Schismatrix

Rating:
Summary: Journey through the future of humanity
Review: Don't feel comfortable with the planet your on? Change your body to cope with the environment! This book explores one possible future for humanity - better living through genetic engineering! Set against a backdrop of a seedy, corrupt, solar system, we are shown the survivalist nature of mankind at its best (and worst). sexy, explosive, witty and pure science-fiction, this highly underrated book is well worth a read!

Rating:
Summary: Dizzying future history of humanity
Review: In Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling takes us on a high-velocity spin through the future of our species. He follows the long career of Abelard Lindsay, genetically altered using the revolutionary technologies of a group called the Shapers, in a series of adventures and intrigues that take him across the solar system in a decades-long battle with the ancient Mechanists, whose power comes from the use of their own, prosthetic technologies. These and other competing groups are knitted together into the Schismatrix with the arrival of a species of powerful aliens called the Investors.

Sterling has a fertile and unruly imagination, describing the welter of new societies and political systems that develop along with the dizzying advance of technology and the interaction between humanity and the Investors. Reading this book is like taking a ride on a bullet train across colorful new territory-fascinating and exhilarating, but not wholly satisfying by the time the trip is through. The ride is simply too fast and jarring to allow the reader to fully digest or understand the experience.

Rating:
Summary: A glut of wild ideas that never really get developed
Review: Over a hundred years of future human history are laid out in this imaginative and sometimes bizarre novel by Bruce Sterling. The protagonist, young firebrand Abelard Lindsay, is exiled from the satellite of his birth after an act of youthful rebellion goes awry. His subsequent adventures take him (and us) on a kaleidoscopic ride through the inhabited reaches of the solar system. In his struggle to survive in a series of brutally harsh environments, he must deal with the vicissitudes of living, loving and acquiring credit in an ever-accelerating society, and at the same time stay one step ahead of his dread nemesis, his treacherous former friend Constantine. As a backdrop to his story, there is the ongoing social conflict between Mechanists, who favor advanced cybernetics, and the Shapers, who would rather modify humanity genetically.

Devotees of cyberpunk will almost certainly enjoy this novel, which moves at a frenetic pace, includes frequent references to prosthetic devices, and tries to fit a modest degree of real science into its outlandish space opera. Certainly the young Lindsay could be considered a punk, and not a particularly likable one, at that, although he seems to mellow as the (many) decades fly by.

But the problems with this book are many, and tend to undercut the positives, the biggest mistake being that Sterling just tries to do too much. There's a point in the novel where Lindsay has successfully dealt with the pirates, liberated the station, heard the news that the aliens have landed, and he's even got the girl, and this reader found himself thinking, "this would have been a good place to end the story - too bad it's only halfway through the book". The problem is that too many of Sterling's ideas get pretty short shift, lost in a cascade of characters and events and locales and discoveries and treacheries and escapes and suicides and lies and martyrdoms, etc... Sterling might have written a whole series of much better novels by approaching each piece of his tale as a separate work, rather than cramming it all into one volume. Admittedly, the scope of the whole is admirable, and serves to make Sterling's point if we concede it to be that "whatever happens life wins out in the end", but ultimately the pacing is too erratic, the plot too episodic, and the characters too unsympathetic to merit a real recommendation.