Schismatrix

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… show more.

Sterling burst onto the SF scene with a crash and clatter when I was in high school, and this book, while perhaps not his very best work, is certainly his most creative.

I loved the fact that the aliens were investors rather than conquerors and also the fact that human beings were diverging along so many different vectors that we were rapidly becoming alien to one another.