Review: Schismatrix+ by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is, together with William Gibson, one of the godfathers of the Cyberpunk genre.

Oddly enough, while I love the aesthetic and the themes, I have not actually read many books in the genre, possibly because the ones I read (e.g. Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy) weren’t much to my liking (see my notes on The Peripheral).

So it’s not surprising that I had not read anything (or if I did, I forgot it) by Sterling, and I decided to give it a try.

Mild spoilers ahead.

The Shaper/Mechanist universe

Schismatrix+ is a book compose of a novel, Schismatrix, and a few short stories set in the same universe, a future where humankind has fractured (see, that’s where the schism in the title comes from) into sects, micro-countries, corporation-states etc, and the major split is between shapers, aka post-humans who believe in improving themselves through genetics, and mechanists, those who prefer cybernetics and a merge of homo sapiens and machine.

There’s more schisms, like in everything, and people drift between one and the other over time so the boundaries are less fluid than the universe would have you believe, but it’s an interesting setting (and not an uncommon one, tbh).

(Sidenote: the Italian translation of the title is “la matrice spezzata”, or “the broken matrix”, which is quite different from the original but it’s quite good)

The place where this happens is the solar system, cause post-humans have not yet achieved interstellar travel, but at some point alien races do appear, the first and chief of which is the investors, a race of space-faring economic-minded reptilians/insectoids.

I really like the concept of the investors, which are, in some sense, a more grounded version of Star Trek’s Ferengi. They are obsessed with wealth, not particularly bright nor threatening, but they are scary in the way that someone far more powerful than you can always be, even if they play by some legalistic and deal-oriented rules.

I also really enjoyed the fact that in this future world there’s a general societal collapse, but we still have patents. Truly a dystopia.

Is this cyberpunk?

I am not sure what cyberpunk is. I thought the core concepts are the fragmentation of society, a lot of computers, the death of traditional nations and rise of corporations. I didn’t expect aliens. By this point of view this is a lot less cyberpunk than, say, Neuromancer or Burning Chrome.

TVTropes says that “Schismatrix is to Neuromancer what Gormenghast is to The Lord of the Rings“, and I honestly have no idea what they mean.

I don’t know, drawing lines hardly ever work, let’s just say this is a book about post-humanism and human societies which got too complex for their own good.

Prigoginic what?

Ilya Prigogine was a Nobel prize winner chemist, who, among other things, studied complex systems.

Sterling heard of him and made up the “prigoginic levels of complexity”. This is akin to old science fiction where “the fourth dimension” was a parallel universe, i.e. it uses some of the vocabulary but fundamentally ignores the actual meaning.

Anyway, in this universe, systems will sometimes make a leap from a level of complexity to another. So, the primordial chaos of the pre-universe made a leap into space-time and matter; matter made a leap into primordial life; life beame intelligent and self-conscious, and here is where we, and the shaper/mechanist universe is.

But the beauty of this post-humanist universe is it’s constantly running, and on the verge of, the fifth prigoginic leap. Something which we cannot describe, since it’s beyond what we can even conceive of.

Here’s an interesting on prigogine and science fiction, written better than I ever could.

Fun trivia: Bruce Sterling in the intro says Prigogine read the stories and said they had nothing to do with what he said, and Sterling agrees.

The stories

Before I forget them completely, these are the specific details about each story.

Here are more spoilers.

Schismatrix

The original novel which got “expanded” in this book. It’s a sort of picaresque adventure following Abelard Lindsay through various adventures, changes of identities, meeting with friends and enemies and so on, across the whole solar system and a span of decades (centuries?). The novel reads lightly even when it touches difficult topics, and it was very enjoyable for me.

It ends in an interesting way, and I particularly enjoyed the irony built into imagining of the various quasi-states, such as the Mare Tranquilitatis People’s Circumlunar Zaibatsu or the Czarina-Kluster People’s Corporate Republic.

7/10

Swarm

Probably the most beautiful story, which has also been made into a very nice animation in Netflix’s Death Love & Robots anthology. It explores the common sci-fi theme of “social insects in space”, but it puts a beautiful spin on it, embracing the idea that the Swarm not only prospers without something analog to our intelligence, but explicitly chooses to avoid it: from its point intelligence is a trait that leads to species fizzling out in a few millennia.

10/10

Spider Rose

Another one used for Death Love & Robots, tho they changed it slightly. I’d argue the original version is better, but the animation is good too. Basically: lonely mechanist receives a pet.

6.5/10

Cicada Queen

We revisit (tho originally this was written before the main novel) the Cicada Kluster, where a mixed community has developed around an investor queen. A Shaper named Landau invents a new kind of jewel, and decides what to do with his new riches. We also get to know the lobsters, a kind of mechanist post-human which wraps themselves in an exoskeleton which allows them to live in the void of space, becoming more and more self absorbed and detached from the human race.

7/10, mostly because of the lobsters.

Sunken Gardens

The people of Terraform-Kluster have been terraforming Mars for a while, and there are regular tournaments/battle between factions of “vassal” tribes to show their skills.

7/10, tho I had to go through it twice to appreciate it

Twenty Evocations

Some experimental post-modernist writing; basically we see the life of a Shaper named Nikolai Leng through fragments of his life in the form of “evocations”: singulat titles like “ECLECTIC EPILECTIC” or “CHILD INVESTMENT” followed by a sentence or a couple paragraphs. Kind of like you could imagine seeing flashes of your life before dying. Surprisingly moving.

7/10.

Conclusion

I think this was well worth the read. I didn’t love everything about it, but I liked a lot of it. This was not the book I expected, but it’s good.

Vote: 7/10, the book is a classic for good reasons.