Crystal Express

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) show more 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. show less

Bruce Sterling is a very good writer and his works have had an important impact on science fiction. Unfortunately, the expectations created by such a concept probably hinder this collection which is…well…it’s just a collection of okay to decent to good stories. This isn’t to say that the collection is bad (although, as with almost any collection, there are a couple of clunkers). Rather that it just isn’t jump-off-the-page great. The best stories may be the fantasies at the end (the book is oddly grouped into stories from his Shaper/Mechanist series, science fiction, and fantasy stories) which include another twist on those mysterious shops that show up so often (“The Little Magic Shop”) and “Flowers of Edo” which show more visits Japan at the beginning of its electronic age to mesh science and demons. But even these stories barely hit a “4” on the “read it”scale. Overall, there is nothing particularly wrong with this collection. If you are fan of Sterling you will undoubtedly enjoy it. If you are a science fiction fan you will get some pleasure from it. But it is more like “filler” reading – something to read between your important reading (like a decent collection in a magazine) – than a must-have collection show less

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 show more 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. show less

The five short stories about the Shapers and Mechanics were very interesting- some of them I may not have fully understood. Green Days in Brunei was one of the best short stories I can remember. I didn't read the last two stories as they were (evidently fantasies.

I was a little disappointed with this book, not because it was bad but because i've come to expect more from bruce sterling.

This collection of shorts is divided into three sections: Shaper/Mechanic following two rival factions of humanity on their way to becoming post-human, Science Fiction near future sci-fi including the only story I really loved ( Green Days in Brunei), and Fantasy.

Shaper/MechanistSwarm Intelligence is a two-edged sword. Spider Rose, Cicada Queen, Sunken Gardens, Twenty Evocations.Science FictionGreen days in Brunei, Spook, The Beautiful and the SublimeFantasy StoriesTellimed, The Little Magic Shop, Flowers of Edo, Dinner in Audoghast
Most of the stories were only ok.

I had a hardcover edition of this