A lot better once you get past the first 50 pages. ( )

What a good time. I'd never read any Sterling before this; he's often lumped in with the cyberpunk crowd even though there's nothing particularly cyberpunk about this work, which is more of a trans/post-humanist take on space opera. It's 5 short stories and the lone novel that comprise everything Sterling wrote for the Shaper/Mechanist universe, which is a lot of fun to read about.

It's set a few hundred years in the future and reminds me a lot of the setting of Greg Egan's Diaspora without AIs - Earth has been abandoned to the dregs of humanity who live in the past, while everyone else has moved out to the solar system, where the real action is the competition between the two factions of Shapers, who practice extreme genetic engineering and mental modification, and Mechanists, who rely more on technology and hardware to do their thing. While it's not very clear exactly why there's such a big schism between the two groups, they hate each other to the extent that the protagonist Abelard Lindsay spends the whole book mediating between them as well as the various alien races who show up. In tone the novel reminded me a lot of Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal, in that it's funny, action-heavy, and very political - there's lots of clever satire of capitalism in particular and human peculiarities more generally. However, it also pays a lot of attention to Lindsay's journeys around the solar system and what it does to his sense of romance, family, and self - he definitely ends the book a very different person than when the book begins almost 200 years prior. Lindsay begins the book watching his first love die in an act of political protest, and throughout all his adventures with pirates, prostitutes, assassins, rogue agents, aliens, dissident political factions, and more, he grows and changes in an interesting way. The novel ends with an odd apotheosis, but overall it was highly enjoyable.

The short stories explore various other aspects of the same setting and are good too. The Schismatrix universe is large enough that it's surprising Sterling decided to stop writing about it, but I guess he had better things to do. ( )

This is a "grand tour" style novel, set in our Solar System after biopunks and cyborgs get kicked off Earth. It's ironic, funny, and packed full of ideas. ( )

Different human factions struggle over control of the solar system. The volume contains the novel "Schismatrix", followed by the short stories "Swarm", "Spider Rose", "Cicada Queen", "Sunken Gardens" and "Twenty Evocations", all playing in the same universe. ( )

I hate to give up on a book once I've started it, but I almost gave up on this one. It is written as if the author was on hallucinogenic drugs. I did manage to slog through and finish the book, but I can't recommend it. Although the story gets a little more coherent as you move through the book, the prose is too filled with imaginative rambles to keep my interest. It is filled with descriptions of what people in "post-human" societies do to "enhance" their bodies. The plot is thin and not well developed. The characters are only mildly engaging. I found it very hard to relate to them. I would have given this one star instead of two, except that I reserve one star for books that I have totally rejected and stopped reading before completion. ( )