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Read Crystal Express (1990)

Crystal Express (1990)

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Rating
3.89 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
0441124232 (ISBN13: 9780441124237)
Language
English
Publisher
ace

Crystal Express (1990) - Plot & Excerpts

The history of mankind in space had been a long epic of ambitions and rivalries. From the very first, space colonies had struggled for self-sufficiency and had soon broken their ties with the exhausted Earth. The independent life-support systems had given them the mentality of city-states. Strange ideologies had bloomed in the hothouse atmosphere of the o'neills, and breakaway groups were common. Space was too vast to police. Pioneer elites burst forth, defying anyone to stop their pursuit of aberrant technologies. Quite suddenly the march of science had become an insane, headlong scramble. New sciences and technologies had shattered whole societies in waves of future shock. The shattered cultures coalesced into factions, so thoroughly alienated from one another that they were called humanity only for lack of a better term. The Shapers, for instance, had seized control of their own genetics, abandoning mankind in a burst of artificial evolution. Their rivals,the Mechanists, had replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics. from "Sunken Gardens"This book is split into three sections, It starts with five science fiction stories about two rival human factions, the Shapers and the Mechanists, and their relationships with the reptilian traders known as the Investors. The next section contained three stand-alone near-future science fiction stories and I preferred the three stand-alone in the next section, and the last section contained four fantasy stories with historical settings (the first of which might not even be fantasy depending whether the protagonist's vision is objectively real or just due to the hallucinogenic drugs he has taken. The Shaper/Mechanist stories were okay, but I preferred the stand-alone stories in the second section, especially "Green Days in Brunei" and I enjoyed the fantasy stories even more.

the stories in this collection are separated into 3 categories: Shaper/Mechanist (Sterling's cyberpunk universe), Science Fiction, and Fantasy. The Shaper/Mechanist stories were great, breaking the boundaries of generic cyberpunk. The Science Fiction and Fantasy groupings were decent. Both where a little less sci-fi and fantasy than typical stories labeled in these categories, and show Sterling's ability to include history, ancient cultures, and lesser known cultures to the Western reader, and these stories bordered on being general fiction rather then the sci-fi/fantasy thread.A good collection if you want to see Sterling's deversity. Also note Sterling's novel Schismatrix set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe has been reissued with the title Schismatrix Plus , which includes the five Shaper/Mechanist stories here, so if you are only interested in cyberpunk Sterling, then that would be the better choice to read/purchase.

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

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