What do You think about Crystal Express (1990)?
I gave this 4 stars based on the breadth of the author's stories and imagination. I liked the Shaper/Mechanist stories which were outstanding. One, Spider Rose, was one of the best scifi short stories I have ever read.The "fantasy" stories were my second favorite. They were all interesting and covered the ground from alternate history to plain supernatural. The Little Masgic Shop was my favorite. Could have easily been a Twilight Zone episode.I liked the non-S/M scifi stories the least. Don't get me wrong, all these stories were well above average, I just liked these the least in this particular collection. To be fair, I have a bias against cyberpunk. It seems to become dated rather quickly (these stories were written in the 1980s) because digital technology is moving so fast in the real world. The Green Days in Brunei was my least favorite story and it was one of the longer stories. The clunky non-futuristic telecommunications and "network" technology that was supposed to drive the story was just too distracting.Another thing, scifi authors shouldn't name drop corporations in their fiction; make the names of companies up. It seems silly for an author to insert a real corporate name into a narrative when to us reading it in the future the company went belly-up or merged or is in a different business now. It may seem cool and prescient at the time of writing but 9 times out of 10 it's going to be wrong and distracting to the future reader, even in the near future. Think of the "Pan Am" shuttle in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Come to think of it, even putting a definite year into a scifi story is a potential distraction unless you want to make it a loooong way off. In most cases it's just not necessary. We can't even get a chimp to the moon anymore much less fly a human to Jupiter. End of rant.
—Randolph Carter
I feel like reading Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper stories is like passing some sort of science fiction Rubicon: once you've read them you are officially a nerd, no backsies. Crystal Express contains, among other short stories, all of Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper stories outside of the novel Schismatrix, and while some of the non-M/S pieces didn't quite do it for me, this collection gets five stars anyway--the quality of the far future M/S world is so vivid and compelling, the alien-ness so amazingly alien (as in Swarm, where two human Shapers live inside an asteroid among large hive-mind insects), that some of the minor faults (the sometimes incoherent off-scene politics, the occasional cypher character) are easily overlooked.
—John
This book would be worth the price alone for gathering together the Shaper/Mechanist stories, the fiction that, along with William Gibson's Sprawl stories and John Shirley's "Freezone," codified a movement. These stories were the cattle-prod to SF in the 80s, and, while they weren't the only good work being done, sparked more interesting fiction and discussion than anything else. Cyberpunk has waned, and will continue to in spite of the imitation work that it spawned which is now hitting the stands, all while the original purveyors continue to move in unique directions. But the work itself, the techno-gritty, seedy stories, stand apart from the arguments and bickering; they are as effective today as when they appeared. But the Shaper/Mechanist stories make up only a third of Crystal Express. There's also the science fiction stories such as "Green Days in Brunei" and "The Beautiful and the Sublime" that showed Sterling understood a great deal about character and humor in addition to technological impact. And there's the fantasy stories, like "The Little Magic Shop" and "Dinner in Audoghast," historical and whimsical, more treats from Sterling's mixed bag of tricks. The hardback from Arkham is, like their other publications, a beauty in itself and nicely compliments the stories that it presents, and contains some interesting graphics from Rick Leider. And fortunately for those of you who don't buy or can't afford hardbacks, a paperback is upcoming for publication before the end of the year.
—Glen Engel-Cox
