I love science fiction and cyberpunk. I was expecting to like this book but wow! I walked away from this book reeling. It capitalizes on the best of those two genres, and reaches past them, becoming something entirely new, much as Sterling's posthumans reach past humanity to become something more bizarre, beautiful, and disturbing.
The world of the Schismatrix is amazingly well-realized. There are endless political and philosophical factions within Sterling's inhabited solar system. I understand how some reviews felt that the complexity of the world and its politics could be overwhelming and hard to keep track of. This is true at times, and one gets the feeling that Sterling had the entire world worked out in his head, but only chose to show us parts of it. This actually makes the story more enticing and kept me turning each page with excitement and hunger for more.
The protagonist, Abelard Lindsay, is actually very likable and funny. There seems to be a new idea on each page, some disturbing, some beautiful, and all of them brilliant. Sterling takes a gritty in-depth look at what it means to augment humanity with machinery. He focuses on the minute details of what a posthuman has to deal with in daily life, and captures it in a believable way.
On top there's a message that humanity will become something so bizarre due to technology that it would be very uncomfortable for us to comprehend, and that science will cause us to drastically rethink what it means to be human. But underneath this message is the beautiful and uplifting idea that life is always exciting, always worth exploring, and that this fascination with life itself serves as a foil to nihilism.
The short stories are fantastic too. They only served to further enmesh me in a universe I had already fallen in love with, and each has its own new idea and angle to explore.
This book is an absolute must-buy for any fan of strange science fiction and cyberpunk, although as I said it transcends genre. I don't know why I don't see it on more classic and must-read scifi lists. Now that Asimov and Heinlen are trite and stale, this is the literature of the future.
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Stuart Steel
One of my all time favourite books
Reviewed in Australia on October 31, 2018
