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Black Swan (A cyberpunk story)
 
 
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Black Swan (A cyberpunk story) [Kindle Edition]

Bruce Sterling (Author)
2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews) |
Digital List Price: £1.02 What's this?
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Product Description

Product Description

“We started reading Black Swan and couldn’t put down our Kindle until the last word.”
[Brain Pickings]

2009 Sidewise Award Nominee

Bruce Sterling brings us a tale of espionage, cyber-threats, alternate realities and intrigue in “Black Swan”, a dark and cyberpunk novelette.

Luca is a technology blogger looking for anything newsworthy. ‘Massimo Montaldo’ is the nickname of hacker living on the fringe of society. What can happen when these two very different people meet each other?
Massimo has discovered something, something that could shift the balance of power among the superpowers of the world. A Black Swan.
What is a Black Swan? “A black swan, when it arrives, cannot even be recognized as a black swan. When the black swan assaults us, with the wingbeats of some rapist Jupiter, then we must rewrite history.”
As a journalist, Luca must investigate, learn the truth – or should he? What if this is all beyond him, beyond his ability to fully grasp? Memristors? Euro-Liras? Spies and the possibility of an Alternate Italy?
What if the risk is too high, the danger too great?
Warring between what is safe and what is right, Luca had to decide if reporting the truth is worth the risk…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.

"Black Swan" is a novelette. 9250 words.

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Bruce Sterling
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Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
By soop
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Some really interesting and exciting themes, however they would have been much better suited to a novel sized publication instead of a short story as I wanted to know more and more and more!
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4 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
Great idea for a story, but unfortunately for me it was far too short and I had no real connection to the characters.
Future tech-ish and alternate realities but set in the present day (is that cyberpunk??).
Far too expensive for the few pages - at that price a full novel would be about £30.
I've read much better stories that have been more engaging.
At 99p it would be more respectable.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:  13 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
thought provoking read 2 April 2011
By D Earle - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is an interesting story about a technology journalist who receives the greatest tipoff in his career, only to be taken into an alternate universe.

It is thought provoking about what events do and do not shape our histories and what alternative histories might exist. The story revolves around the much touted idea of a black swan event, which totally disrupts the sequence of history - or the absence of such events.

The writing is a bit rough in places and at times I had reread sections to establish the flow of events. But this made up for by the imaginative content.

I have one general gripe with alternate universe stories. Why is it that authors propose that alternative universes are going to be populated by genetically identical people, living very different lives? Patterns of probability suggest that if alternate universes existed, the societies may have some general resemblance, but the chances of two people being genetically the same are very, very low. Anyway, there is a little twist in this story which might just redeem the storyline from this problem.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A SF short story about us 25 Sep 2010
By Davide Bianchini - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
"Black Swan" is yet another story about parallel universes. So the good part of it isn't the weird travel between alternate realities, which has already been (and better) exploited lots of times in SF literature.
The fun and interesting of this novel comes from the divertissement Sterling builds up adding people and historical turning points to the different worlds he writes about. More, Sterling is one of those authors who use fiction to report their sociological thoughts without any need to add any scientific proof to support them.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Outliers in History 13 Sep 2011
By Kitsune - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Luca is a tech journalist who's getting very valuable information for his career. Although, in order to understand that, he's taken to an alternate world where he knows that ideas can be History outliers that creates divergences and real big changes.

Based on the "Black Swan Theory", Sterling creates an idea of human being and society that feels so close to us and makes us question about "what if..."
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Popular Highlights

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&quote;
My genius had never embraced me, because genius had never been required of me. I had been stupid because I dwelled in a stupefied world. &quote;
Highlighted by 27 Kindle users
&quote;
A black swan can never be predicted, expected, or categorized. A black swan, when it arrives, cannot even be recognized as a black swan. When the black swan assaults us, with the wingbeats of some rapist Jupiter, then we must rewrite history. &quote;
Highlighted by 23 Kindle users
&quote;
A stroke of genius is a black swan, beyond prediction, beyond expectation. If a black swan never arrives, how on Earth could its absence be guessed? &quote;
Highlighted by 21 Kindle users

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