Customer Reviews

Heavy Weather

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Sterling is one of the few current cyberpunk/scifi writers who seems to work with real characters rather than new ideas. Despite an occasionally messy plot point, this book delivers some of the most interesting speculative fiction around. The German-Mexican brother sister pair-- Jane and Alex-- are full and complex people and rather than simply acting out some kind of mythic archetype they move in this futurescape the way you'd expect real people to move. The sense of scene is also rich and full, with the cultural details full of verisimilitude. Perhaps not my favorite Sterling, but still a great read.

Heavy Weather is not a bad book, but it is not one of my favorite novels. While the plot can be slow at times and is a little predictable, the concept is interesting and the book is very easy to read. If you have a short attention span, I suggest that you do not read this book. The story has a very large lull in the middle. Another downfall is that the F6 tornado is extremely over-hyped. Sterling could have done much more with it, but didn't. The plot and characters are developed well, however, and the story itself is refreshingly different.

Heavy Weather is much like one of Sterling's other works, Holy Fire. The writing styles of both books are very similar. Both books deal with medical technology. The theme of whether or not medicine can be too high tech seems to run through both books. Some characters even seem like they could fit in with the characters in Holy Fire. In both books, Sterling focuses on the people in his story, rather than the technology itself. He writes more about how technology affects people.

The main characters, Jane and Alex, are two siblings that were never very close to each other. Fulfilling her role as the big sister, Jane saves Alex from a life of black market medical treatments, and takes him to experience her lifestyle. Jane lives with the Storm Troupe, a group of people that hack weather. The Troupe chases tornadoes gathering all the information they can get, in hopes that they will figure out the secrets behind one of Mother Nature's mysteries. Their mission is centered on a hypothesized F6 sized tornado, their Holy Grail.

One attraction to this book is how different it is from other cyberpunk novels. I started reading this book expecting another classic cyberpunk storyline, but found a book that could have easily not been cyberpunk at all. The book seemed more along the lines of a natural-disaster-punk novel. The movie Twister, which came out two years after Heavy Weather, shares many similarities with it. Both show the group of outsiders who are only interested in solving the mystery of the tornado. Both show the main characters chasing the big tornado, which ends up making their relationship with each other better. There is even an appearance in both the book and the movie, by the cow that gets caught in the tornado.

Bruce Sterling took the familar sub-genre of Cyberpunk and carried it to new terrain, literally. The story takes place primarily in West Texas and up Tornado Alley, with a smattering of Mexico for the really dark side of living. Most of Cyberpunk takes place on the West Coast or Asia. The setting changes the whole ambience of the book. Instead of the slick, fast, all mirror feel of typical cyberpunk fare, we have a more paced and linguistically clever piece of writing.

Sterling does go a little overboard with the F-6; the anticipation is built up so much that when he finally describes it, the disappointment is palpable. Words simply fail to capture the idea of such a colossal event.

However, this book is about people, and how they are dealing with a world in climatic catastrophe. Consequently, the characters are rich and the dialogue is textured. The characters are not ginger-bread people, each is noticeably different from one another. Many very clever lines from this book and some astute insights as to the nature of modern American thought.

Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" has an excellent concept that is just not brought off all that well. A story about a group of post-Greenhouse effect stormchasers going after the BIG one (tornado) should be faster paced and much scarier than this novel. Sterling also does not give a very coherent view of what the world is like during its period of so-called "heavy weather," given that all of the action takes place in Texas and Oklahoma. There is also an evil consortium subplot that makes very little sense. That said, most of the the main characters are quite likable and very believable. Their story is just not as remarkable as it ought to be.

Overall, I would give this book a marginal recommendation to sci-fi buffs and perhaps disaster buffs. It moves slowly at times, but there are enough interesting ideas to make it worth your while if you're interested in the subject matter.

Flat characters and pedestrian prose make this a real sleeper. While there may be action, action, action, the characters are juvenile and appear to be going nowhere. This book popped up when I entered my tastes - which go toward literature! This is not literature.

Weather challenged everyone before the 20th century: if you lived in Kansas, how did you know what weather was coming toward you over the plains? Naturalists developed anemometers, wind vanes, barometers, rain gauges, and thermometers to collect measurements over time of the weather at particular locations. In the early 19th century, statisticians sought to interpolate among enormous numbers of measurements of wind speed and direction, humidity, temperature, barometric pressure, and rainfall to figure out what the atmosphere plans for us in terms of weather. Only when we distributed accurate clocks along railroad routes could meteorologists integrate this data into weather maps that showed the development and decay of weather systems over time and geographic space. In the 20th century, with aircraft, more complex statistics, and computers, we developed measurements and models of weather systems in 3-dimensions. (See, for example, James Fleming's Meteorology in America.)

The protagonists of Heavy Weather use nothing as handy as a thermometer, but rather a combination of modern and futurist tools, most of which require developing a personal knack to master. In addition to supplying a story, the extreme weather of the southern plains also serves as a metaphor for stormy relationships and the battle that one protagonist, Alex, wages with his own body, whose mysterious debility has seemed to control his life's purpose until he chooses to focus on helping his sister's troupe of roving weather hackers to understand the region. Medicine employs instruments much like those used to measure weather, but that reduce Alex's body to a mapped system that then does not respond to therapies as doctors project.

This is a complex book, gratifyingly over the top in areas, and mundane in some aspects of character development. Sterling's novels show that he is intent on examining basic interpersonal relationships, such as parent-child, lovers, siblings, colleagues, and civil society in extreme settings. As with all his books, his protagonists are heroes who are less than heroes, sometimes improbably sweet or strong.

In light of the mysterious, powerful weather on the U.S. Gulf Coast this fall, I especially recommend this book. As I listen on the radio and TV to the reasons that the public and officials give for not acting appropriately in the face of enormous risk, I think about the 500-year transition much of the world has made away from a mystical and toward a science-based understanding of "why things happen." Clearly, the science of hurricanes has not been heard by many of those who are most at risk of losing life and property, as well as by many of those most favored by position or education and bearing an enormous responsibility, as experts, to act to promote public safety.

Four stars only because I wish this Sterling book were longer, with more development of his settings and technologies. It might be a characteristic of the cyberpunk label that intriguing terms get plopped in the text with little explication, their meaning derived from narrative context. However, many of these terms stick like burrs and travel with me into conversations; they are very pithy. I can't complete the metaphor of comparing extreme weather to the characters because that would give away too much. Suffice it to say that there's an end to every storm.

In "Heavy Weather" Bruce Sterling attempts to construct a storyline around a bunch of very interesting "futureshock" concepts. Unfortunately the concept is better than the execution. The plot alternately plods and accelerates, and its two main characters are not the most likable in fiction, particularly that of Jane/Juanita. After only adequately building the suspense for almost 300 pages, the ending totally wimps out, with some of its key action "off-stage". Doesn't anyone know how to end a story any more? While this book offers some interesting parts, there is too much speculation and not enough fiction in this speculative fiction.

Bruce Sterling has delivered quite a powerhouse of the imagination here. This book is a mostly strong mixture of cyberpunk elements along with textbook sci-fi storytelling techniques, in which real scientific research lies at the core of fantastical plot elements. We are given an environmentally devastated near future in which the weather has gotten extremely heavy due to the runaway greenhouse effect, with a team of cyberpunks seeking the ultimate tornado. Sterling has obviously done his homework on meteorology and the possible effects of climate change, as his speculations into potential heavy weather are both fantastic and plausible. This book also displays a very bright writing style with a real flair for outlandish similes and allegories. For example: "...kicked over cars like a giant child disturbing a convention of turtles." Just beware of the rather annoying overuse of the word "hack" without much explanation into what this activity really entails in this future society. Alas, the end of the story is somewhat of a dud given the extensive build-up, and there is a completely unnecessary evil organization appearing incongruously during the climax. But the best aspect of this book is Sterling's disturbingly possible vision of a dysfunctional future caused by violent disruptions in nature, economy, and cyberspace. These are some disturbing speculations that offer a lot of food for thought.

Maybe this is controversial but I would say that this is his best book in the following sense: it has real characters that are sympathetic, it balances his tendency towards over abstraction with a more plot driven approach, and it retains all the best elements of well researched hard sf. Even if you haven't liked him before, but you like more action oriented hard sf, you will like this book.

This is quite readable--a cyberpunk book that doesn't take place in a huge urban sprawl, and the data being stolen is from Mother Nature, who never gives up secrets easily. From a Mexican black market clinic to a tornado that could cover an entire time zone, several intrepid scientists and one dying part-time drug runner attempt to figure out why tornadoes form, and whether or not one can be stopped before it's too late. Of course, by the end of the book, it's almost too late. It's always nice to see actual science and actual characterization in a book, and kudos for including a "lung enema" at the beginning of the book. I'd say it's about a three and a half star book, but Amazon doesn't let you do that. So enjoy a free half-star, Mr. Sterling.