Schismatrix Plus [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I've read hundreds of good books in my life, books that have altered my ideaologies, infused my writing style with subtle energy, reinvented my understanding of character, and reaffirmed my love of life and creation. Then every once in awhile a book comes along that makes me what to give up writing because I'll never be able to write that well. Schismatrix is the second kind of book.

I took the time to write this review in the hopes that others will see its preternaturally bright bonfire in the darkness and come to its call, moth like, fluttering. I'm still reeling from this book, deconstructing it and rereading it again and again. The images contained in its leaves are better then the ones in my own damn head! Its been so influential in my own writing that sometimes I can't think outside of the still drying borders that its constructed in my mind.

Sterling manages to step outside some of the major problems that have plagued sci-fi since its incept date. For one most sci-fi prose is boring, horribly boring, recitlinear prose, laid out as if it were some hypercontroled mathmatical equation. The massive wads of techno-jargon that riddle most sci-fi have a habit of spilling over into the character descriptions and scene desriptions, making them Mars-dry. Asimov is a monster of the imagination but lets face it his prose is dull. It doesn't have to be this way as proved by some of the earlier sci-poets like Bradbury and Le Guin and the early work of A.C. Clark and now as proved by the crammed prose, acid bright style of cyberpunk idoru, Bruce Sterling. Some of his sentances are woven together with such alien majestry that the shock of the word-blasts are still felt pages later. I found myself asking what secret deal had he made with the devil to be allowed to write with such superfluidity.

The second problem of most sci-fi is that it confines itself solely to hard science. While a hard science background is admirable it is utterly limiting. The power of sci-fi to evoke the undiscovered mindscape of the deep brain are what I read sci-fi for, not sure about you. The major problem with basing all of your future book on "known' science is that what we "know" is severly limited and limiting. Look back just 100 years and what was considered state of the art is laughable. "We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything," said Einstein. If a person were fired into the future today (assuming that he could possibly get to 'our' future and not some alternate Sliders-bootstrap like universe) he would probably come back insane due to the unseen technological flourishes and the way they have altered kown space. Sterling knows all this and masterfully threads superstrings of as yet undiscovered science into the tapestry of known science.

And with all this Sterling still manages a nucleus of larger then life characters. Many sci-fi stories such as Ender's Game acheive master character protraits that would make the Greeks weap, but only by sacrificing the science that goes with it. In Schismatrix the characters develop with the technology and change over time together. By the end of the book, a 200 year scope, society, its technology and its characters have changed drastically from the first page, in a way that is so eeriely realistic that you feel as if you have aged with the book. Very few novels can capture the passage of time this beautifully. By the end I found myself wondering about what I would do without the main character in my life, as if he were some how palpable.

I'd need a whole new page to go in depth on the masterful word play he employs. His sense of double entendre rivals Hemingway and at a lower octaves Vriginia Woolfe.

Not one word can be cut from this smoothly bulking word trip. Every character, gadget, development, is essential to the story as a whole. Sadly Sterling has never acheived this kind of mastery again in any of his novels. After closing the book I went out stalking for more Sterling, only to find that he had stripped away his crammed prose style and panoramic scope for small niche futures that seemed to crib heavily from his earlier work. The divine fire of creation that he had once infused his prose seemed to have burnt itself out. I'm deeply sorry to have to say this because I wouldn't want to cause any harm to an author who made me fall in love with reading again. But maybe he'll take this as a challenge and rise to his former height as I have taken the challenge that his book offers me. In the words of one of his characters "Don't be afraid Pilot. Its done you a favor. You've seen the potential. Now you'll have something to aim for." Maybe he is never again meant to acheive something like Schismatrix. Perhaps it is like final dance of a warrior at his death in Carlos Casteneda's Journey to Ixtalan. I hope not. People are always demanding more Shaper/Mechanist work from him. Though sometimes I am tempted to join in the shouting, in my heart I agree with Sterling that this should be all there is. Like a human life it is fleeting and that very transience is what makes it so powerful. That there will never be another Schismatrix is terrible is heart-wrenching just as there will never be another you. But that doesn't mean that he can't go for the potential again, in a new way. Here is to hoping that like his sun dog rebel hero Abelard Lindsey, he'll embrace the ultimate once more, and be back up where he damn well deserves to be, cutting fresh swaths in a field of stars.

Not being well-read in the Science Fiction genre, there are quite a few allusions I am sure I missed throughout Sterling's Schismatric. Nevertheless, I found it a compelling book, due in large part to his constructed environments and the philosophy developed and bandied about by the characters. In addition, the characters (Lindsay, most importantly) had personalities which Sterling played with skillfully, giving a spin on the "nature vs. nurture" argument. For example, Lindsay, who is a person who has been structured through mind alteration and genetic breeding, is a personality with cunning charm and an adaptability to cultural and emotional clues in the people he is interacting with. Nevertheless, he has some moral imperative driving him, either through advancement of his own pleasure and security, the fulfillment of the needs he has as the person he has been constructed, or perhaps deep, deep down, past all the layers of biological manipulation, a "human" quest for seeing the "right" thing done. If that seems convoluted, then you are probably seeing a good example of the multiplicity of "future shock" ideas running through this book. Very intriguing.

His writing is great--solid and quite readable even when the ideas are not so easily grasped. The book falls down, though, when he relies on simple descriptions of the characters' clothing or the environments (perhaps thinking of how it might be picked up by a studio and translated to film?). The descriptions seem simplistic and almost petty reflected against the higher aims of the novel. Even if he is using these descriptions as some sort of eveidence towards semiotics in this future world, they still stand out as clunky and pandering to the Trekkies out there.

It's refreshing for one who reads literary fiction to delve into the Science Fiction genre, and I would highly recommend this book over others as representative of the potential for depth and artistry in SciFi.

Overall, a good read and an interesting bunch of ideas for one's mind to chew on