector Seat. Arguably the best of the stories here is "Big Jelly," a fevered collaboration with Rudy Rucker, whose motto sums up Sterling's shared vision nicely: "Seek Ye The Gnarl!" This is a spendid, lingering collection, more coherent and immediately enjoyable than "Crystal Express" or "Globalhead."
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