review of
Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 24, 2017

[See the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/604975-heavy-whether ]

I keep picking on Cyberpunk writing in much the same way I pick on Surrealist writing. At the same time that I like it in theory I'm annoyed by it in praxis. What was the last cyberpunk novel I read & reviewed? Weeellll, that depends on how one defines Cyberpunk, obviously. Is Cyberpunk any story in wch societally fringe & rebellious characters are expert with computers? Hackers perhaps?

Wd a novel like Geoff Ryman's "The Child Garden"https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/388646-upping-the-nante ) Or do I have to go all the way back to January 6, 2011, to my review of William Gibson's "Spook Country" (2007)? ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/138904025 )

The point is that as soon as a genre name is coined & a vague definition attached to it there're bound to be people who then point out examples such as the above that might not be slotted into the market-speak but wch might still qualify - or proto-examples that lessen the importance of the term by significantly predating it. I think of Cyberpunk as starting with Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) but, then, wouldn't Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) have an important place in there somewhere? A place that seems monumental in contrast to Neuromancer? Or what about Alfred Bester's Golem100 (1980)? Visually, Golem100 is stunning in contrast to the design-banality of Neuromancer.

Heavy Weather, for me, is clearly Cyberpunk from the get-go & that probably helps sell Sterling's bks - but I don't really know if Sterling likes the term or just accepts it as a 'necessary evil' for marketing. I liked Heavy Weather, it's about storm chasers in a near-future (or present at this point 23 yrs after the bk was published in 1994) when the ecosystem has become increasingly disturbed by human intervention & extreme storms are more & more common. I can't object to that, the more humanity's reminded that our uses of the environment do have effects that we'd better take into consideration the better. Still, I think of John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) ( http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/344636-a-review-of-john-brunner-s-ecological... ) as a much more important example.

What happened when I started reading this? I was immediately sucked into the writing, it was thrilling, it's a thriller of sorts. I could identify with the characters, the lunatic fringe obsessed w/ studying tornadoes. Am I a storm chaser? Nope. Am I a meteorologist? Nope. Am I a hacker? Nope. So it really just plays into an aspect of my fantasy life. I am, however, an 'outsider', a person barely tolerated by a society of robopaths. & it's from that highly experienced position that I started questioning the narrative POV of Heavy Weather: Is this something written by someone who knows how to write a thriller but who doesn't necessarily come from the social milieu that his heros are located in? I don't know, I don't know anything about Sterling so my suspicion that he's more cyber than he is punk is a gut-level reaction. At least he's sympathetic to the ecologically concerned instead of dismissive of them as Michael Crichton is in his State of Fear (2004) ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15860.State_of_Fear ).

OK, I'm pretty pessimistic at times about the present, I think what passes for the 'news' for most people in the world (if I can make such a generalization) is such despicable propaganda that I find this amusing:

"And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news. Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 2010, had watched the news grow steadily more glossy and cheerful for all his twenty-one years. As a mere tot, he'd witnessed hundreds of hours of raw bloodstained footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, ghastly military wreckage, all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets." - pp 5-6

It's funny-odd to me how I react to the above: for one thing I'm sooooo sick of how the so-called 'news' distorts life to make it seem like a constant threat - to keep people mentally-glued to the disasters & tragedies that the stns are just using as fodder to attract advertisers & suckers alike. On the other sharpened hook, I'm against censorship. Is the happy medium to devote the amount of media time that's statistically appropriate to the subject? Hence murder cd still be reported about accurately but wd occupy a very small time slot? That wd be a disaster for those poor struggling arms dealers - I'm told that after the latest mass murder in Las Vegas by one of those responsible legal gun owners the NRA is always telling us about gun sales went waaaaayyyyyy up. Fancy that. Fear tactics are the best marketing strategy. Maybe the accountant/murderer was just trying to give the economy a boost, eh?

"Concepcíon left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi. Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence. Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important." - p 7

Go get 'em Sterling! I was once denied treatment at a clinic by a so-called doctor when, as response to the question: "How are you?" I replied: "I'd be alot better if you hadn't kept me waiting for an hr & 40 minutes." This in a clinic devoid of patients other than me. When I become supreme dictator, doctors who keep patients waiting will have to have a patient's excuse to justify it (that's a take-off on doctor's excuse, get it?) & if the patient kept waiting doesn't accept the excuse as valid then the doctor will have to pay the patient the doctor's own wages for that time period. 3 strikes & they have to practice in prison until the patients say they may be released. It's only fair. I go to the doctor's as a patient not to become IMpatient. Doctors beware, my supreme dictatorship is just a hop, skip, & a jump away so get yr shit together you pompous pampered creeps.

"Jerry was thirty-two, and he could remember when people did most of their own driving, and even the robots always left their headlights on. Jane, by contrast, found the darkness soothing. If there was really anything boring about the experience of driving at night, it was that grim chore of gripping a wheel with your own hands and staring stiff-necked for hours into a narrow-cone of glare. In darkness you could see the open sky. The big dark Texas sky, that great abyss." - p 24

Hhmm, a robot car driving w/ its headlights off might be a tad bit dangerous for us pedestrians. Living in Pittsburgh, as I do, where robot cabs are common, I love being a mere 23 yrs in the future of the novel's copyright date & being already almost there. How many people wd've believed that there'd be robot taxis in 2017? I still haven't ridden one. Sterling's good at descriptions of what he imagines as post-industrial conditions:

"Here and there along the highway dead windmills loomed, their tapered tin vanes shot to hell, their concrete cisterns cracked and dust empty above an aquifer leached to bare sandstone. . . . They'd sucked the landscape dry, and abandoned their mechanical vampire teeth in place, like the torn-off mandibles of a tick. . . ." - p 33

Concerns about aquifers are important. Ask an Australian aboriginal forced to live in the outback by the European invaders. My collaborator etta cetera & I made a movie in Australia called Don't Walk Backwards & we visited a camp of resisters to in situ leeching whose concern was w/ the destruction of the aquifer by uranium mining. The link to a possible beginning to the relevant section is here: https://youtu.be/kODzM_2_bRM?t=1h48m9s . Thrilling novels are designed to provide depictions of heightened situations, Heavy Weather does an excellent job of this, the reader is likely to be engrossed & excited. For a more realistic look at such activism, that is, nonetheless, not didactically dry, one might try absorbing the whole experience of Don't Walk Backwards instead.

""What the heck kind of drought can kill a mesquite tree?"

""Look, dude, if it doesn't rain at all, for more than a year, then everything dies. Mesquite, cactus, everything. Everything around this place died, fifteen years ago."

""Heavy weather," Buzzard said somberly.

"Martha nodded. "It looks pretty good right now, but that's because all this grass and stuff came back from seed, and this country has been getting a lot of rain lately. But, man, that's why nobody can live out here anymore. There's no water left underground, nothing left in the aquifer, so whenever a drought hits, it hits bad.["]" - p 77

How many people read such a passage & become concerned imagining the possibilities? If you lived near Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre you'd be likely to take such a threat a bit more seriously - esp if the lake became increasingly smaller bodies of water without returning periodically a few times a century to its more filled condition.

"Now Alex understood why Buzzard and Martha lay half-collapsed in their sling chairs beneath their sunshade, the two of them torpid as lizards while their eyes and ears flew for them. Sweat was water too. Civilization had been killed in West Texas, killed as dead as Arizona's Anasazi cliff-dweller Indians, because there just wasn't enough water here, and no easy way to get water anymore." - p 92

Of course, Cyberpunk novels just have to have cutting edge technology in them & characters who get their kicks pushing that technology to its limits. On example of this, here, is the use of ornithopters. An ornithopter is an aircraft that imitates birds by having wings that it flaps. The storm chasers use them to get close footage of the heavy weather in action.

""There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch-black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light—red and infrared. I dunno what we'll see, dude, but we'll see something."" - p 103

"Jesse", an ornithopter, is about to flown by remote-control into a tornado to get data. The person controlling it will be experiencing it as virtual reality, it'll be terrifying but at least they'll be able to breathe. This is what they do.

"The Troupe had scared up an F2" [a scale rating for a tornado] "early in the day. The spike had come very suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, and out in the middle of nowhere. And that was all to the good, because the Troupe had had the spike all to themselves. Greg and Carol had taped the entire development sequence, from wall-cloud to rope-out, at close range from the ground. Buzzard and Martha had nailed it with chaff, so Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus had gotten some very good internal data. That one had to be counted a success." - p 110

Purposeful social groups tend to organize around direction. I prefer the anarchistic ones where direction is provided by the most articulate spokespeople rather than by the people who consolidate power around themselves through dirty tricks. Sterling has the 'mastermind' of this group request something of one member after she'd gotten into a fight with another.

"A vow of silence was a very weird request. But she had never seen Jerry more serious. It was crystal clear that he was giving her a deliberate challenge, setting her an act of ritual discipline. Worst of all, she could tell that Jerry really doubted that she had the necessary strength of character to go through with it." - p 112

I think a temporary vow of silence would be an interesting discipline for many people to go through - just like I think fasting is a good thing. Like fasting, it could just be for a day or a wk or 2 wks or 3 wks or a mnth. A mnth seems stretching it. A thoughtful person might learn something from the increased introspection. I'm tempted to try it. Answering the phone wd be tough. Does txting break the rules? I think so. It wd have to be a vow of no communication maybe.

Cyberpunk novels seem to thrive on zeitgeists of fairly large subcultures. A little anti-money sentiment goes a long way w/ me:

"Rick grimaced. She'd brought up the subject of money; the Troupe's ultimate taboo. From the look on Rick's round, stubbled face, he seemed to be in genuine spiritual pain. She knew he'd be too embarrassed to complain anymore." - p 114

There will always be barter, there will always be bad deals where someone feels like they got the shitty end of the stick, so what's the solution? For every transaction to have to meet a standard of absolute integrity? & what wd that be? There will always be generous people & there will always be thieves.

""The density of information embodied in the modern technological object creates deep conceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface. . . . Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their own environment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."" - p 170

& now there's a Center for PostNatural History created & operated by Rich Pell in Pittsburgh. Check it out!

"Before heavy weather, there had been about nine hundred tornadoes every year in the United States. Nowadays, there were about four thousand. Before heavy weather, a year's worth of tornadoes killed about a hundred people and cause about $200 million (constant 1975 dollars) in damage. Now, despite vastly better warning systems, tornadoes killed about a thousand people a year, and the damage was impossible to estimate accurately because the basic economic nature of both "value" and "currency" had gone nonlinear." - p 182

So where are we at in 2017? A wikipedia page informs me that there've been 1,234 tornadoes so far this yr in the US (as of October 24, 2017) so, apparently, we're not quite to heavy weather yet. What about mass shootings in the US? There're plenty of statistics on that online, a chart from Mother Jones online covering 1982 to 2017 yields:

1982: 1 mass shooting, 8 killed
1983: NO mass shootings
1984: 2 mass shootings, 28 killed
1985: NO mass shootings
1986: 1, 15 killed
1987: 1, 6 killed
1988: 1, 7 killed
1989: 2, 15 killed
1990: 1, 10 killed
1991: 3, 35 killed
1992: 2, 9 killed
1993: 4, 23 killed
1994: 1, 5 killed
1995: 1, 6 killed
1996: 1, 6 killed
1997: 2, 9 killed
1998: 3, 14 killed
1999: 5, 42 killed
2000: 1, 7 killed
2001: 1, 5 killed
2002: NO mass shootings
2003: 1, 7 killed
2004: 1, 5 killed
2005: 2, 17 killed
2006: 3, 21 killed
2007: 4, 53 killed
2008: 3, 17 killed
2009: 4, 39 killed
2010: 1, 9 killed
2011: 3, 19 killed
2012: 7, 71 killed
2013: 5, 35 killed
2014: 4, 18 killed
2015: 7, 46 killed
2016: 6, 71 killed
2017: 8, 83 killed

I was planning to look at the statistics from various sources but I think the above will do. Mass shooters in the US haven't quite become a force of nature yet but maybe if they had a convention they could pool their resources & practice on each other. It would be good to have all the arms dealers there too explaining why guns are such a great idea. Since pro-gun people seem to pull out a fair amount of statistics on how knives have been used in more murders, maybe at the convention they could have a contest to see who could kill the most people?: the automatic weapons users or the knife-wielders? The arms dealers could each get a steak knife, e.g., & they could prove their point by killing all the guys who have machine guns aimed at them. Just a thought, y'know, sometimes I'm moved by an image of an arms dealer going hungry while one of those vicious knife murderers carves up a juicy steak that's rightfully the dealer's.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I was hoping Sterling wd throw in a little Fortean froggian stuff n'at:

""That's nothin' either. Once I saw a rain of meat."

""What?"

""Meat fell out of the sky," he said simply. "I saw it with my own two eyes." He sighed. "You don't believe me do ya, kid? Well, go back in the anomaly records sometime and have a look at the stuff people have seen in the past, faling out of the sky. Amazing stuff! Black hail. Black rain. red rain. Big rocks. Frogs. Rains of fishes. Snails. Jelly. Red snow, black snow. Chunks of ice have fallen out of the sky as big as fuckin' elephants. Dude, I saw meat fall out of the sky."

""What kind of meat?" Alex asked.

""Shaved meat. No hair on it or anything. Looked kinda like, I dunno, slice mushrooms or slice potatoes or something, except it was red and bloody wet and it had little veins in it.["]" - pp 191-192

Next thing you know I was wackin' myself off & that meat was talkin' to me!

That's nuthin', man, I saw rain once that wasn't acid rain.

No fuckin' way!

I've been lovers with many women who were prone to self-destructive activities who weren't so self-destructive when they were with me even if we had very volatile times together. As such, I highly identify w/ this next passage:

"Jerry made her do crazy things. But Jerry's crazy things had always made her better and stronger, and with Jerry around, for the first time in her life she no longer felt miserably troubled about being her own worst enemy. She's always been wrapped too tight, and wired too high, and with a devil inside; in retrospect, she could see that clearly now. Jerry was the first and only man in her life who had really appreciated her devil, who had accepted her devil and been sweet to it, and had given her devil some proper down-and-dirty devil things to do. Her devil no longer had idle hands. Her devil was working its ass off, all the time.

"So now she and her devil were quite all right, really." - p 203

So, yeah, my friends & I have done pretty 'extreme' things but what would we have been doing if we hadn't learned to channel our anger as creatively as we have? What if I were just a psychopath instead of a psychopathfinder?: "Seriousness is Death": https://youtu.be/fIr1_U-dDHI .

"every once in a while some anxious weedy-looking guy would show up at camp who didn't give a hit about tornadoes and really, really wanted Jerry to forget all about it and get back to proving how many soap bubbles could fit inside a collapsing torus in hyperspace. Jerry was always terribly kind to those people." - p 205

[See the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/604975-heavy-whether ] ( )

OK writing, some very interesting ideas, but ultimately kinda pointless entertainment, like watching TV. ( )

I read this for a university of Oklahoma college class about the history of science fiction. It was actually a replacement textbook for a book we couldn't get that was out of print. The class in general was not impressed by the book.

It's supposed to represent the cyberpunk era. This book was published before the May 3rd, 1999 tornado outbreak, btw, which set the highest recorded wind speed for a tornado ever, and caused the fujita scale to be redesigned.

The science was ok, I guess. ( )

Liked it very much. There is a definite shared world of ideas between Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson, etc. The down and out warrior-genius; the bad-ass girl; the ex-Special Forces wackos; the apocalyptic possibilities, etc. It's like the hand-shake of shared symbology. But, this is not a complaint. I love it. ( )

My reactions to reading this novel in 1994. Spoilers follow.

The contrasts and similarities between this and Sterling’s 1988 novel Islands in the Net are interesting.

The earlier novel was set in 2022. This novel is set nine years later in 2031.

Both novels feature a contemporary social concern hovering over their worlds. In Islands in the Net, it was the “Abolition” of nuclear weapons as befitting a novel of the nuclear-obsessed Eighties. In Heavy Weather, the effects of the much touted Greenhouse Effect loom over the novel’s milieu. (The title refers to not only the disturbed, violent weather of the Greenhouse world but also its political/social turmoil.)

Both novels heavily feature the economic effects of the information age. Data pirates featured heavily in Islands in the Net. Here, Sterling postulates other adverse effects of the information age. The U.S. “State of Emergency” in 2015 nationalized all data, and software in general has little value since it can be copied so easily. (Sterling also postulates that software and computer circuits so complicated that computers design them and no human really understands them.). “Unbreakable encryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing, and network untraceability” have destroyed any governmental – indeed any human – control over the economy with “all workable standards of wealth … vaporized, digitized, and vanished”. Taxation becomes impossible. (I would dearly like to know what research sources Sterling used in forming this vision and how they think governments will be unable to tax wealth. The cybersphere, after all, is not the whole world, just a virtual depiction of it. Wealth also exists in physical objects which a government can take as taxes. For that matter, I’d like to know Sterling’s politics. He has taken enough swipes at Reagan and Republicans so it’s clear he’s not a conservative. Yet, he also takes a lot of swipes at Marxism’s failure. I suspect, especially given what little I’ve read of his non-fiction about computer crime, that he’s something of an anarchist with muddled ideas of economics.). Vast amounts of black-market money (from untaxed work and crime) comes to the surface, and market forces set up private currencies (of course, historically they have existed).

Islands in the Net has a much more hopeful air about it. Essentially, it’s a tale of taming the wilder uses of tech. This novel posits a much darker, more anarchic world. Essentially this is a novel of people finding purpose and surviving in a bleak, devastated world where sexual intimacy is deadly. Several new strains of diseases are sexually transmitted or spread through casual contact, severe storms frequently devastate the Midwest, the economy of America and the world is in ruin, disease and famine and environmental ruin stalk the planet. It’s no mistake that the two protagonists of this novel – Jane and Alex Unger – are essentially fearless individuals because they have little to live for. This is particularly true of sickly Alex who doesn’t expect to live to see his 22nd birthday. (We first meet him in a quack black market Mexican clinic getting a “lung enema”.) He just wants a more meaningful death (like by gunshot or plane accident) than illness. His sister – Jane Unger is fearless in her quest, shared by her fellow Storm Troupers, for the apocalyptic F-6 storm (a storm so severe it is only theoretical – at one point it is theorized it will be a massive permanent storm like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot). The passionate love of her life, Troupe leader and charismatic Jerry Mulcahey is willing to risk death to give witness to the F-6’s destruction. Other members of the group find purpose in being crypto-Luddite terrorists.

In a bleak aside to the more optimistic, computer heavy Sterling novels of Schismatrix and Islands in the Net, computer technology here offers little in the way of salvation and much in the way of social dislocation. Not only has the cybersphere brought economic chaos, but Alex Unger satirically notes that bums with cheap laptop computers full of the Library of Congress spend their time coming up with “pathetic, shattered, crank, paranoid” theories for their personal failures. He quips that it “almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.” The situation is nicely summed up with the Troup possessing a supercomputer with more power than all the planet’s computers in the 1990’s. It’s a loan but no one wants it back. It seems that not only is not much help in modeling the chaos of an F-6 but also not much good solving the world’s problems.

Leo Mulcahey, Jerry’s brother, finds purpose as part of a shadow cabal existing in – but not of – the government. In a nice bit showing how a small, powerful conspiracy could be organized piecemeal in the Information Age, Sterling gives us a cabal of semi-Luddites dedicated to doing what no one else is willing to do – solve the world’s social and environmental problems by any means necessary. (This cabal is an interesting contrast to the formal, strictly multi-national, high level group in George Turner’s recent The Destiny Makers. They meet to secretly plan a population cull.) They accomplish this by fostering plagues, covert sterilization programs, increasing death tolls by delaying aid and/or diverting public attention. (This sudden plot twist is only in the last quarter of the novel.) This purpose exacts such a toll on the soul though that several conspirators, including Leo, plan to use the communication black out caused by the F-6 to escape their governmental masters. Ultimately – in a plot development that will no doubt please Orson Scott Card and Nancy Kress who have criticized sf for ignoring family and children in future stories – the Ungers find value and purpose in life in the oldest place of all – the family. They genuinely acknowledge and become aware of their love for each other. For Jane’s part, fear enters her life with her and Jerry’s child – a “hostage to fortune”. Alex becomes reconciled with his father, is cured, and begins on planning what to do with his life, and he falls in love. (Leo’s story is less happy. Alex kills him.)

The story ends on no happy note – just that the Ungers will survive the future, plan for it, and get by through their love for each other. As always, this novel exhibits Sterling’s impressively plausible blend of future tech, politics, and economics, but it’s the best novel of his I’ve read because it’s very funny in parts. Here Sterling exhibits in his fiction the wit I’ve seen in his reviews and articles. I particularly liked the character of Alex – a bright young man who longs for a good death, refuses to feel guilty about the pain of others, and who has a young man’s passion for things like rare paper comic books. ( )