Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a new Soviet Union has invaded Europe, micro-drones fill the sky, providing ubiquitous surveillance to governments and powerful NGOs, the USA is paralyzed by infighting and economic concerns, and in the midst of all of this, a powerful fascist organization has militarized and sells its services to the west—for money, yes, but also for the chance to remake the world in its own twisted image. Nope, that’s not a story ripped from today’s newspapers or nightly news programs, it’s the setup for John Shirley’s Eclipse Trilogy. What had seemed like a wild, typically cynical cyberpunk riot to sci-fi readers in 1985 now reads like an eerily prescient view into the future.
Shirley, as fellow devotees of cyberpunk will remember, is the subgenre’s first author, having written the first cyberpunk novel, City Come A-Walkin’, published in July 1980. The Eclipse Trilogy, though, is far more ambitious but no less prophetic in its insights. The story follows a group of resistance fighters—coming from all walks of life and, because it’s a John Shirley novel, includes a dashing punk guitarist—as they battle to uncover the motives and means by which the fascist organization (the New Alliance) will take control of the world, through exploiting the Soviet Union’s invasion of western Europe.
The action is crisp and gripping, the characters complex and believable, and the story rages not only across Europe but around the world and into space, as a large portion of the book (and more of the next two) takes place on FirStep, Earth’s first orbiting colony.
A Song Called Youth, or Eclipse book 1, is a great read for fans of cyberpunk and for anyone looking to understand our present day through the eyes of yesterday. One last interesting note: an excerpt of book 1 appears in Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades: a cyberpunk anthology, which was one of the reasons why the subgenre adopted the name cyberpunk. So, not only a damn fine story, but a page from history, too.
This gripping cyberpunk novel — the first in a trilogy — envisions a future in which the economy of the United States has crashed, while the Soviet Union not only remains intact but invades Western Europe. With the collapse of NATO, governments have abdicated control to an ostensibly private antiterrorist and security firm, the Second Alliance. But the fascist mercenaries of the alliance are working from a hidden agenda, and their only challenge comes from the New Resistance, a rogues' gallery of rebels who battle mind control and weapons of mass destruction with sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll.…
Synners is a book you’ve got to want to read, it is not casual. The mix of prose and blank verse create a haunting text, but the pacing has been noted by some reviewers as a weak point—which misses the point. The protagonists in Synners are, effectively, hackers of a sort, virtual reality aficionados who create VR content, plugging their minds directly into their hardware: then, something goes wrong in the global VR networks, people start dying from the online experience, and it’s only these plunky, drugged-out adventurers who can untangle the plot and save the day. The complication is more a matter of who they’ve become over the years leading up to the literary present of the novel, rather than the antagonist’s actions, and the prose style effectively communicates the kind of drifting, obsessive state that their lives have adopted, disconnected by the very thing that connects them to everything.
If you love cyberpunk, you owe it to yourself to read Synners, but be warned, this is a Pat Cadigan novel and if you’re going to make it through, you’re going to have to want it. In many ways, Pat’s novels are like the drugs she describes: the best way to read them is to settle back on the couch, relax, and enjoy the trip. Try to focus too hard and you’ll lose it.
What does it mean to be human when you're part of the machine?
Synners are synthesizers - not machines, but people. They take images from the brains of performers, and turn them into a form which can be packaged, sold and consumed. This book is set in a world where new technology spawns new crime before it hits the streets.
In SYNNERS the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim; the human mind and the external landscape have fused to the point where any encounter with reality is incidental.
A classic novel from one of the founders and mainstays…
Ho boy, Schismatrix. Our third book this year is a standout amongst the golden-age cyberpunk novels, as it is Bruce Sterling’s most ambitious—and one of his weirdest—novels. Schismatrix takes many of the core cyberpunk themes and turns them up to 11: corporate republics have replaced traditional countries, businesses and philosophies intermingle, rising and falling with the market and with the current fashion, and life-and-death decisions are made as matters of policy, profit, and the inner urgings of hardwired human augmentation.
The story follows the protagonist/anti-hero Abelard Lindsay through his rather bizarre life. Lindsay undergoes augmentation, diplomatic programming, and gets involved with numerous plots throughout the universe, promoting first this corporation and then that one, becoming involved with schemes to boost this philosophy and then turning on it, and competes or cooperates with several main characters as circumstances dictate. It’s a dizzying, twisting plot of betrayed or abandoned loyalties and goals, ultimately leading to a question of who exactly is Abelard Lindsay and who does he want to become (quite literally, because he has the option of being turned into a fish or a disembodied stellar being).
Schismatrix differs from the core cyberpunk novels of the golden age because it is not set mostly on Earth, but rather it subverts the usual space opera motifs and tropes by plunging into the farthest reaches of space and bandying with aliens, while still exploring the usual cyberpunk tropes of augmentation, corporate exploitation, and ne’er-do-well heroes. Think Dune meets When Gravity Fails and you’ve got it.
THE FUTURE OF MANKIND CAN TAKE ONE OF TWO DIRECTIONS...
The Mechanists are ancient aristocrats, their lives prosthetically extended with advanced technology. The Shapers are genetically altered revolutionaries, their skills the result of psychotechnic training and artificial conditioning.
Both factions are fighting to control the Schismatrix of humankind.
The Shapers are losing the battle, but Abelard Lindsay--a failed and exiled Shaper diplomat--isn't giving up. Across the galaxy, Lindsay moves from world to world, building empires, struggling for his cause--but more often fighting for his life.
He is a rebel and a rogue, a pirate and a politician, a soldier and…
The perfection of cold fusion and CasiDrive propulsion had lifted humanity into the wider solar system—and widened the gulf between the nameless masses and the sovereign-class wealthy. Into the grey between corporate and criminal walked Cain, a soldat de fortune, who, for the last twenty years, had taken scores and completed contracts for the elites of any world, impenetrable, abstruse, and solitary.
All of that changed one year ago when, after a triste with a former client turned into a romance, Cain’s relationship with Francesca caused him to question how he could walk in her world and survive in his own. The boundaries of their lives then came crashing to Earth when the man whose syndicate they had destroyed returned for revenge. The money behind the man, however, concealed a deeper, more sinister plot, one that threatened Francesca’s life and would challenge Cain to walk the razor’s edge between their two worlds while remaining true to the Ethos of Cain.
Ethos of Cain is the first novel in The Cain Series by Seth W. James.
