Stuart's Reviews > Schismatrix Plus

Neutron Star-Dense Cyberpunk, Hugely Influential, Hard to Digest
Back in the 1980s, it was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Stirling's Schismatrix (1985), Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (1985), and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) that gave birth to the concept of cyberpunk, shaking things up by mixing dystopian themes with the latest technology extrapolation, early iterations of the internet, cybernetic enhancements, hackers, AIs, and so forth. And of course the excellent later cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon (2002) by Richard Morgan owes a huge debt. But of that group, Sterling's Schismatrix is actually a lot more, it really goes galactic and post-human and explores themes that of human genetic and technological advances that bring mankind closer to the singularity, again before that terms was bandied about so frequently. It apparently was a major influence of the SF creations of Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross as well.

So it's a bit sad that this was the only full-length outing that Sterling wrote about his Shaper-Mechanist universe, along with a series of excellent short-stories written previously that are included in Schismatrix Plus, namely "Swarm", "Spider Rose", "Cicada Queen", "Sunken Gardens", and "Twenty Evocations". There was enormous potential to expand on any of the seething mass of ideas that are jam-packed into this small but ultra-dense novel that still feels like a serious of vignettes, brief glimpses of a cold and scary post-human universe, ala Alastair Reynolds.

While it gets full marks for its brilliant ideas, free-wheeling extrapolation, and diamond-hard prose, it is also almost unreadable at times, given how much is packed into such tight passages and episodes. There is also a lot of implausible far-future developments, and of course a severe lack of relatable characters just like William Gibson, but then again that is a defining characteristic of cyberpunk in my view, as it's fundamentally dystopian and often a warning of what might happen if we surrender ourselves to AIs, technology, and hyper-capitalism at the expense of our humanity.