Global Headis/was Bruce Sterling’s first published collection of short stories (he’s published 4 more since) – these are stories written between 85 and 92 and, in retrospect (don’t we all love hindsight!) show his departure from the Cyberpunk/Steampunk stories he was writing (or, rather, selling!) at the time. It contains 12 stories of varying length, and, as usual for such collections, spanning a substantial range of topics and approaches; most of which I rather enjoyed.
Our Neural Chernobyl: This is a pseudo-review of a fictional book by Dr Felix Hollom, an ‘Open Tower Scientist’. Er, populist science? How very Daily Mail. Anyway, it discusses Gene Hacking gone wrong and viral, and resulting in a world where animals develop intelligence. Fun, and thoroughly tongue in cheek.
Storming the Cosmos: this is a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, describing a Tunguska Expedition by the KGB, early in the space race, to obtain a sample of the Alien technology which crashed there. It’s got plenty of cold war paranoia, party and love politics. And the artefact is not what they expected. Or is it? Delightful, to say the least.
Here are a few thoughts, put down originally in 2007, on Melanie McGrath's Hard, Soft and Wet- an inoffensive, but rather non-essential auto-biographical story describing her experiences with the online world. My, how times have moved on!
Where to start? Firstly, a few misconceptions from the front cover:
The title, pornographic as it sounds (or is that only me? search for the title on Google at your own risk...), refers to the Hardware, Software, and Wetware (ie humans – what a limited definition) that today’s world of IT requires. Not sure she really ‘got it’, though. The whole thing and its interactions seems to continually be slightly out of her grasp...
The subtitle/tag line (The Digital Generation Comes of Age) is a load of rubbish, and most likely the result of a brainwave by some marketing droid. The story is about Melanie’s love affair, and eventual disillusionment with the online world.
I Wake from a Dream of a Drowned Star City is a short story (novella? Fragment?) byS.P. Somtow, which is a pseudonym for the magnificentSomtow Sucharitkul; award-winning Author, Musician, and famous Conductor/Composer. This is a book published by Axolotl Press (their 24th publication out of 26 overall…), it came as 75 bound in leather, 300 Hardbacks, and 525 Trade Paperbacks; all of which signed by the author. A bit of a rarity, really, although it’s definitely findable (and obtainable) on the internet, if not terribly well known.
Dreambreak. The easternmost point of the world. Just shy of the drowned star city. Where the human dream is shattered. Dreambreak.
Here's another old review, this time for Cosmonaut Keep, the first book in Ken MacLeod’s Engines of Light series: Given that I recently managed to buy not one, but two copies of this book I thought I’d better give one of them a spin… what I found is that it is an excellent book, and was nominated for a Hugo Award for good reason (no, it couldn’t win, not against American Gods!). Recommended – and I’m now after the other two books in the Trilogy. One copy only, though.
Ken MacLeod provides us with skilled storytelling on a grand scale. This book has two, at least in this book, only loosely connected strands. One of them is classic Space Opera: We find Gregor Cairns, a marine (exo)biologist conducting his research in the town of Kyovic, on the planet of Mingulay. The colony has regressed a lot, at least technologically, and can neither reach nor fly the spaceship, the ‘Bright Star’, which orbits their world. The story kicks off when another spaceship, carrying (human) traders from another star system visits Mingulay. The star ship, like all of them, are being flown by Kraken, whilst the gravity skiffs used, you guessed it, in gravity, are being piloted by Saurs (as the name suggests). Gregor, a direct descendant of the original ‘Navigator’, and part of the current ‘Cosmonaut Cadre’, gets tangled up in a (not very bizarre, but very adolescent) love triangle between one of the trader girls, and his lab assistant, Elizabeth Harkness.
Global Head 
I Wake from a Dream of a Drowned Star City
