Visionary in Residence: Stories [Paperback]

Visionary in Residence is a collection that unites thirteen stories (published circa 1999-2005) by Bruce Sterling under one cover; two of these yarns also happen to be collaborations with his close friends Paul and Rudy. Audiences generally regard Sterling to be an author of science fiction, but his writing (continuing to transition into more alien forms of that genre) lately seems to congeal around disparate fields such as architecture, biology, design, environmentalism, and security.

"In Paradise," the lead story, is Sterling's strongest effort. Set amid a concourse of duty free shops, this narrative details the chance meeting of a nineteen year old Iranian beauty (Batool) and a twenty-six year old Texan plumber (Felix), and their subsequent love affair. Of course they can't converse with each other, without the help of two expensive Finnish cell phones that perform real-time translation on the fly, but that's the charm of the piece.

Second to "In Paradise," I think "The Growthing" is remarkable in terms of its overall texture. Set in a deserted Texas energy refinery that would be unrecognizable to today's industry vets, we get to share a tender vignette between biodome caretaker Milton and his teenage daughter Gretel before she's whisked away by a passing dirigible after her latest custody visit. Seems pretty tame on first read, but there are strange legal undercurrents coursing through the tale and an odd tacked on coda that offers redemption.

"Ivory Tower," is a funny squib first published in the British science weekly 'Nature.' The story revolves around ten thousand physicists self-educated by Internet, the manner in which they've leveraged their knowledge, and their formation of an academy in the Great Indian Desert. Two more 800 word pieces - "Message Found In A Bottle" and "Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct" - that are equally humorous, fill out Section Three, which is labeled as "Fiction for Scientists."

Of particular praise are the co-authored stories; The Scab's Progress (with Paul Di Filippo), and Junk DNA (with Rudy Rucker). Both of these stories are so strong that Bruce should really consider finding the time to co-author separate novels with each of these talented guys. I especially enjoyed the two female characters (Janna Gutierrez and Veruschka Zipkin) in Junk DNA, so I'd like to see them in a return outing. Two thumbs up for collaboration!

Now that I've encapsulated the weirder stories, let me tout one that's more mainstream. Code, set in the polished offices of Austin tech-startup Vintelix, finds Sterling taking us on a quirky romp after Employee #3 - a jumbo hippie coder named Louis - is found slumped over dead in his leather chair. The finding brings Van (a junior coder) closer to Julie (the receptionist) after the pair discovers LSD hidden in the unfortunate bloke's desk.

After reading The Growthing, you should probably skip ahead to Code before back-pedaling to read the hybrid "User-Centric," which begins with literary epistle (a series of emails between Engineer, Graphic Designer, Legal Expert, Marketer, Programmer, Social Anthropologist & Team Coordinator) about two hypothetical customers named "Al" and "Zelda," before morphing into a story about an oddly mismatched couple. Are these characters real people? The story leaves you wondering.

Rather than knock Bruce, I'll declare that "Luciferase" - previously published in SciFiction - seems out of character (too Disneyesque) for a Sterling story, note that I've read many of them. Talking bugs named Dolores, Peck, and Vinnie? Not really the kind of story you're likely to find podcast on EscapePod anytime soon. The trio that complete this volume ("The Necropolis of Thebes," "The Blemmye's Stratagem," "Luciferase,") while okay, won't get you stoked.

You should pick up Visionary In Residence if you're a science fiction fan. Each of Bruce's stories will transport you to interior landscapes that ripple with cheery qualities of both light and sound - places where the players struggle with unusual aspects of death or love - or quiet interludes where time itself seems to bend. The compendium reveals Sterling at his nadir. Grab some coffee, find a comfortable chair, and enjoy this eloquent softbound book.

Bruce is one of those authors I always approach hesitantly. When he's good, he's very good, but when he's not, he's . . . well, not terrible, but certainly uninteresting. That goes for both his novels and his short stories. As I've noted elsewhere, he's a kick to listen to in person at a con, but his ideas and enthusiasms and social concerns don't always translate well into print. This collection of thirteen stories which first appeared in the past five or six years is divided thematically -- "Fiction for Scientists," "Design Fiction," "Architecture Fiction," etc. And there are several here that are great fun: "In Paradise" (love by means of real-time language translation in your cell phone), "Code" (boy-nerd meets girl-nerd), "The Necropolis of Thebes" (a very thoughtful look at "the old days" -- really old), and "The Denial" (actually a ghost story set in Ottoman times). One of the best, under the heading of "Ribofunk," is "Junk DNA," written with Rudy Rucker, which is about a high-tech start-up built around genomics instead of software; it's damaged, though, by the rather silly ending which makes me think Bruce simply got tired of writing it. The least-readable story, as it happens, is also about biotech -- "The Scab's Progress," with Paul Di Filippo, which made almost no sense at all to me. Also, if the author would just learn to write endings for his stories instead of just stopping his typing, I wouldn't have to keep turning the page, wondering if the rest of the story had been omitted.

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories from Bruce Sterling. Thematically the stories range all over the place from post-human to ancient history and ancient alternate history. The thing that ties all these stories together and made the book so great for me was that these tales reflect many of the futurist ideas posited in his non-fiction work Tomorrow Now. If you haven't read Tomorrow Now I highly recommend it, it's a five star read all the way. Frankly, even though I tend to read more fiction than non-fiction, his Tomorrow Now was one of the better reads I've undertaken this year and the quality of the prose was shockingly good. For a non-fiction work on ideas and what the future may hold it couldn't have been more engaging, easy to read, and mind-expanding.

I read this collection shortly after Tomorrow Now and it felt to me as if they were almost complementary books. The non-fiction work describes many of things we may see in the future and the way society may change with new technologies, including fascinating ideas about the future of biotechnology and the changing nature of employment and what people may wind up doing on a day-to-day basis for work. His concept of work in the future is almost hard to grasp it is so alien, yet extrapolating from the changes over the past twenty years his ideas are entirely plausible too. The short stories take these ideas and wrap them up in engaging tales exploring how these changes affect discrete individuals; the fictional accounts cover the world changes from individual perspective rather than a general societal overview. Some of the stories are better than others naturally but there are some real gems in here, including a colloboration with Rudy Rucker and two stories set in the Middle East roughly 1200 and 1400 A.D. Don't worry, they're both still sci-fi, and expand on some of the better ideas on society and culture that Sterling comes up with. This is a great book, I enjoyed it a lot, and it's well worth the money, but for an even better appreciation I recommend reading Tomorrow Now first and then this one directly after. I am so glad that I did that way.