Schismatrix Plus

A trip round the solar system in Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist future, as humanity leaves the Earth behind, spreading in independent autonomus groups in habitats and enclaves, breeding strange technologies and philosophies and ideologies, with sharply divided rivalries and violent conflicts in a future that refuses to be coherent or singular. It'd be easy to say this is dated now, but it's a wilder, more diverse and strange future than the vision of, say, The Expanse, which has a sort of sturdier throwback simplicity - this is far more daring and ambitious in terms of throwing people out into space to see what happens then racing around to see as much of it as possible in its short, tight word-count.

This Plus edition includes the four Shaper/Mechanist stories from Crytal Express, the complete Shaper/Mechanist texts. Is it ironic that one of the foundational texts of the cyberpunk movement is space opera? I always thought the sense that there was a split between the subgenres was artificial, if not illusory. Maybe I imagined it?

I’m pretty sure I read Schismatrix back in the very early 1990s… but I also have a vague memory of borrowing the novel when staying with a friend on a trip to the UK a couple of years after I’d moved to the Middle East in the mid-1990s. Schismatrix Plus, published a decade after the original novel, includes it and five short stories set in the same universe. I suspect I’d read a couple of the short stories first, and then read the novel when staying with that friend. Whatever the truth of the matter, I’d pretty much no memory of the novel’s actual story when coming to this recent reread. Certainly, the one big thing I’d forgotten about Schismatrix was that it featured aliens. In the future of the novel, a couple of centuries hence, humanity has colonised the Solar system and those based off Earth have split into two factions - the Shapers, who improve themselves through genetic engineering, and the Mechanists, who use technology and cybernetics. The two factions are in an almost constant state of political and commercial rivalry slash war. Lindsay is born in an O’Neill cylinder orbiting the moon. Despite being a Mechanist, he’s sent to the Shapers for diplomatic training (and some genetic engineering). Later, he’s exiled from his cislunar republic, and embarks on a career bouncing around the outer Solar system, growing more and more politically powerful, although typically as an eminence grise. He has a rival, Constantine, and the two are at constant, if often hidden, loggerheads. Aliens, the Investors, large dinosaur-like interstellar merchants, arrive, and there is a peace of sorts between Shapers and Mechanists. But it doesn’t last. Sterling’s future solar system is pretty neat, if a little dated in places, such as the frequent mentions of “tape”, but Lindsay’s and Constantine’s political genius, even the reasons they’re so admired, is never explained and never really convinces. They are what they are because Sterling tells us so. The most interesting character in the book, Kitsune, who later becomes an actual space station, doesn’t appear often enough. The aliens are dull, and not very original. Although the Swarm in the story titled, er, ‘Swarm’, is based around a neat idea, later used by Paul McAuley in his 1989 novel, Secret Harmonies. Sterling went on to write much better novels than Schismatrix, although it remains popular to this day. It was ahead of its time back in 1985, but sf has moved on a great deal since then. Schismatrix Plus is worth a read, the original novel on its own not so much.

A study of future humanity through space, this book follows the life of one man who I don't particularly care about one way or the other. While the ideas are good, the lack of sympathetic characters makes this a tough read.

This is a "grand tour" style novel, set in our Solar System after biopunks and cyborgs get kicked off Earth. It's ironic, funny, and packed full of ideas.

I hate to give up on a book once I've started it, but I almost gave up on this one. It is written as if the author was on hallucinogenic drugs. I did manage to slog through and finish the book, but I can't recommend it. Although the story gets a little more coherent as you move through the book, the prose is too filled with imaginative rambles to keep my interest. It is filled with descriptions of what people in "post-human" societies do to "enhance" their bodies. The plot is thin and not well developed. The characters are only mildly engaging. I found it very hard to relate to them. I would have given this one star instead of two, except that I reserve one star for books that I have totally rejected and stopped reading before completion.

Science fiction is often called the fiction of ideas. In a way, this is insulting. Yes, in the past, it was the ideas that drove the stories - not the people, not the story, just a litany of ideas looking for a story. (In fact, when you look back at some of the very early famous stories – I’m thinking in particular of Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” – they still “wow”, but are primarily ideas and strange images hung together with a thin plot that exists simply to showcase the ideas.) Science fiction has come a very long way and it is a fiction that, at its best, is a successful amalgam of all the necessities of good story telling.

I bring this up because Schismatrix, the novel that is at the heart of this collection of Bruce Sterling stories about the Shaper/Mechanist universe he developed, strikes me as idea after idea after idea desperately searching for something to make the reader care. And, as evidenced by this comment, I couldn’t seem to care. The novel, wrapped around the long (extremely long, absurdly long, gimmicky long) life of the primary antagonist Linsday, spans most of the history of this universe Sterling has created. While telling the epic story of a universe’s transformation, this has the effect of making the humans less real. And, that means there wasn’t really anyone to care about.

The remaining stories are better, but that may just be in comparison with the novel itself because I know I have read these before and, while somewhat enjoyable, have never really been impressed.

I keep trying to give Sterling a try, but I am consistently underwhelmed. I am sure there are others who fall in love with the universe and the detail. But it is not for me, and I would never give this to someone and say “This is how cyberpunk got started” as it might drive them away from ever trying more.

Sterling's Shapers-Mechanist stories are some of the most imaginative and somewhat disturbing images of the human future I have read. These stories explore the cultural, political and socio-economic issues of humanity as science allows ever more extensive modification of the body and mind through genetics and prosthetics. Highly intelligent and entertaining reading that I would recommend to any hard SF fan.

weird but awesome

Schismatrix is a meditation on what it means to grow older, both individually and as a species. Unlike most of Sterling's later work, it's set in the distant future; and, stylistically, it reminds me of Roger Zelazny's work in a way that Sterling's other novels don't. But the themes of this book will be familiar to Sterling's fans and, if the writing isn't up to the standards of his best work, the ideas certainly are. Although I'd probably recommend Holy Fire as a better starting point for new readers, I'm impressed that someone so young could wrote such a good book about characters so old. The additional stories collected here aren't outstanding, and they're available elsewhere, but they gain from being read alongside the novel. [2008-08-07]