Customer Reviews

Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling

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Bruce Sterling fans will find nothing new here, sadly. But the selection of his best works will be a pleasant reread. While newcomers to Sterling's works can get an excellent synopsis of why he is so highly regarded. The stories in this book originally appeared in sundry magazines, scattered over 20 or so years. The diversity of topics speaks to a versatile writing ability.

As to what is be the best story, this might not be a useful question. Readers' tastes will vary widely enough to make difficult any sort of consensus judgment. My personal favourite would be the Dinner in Audoghast, for its piognant evocation of a lost culture. It also differs strongly from the cyberpunk flavoured tales for which Sterling is renowned.

Bruce Sterling, one of the best practitioners of science fiction and every kind of writing that can be presented using the tropes of sci-fi, i.e. fantasy, finally allows us to get a glimpse of his entire range of literary creativity. The stories are unlike most of the contemporary science fiction that fill up the extremely boring volumes edited by gardner Dozois, or some of the other pretenders. They are fresh, fast, driven equally by plot & characters, and very tightly told. Sterling gives too hoots about propagation of politically correct themes through fiction, and concentrates on creating stuff that you are bound to remember as "one hell of a story". The contents of this massive collection are: -

(*) Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
(*) Foreword by Bruce Sterling

Part I: The Sharper/Mechanist Stories

1) Swarm
2) Spider Rose
3) Cicada Queen
4) Sunken Gardens
5) Twenty Evocations

Part II: Early Science Fiction and Fantasy

6) Green Days in Brunei
7) Dinner in Audoghast
8) The Compassionate, the Digital
9) Flowers of Edo
10) The Little Magic Shop
11) Our Neural Cherynobyl
12) We See Things Differently
13) Dori Bangs

Part III: The Leggy Starlitz Stories

14) Hollywood Kremlin
15) Are You for 86?
16) The Littlest Jackal

Part IV: The Chattanooga Stories

17) Deep Eddy
18) Bicycle Repairman
19) Taklamakan

Part V: Later Science Fiction and Fantasy

20) The Sword of Damocles
21) Maneki Neko
22) In Paradise
23) The Blemmye's Strategem
24) Kiosk

I can try to list some of my favourties among favourites, but that would not be very good for you, the prospective reader. These are wonderful stories, and if you feel like reading them, after you have read this incompetent review, my work here would be done. Highly recommended.