Two dozen tales of future shock and twisted history from an undisputed
king of cyberpunk science fiction, including Nebula Award finalists
"Sunken Garden" and "Dori Bangs."
Time magazine describes Bruce Sterling as "one of America's best-known
science fiction writers and perhaps the sharpest observer of our
media-choked culture working today in any genre." Sterling's abilities
are on full display in Ascendancies, a collection of speculative
fiction from a world-class world-building futurist, alternate historian,
and mad prophet operating at the peak of his extraordinary powers. Here
are twenty-four stories that span the illustrious career of the author
who, along with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, injected the word
cyberpunk into the science fiction lexicon. These tales not only
traverse galaxies and employ mind-boggling technologies, they also cut
back across the centuries into a richly imagined past with style and a
sharp satiric edge.
Sterling's unparalleled imagination and courageous originality carry the
reader into the future universe of the warring Shapers and Mechanists,
rival sects of exiled humanity with radically opposed views of human
augmentation. Several stories feature the questionable adventures of the
footloose con man Leggy Starlitz in a somewhat-skewed and
still-dangerous post-Cold War world.
Sterling explores the cyberpunk trope of technology gone wild and the
resultant decline of civilization with appropriate gravity, while
presenting parables of strangers stuck in very strange lands in a more
whimsical vein. Whether chronicling an alien's encounter with Crusaders
in disputed Palestine, depicting the discovery of the key to immortality
in a nineteenth-century Times Square magic shop, or portraying bicycles
and bad guys in a near-future Tennessee, Sterling's stories are smart,
surprising, genre bending, bold, and outstanding, one and all.
