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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sterling's best collection so far,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Good Old-Fashioned Future (Mass Market Paperback)
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."
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Neat near-future stories,
By
This review is from: A Good Old-Fashioned Future (Mass Market Paperback)
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.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A more even collection than "Globalhead",
By
This review is from: A Good Old-Fashioned Future (Mass Market Paperback)
As I discussed in my review of "Distraction," Bruce Sterling is a puzzling writer. At his best -- his non-fiction work, "The Hacker Crackdown" -- he is a fabulous, witty, fascinating writer. But his fiction, particularly his novels (I refer here to "Islands in the Net," "Holy Fire" and "Distraction," plus "Heavy Weather," which I started but never finished), tends to fall short of his aim.His short stories tend to fare better. They are less ambitious but also tighter, and hence less distracting. "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" represents his latest collection of stories; the earlier works are "Globalhead" and "Crystal Express," which contains one absolute knock-out story called "Swarm." These stories are less experimental than "Globalhead" and more successful. Most of them are set in the near future and focus on collapsing societies. The last three are set in the same world and form a loose novella; Sterling seems to like this setting. None of the stories in here drags unacceptably, and some are quite good. It may be that Sterling has settled down to writing clean readable stories, rather than trying to write "outside the box."
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