Sterling is actually good in the short story genre whereas, some of his novels may drag a bit and be a bit scanty in character development the stories in this collection hpowever, are quite good in pacing and development.

One of the best moments was reading "Flowers of Edo" while on a train to Nara. The story of Japan's embrace of modern technology and the destruction of its past had a great resonance for me after seeing the hyper buzz of Tokyo. I felt that Sterling also showed more hope and charm of his romantic nature with "Green Days in Brunei".

The most daring work within a standard narrative format were all the Shaper/Mechanist stories. The other stories were interesting in ideas and themes, but nothing outside the scope of regular science fiction or fantasy themes found elsewhere.

Before slapping heavier works on your plate such as, _Global Head_ or _Disctraction_ pick up this book of his early work when he was learning his craft and was willing to dare a little bit more.

The characterisation is really very strong for such a short book. The characters are all very different and their interaction is great. The plot is simple, but hangs together extremely well. I found some of the descriptions of the alien life and the sensibilities of the locals and whalers really absorbing. There are quite a number of amusing little scenes in this book. (I think a few may be unintentional). The setting is really fascinating and has a few well chosen details that really add to the immersiveness of the book. I really enjoyed it!.

Things I didn't like about the book (don't worry, nothing really revealing here): the Flying Island, Crossbow and the Chairman's transformation, a climax you wouldn't exactly call exciting. Also, the Crossbow Body was a pretty shaky and only vaguely accounted-for concept.

I found this book in the library, of all places, back when I was in junior high school in 1982. Crouched between all that hoary Silverberg and Simak that I didn't want to read, it said "Psssst!". I haven't been the same since. The Kid jumped out and smacked me across the forehead with his lush, tweaked-out postpunk setting and sweeping, interconnected plot. A little bit of old-world pangalacticism, a little futuristic DIY chopsocky, a bunch of toungues in cheeks, and loads of high-tech wetware polymers and lurching biomasses, from before wetware polymers and lurching biomasses were cool. And all the while, Sterling's trademark core of optimism shines through.

It's taken the world about ten years to catch up to this baby, and it's about damn time. If you don't know Bruce Sterling, this is a fine place to start. Now, where's my Smuff?

John Zero (jzero@onramp.net), Dallas, Texas

Overall, I would give this book a marginal recommendation to sci-fi buffs and perhaps disaster buffs. It moves slowly at times, but there are enough interesting ideas to make it worth your while if you're interested in the subject matter.

Heavy Weather is not a bad book, but it is not one of my favorite novels. While the plot can be slow at times and is a little predictable, the concept is interesting and the book is very easy to read. If you have a short attention span, I suggest that you do not read this book. The story has a very large lull in the middle. Another downfall is that the F6 tornado is extremely over-hyped. Sterling could have done much more with it, but didn't. The plot and characters are developed well, however, and the story itself is refreshingly different.

Heavy Weather is much like one of Sterling's other works, Holy Fire. The writing styles of both books are very similar. Both books deal with medical technology. The theme of whether or not medicine can be too high tech seems to run through both books. Some characters even seem like they could fit in with the characters in Holy Fire. In both books, Sterling focuses on the people in his story, rather than the technology itself. He writes more about how technology affects people.

The main characters, Jane and Alex, are two siblings that were never very close to each other. Fulfilling her role as the big sister, Jane saves Alex from a life of black market medical treatments, and takes him to experience her lifestyle. Jane lives with the Storm Troupe, a group of people that hack weather. The Troupe chases tornadoes gathering all the information they can get, in hopes that they will figure out the secrets behind one of Mother Nature's mysteries. Their mission is centered on a hypothesized F6 sized tornado, their Holy Grail.

One attraction to this book is how different it is from other cyberpunk novels. I started reading this book expecting another classic cyberpunk storyline, but found a book that could have easily not been cyberpunk at all. The book seemed more along the lines of a natural-disaster-punk novel. The movie Twister, which came out two years after Heavy Weather, shares many similarities with it. Both show the group of outsiders who are only interested in solving the mystery of the tornado. Both show the main characters chasing the big tornado, which ends up making their relationship with each other better. There is even an appearance in both the book and the movie, by the cow that gets caught in the tornado.

What would it be like to chase massive storms in the year 2031? Bruce Sterling does a great job of "forecasting" what the future may hold in his book Heavy Weather. I liked Heavy Weather because it had good plot, the characters were well developed, and the technology was great. Really the only thing I did not care for was the ending.

The main portion of the story pertains to the adventures of the Storm Troupe. The Storm Troupe is a small group of people that "hack" heavy weather in the year 2031. "Heavy weather" is a summer cycle of storms, caused by the out-of-control greenhouse effect, which produces tornadoes that ravage Texas and Oklahoma. The Storm Troupe leader, Jerry Mulcahey, has predicted the F-6, a super tornado that will be unimaginable in scale. The troupe's ultimate goal is to be there when the F-6 comes down. The reader is taken through the journey for the F-6 using the eyes of the main characters Alex and Janey Unger.

One of the reasons I really liked this book was because of the characters Alex and Janey. The characters are well developed, interesting, and each has their own distinct personality. The brother-sister tandem of Alex and Janey is really kind of humorous as they argue and smart-off to each other just like a stereotypical brother and sister. The minor characters are also well organized. Sterling definitely took the time to be precise with minor characters, too.

The technology was another reason I liked this book. The gadgets were always interesting to read about. One of my favorite techs was the ornithropter. The ornithropter was a machine that acted very much like a bird, but had two cameras mounted on it and was controlled with virtual reality. These machines were used to drop measuring instruments into the funnel cloud, and sometimes flew into the vortex.

A great thing about Sterling's Heavy Weather is how easy it is to read and understand. This book is written in a clear and concise way that is easy to comprehend. I would say this book is a much easier read than Brunner's Shockwave Rider and Gibson's Neuromancer.

There were quite a few good parts in the book, but the ending disturbed me. I would compare the ending of this book to that of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. In Snow Crash the ending keeps getting built up and built up, but at the end it kind of leaves you guessing. I felt the same way after I finished this book. It kept building and building, but kind of fizzled out.

Even after what happened with the ending, I would still consider Heavy Weather a great book. The plot, characters, and technologies outweighed the one weakness of this story.

This book was as fingernails on slate by the time I was half through so I stopped. It is self-consciously clever- so much so I blushed with embarassment for the author. A 10 year old girl demonstrated a working familiarity with scholarly writings on existentialism and feminist politics to her estranged-but-loveable dad. He didn't comment on this absurd precosity. That's when I gave up.

As much as I read books and these reviews which often guide my purchases, I rarely post anything, myself. Here I make the effort to save you -stranger- from a distinctly unpleasant dose of forced
and insincere mirth.

The plot was interesting. Starlitz is peddling stupid pop music and trashy G7 gals with zero talent from the worlds richest countries to the some of the world's poorest. At stories end, in contrast to the G7 girls whose tour ended in monetary disaster, Starlitz likes the idea of next trying the tour with seven very talented gals from seven obscure countries singing the best music with the ambition of making no money at all. Their success could support Sterling's idea that reality depends entirely on the words used-the narrative.

Maybe it's just because I've read Bruce Sterling short stories and I know that he can write. Maybe it's because I've read Neal Stephenson and compared to Snowcrash, other books in the cyberpunk genre are plodding. But mostly it's just not a very good book.

Set in the 2030 this book concerns a democratic corporation and the information pirates that it's trying to bring to heel. Instead of focusing on the pirates, as Gibson would do, this book concerns itself with the corporate types that are trying to figure out what's going on in the assassinations.

The world set-up in this opening is dull. Most of the characters are talking heads to spout philosophical mumbo-jumbo. A church of goddess worshipping prostitutes was probably innovative in its time but Starhawk's fifteen minutes are up, and paganism has moved away from the hippie garbage finally.

Halfway through the book it becomes a travelogue of the various places in this world. Here's where it begins to get good. Zelazny compares it to Candide. Sadly it's nowhere near as funny as Candide - which could be the fault of the main character whose nowhere near as innocent or cynical as she would need to be to pull off a Candide. Instead she's simply morally outraged.

When the book gets to Africa it begins to pick up, but then the protagonist is rescued by a Noam Chomsky type reporter whose running a guerrila army. This is where the book again falls flat on its face - by presupposing that Noam Chomsky would actually be able to run a workable system - rather than criticize the unworkabiility of current systems.

There are moments, but mostly this book is a lifeless remnant of the cyberpunk explosion.

Overall, however, the story is good, the characterization, setting, etc. are all good, and in the end, you *are* left with a solid sense of what the author intended (thoughts about world-wide changes over time...revolutions...*ideas*...sweeping political changes), and thus, the novel is effective and entertaining.

The world Sterling creates alone would make this worthwhile reading, but his characterization is strong and unconventional, and he tells an extremely interesting story that travels all over the world. This isn't really a fast-paced pageturner, and it isn't immersed in hard-science details about how things work in the future--it's more like real life for most of us, where technology is part of the background, and just works. So if those are the kinds of things you value in a SF novel, this may not be your book. But the traditional virtues of plot, characterization, and setting make this an outstanding novel.

Other reviews here have alluded to the main characters of this novel being two-dimensional. I disagree - Sterling's protagonist is engaging and witty, brilliant and suave and wonderfully flawed to boot. I found great pleasure being in his company for the duration of the book.

Much of the book is cleverly and compellingly written in dialogue form - allowing the author to warm to his subject through his characters instead of off-loading his political philophies as wordy exposition. Sterling handles this expertly, drawing the reader in and entertaining them thoroughly in the process.

Worth the bother? Definitely!

Sterling's writing is quirky, intelligent, and real. He makes implausible situations (such as a cold war between the US and the Netherlands) feel both believable and appropriate.

The characters are wonderfully drawn. I was in love with Oscar-- the fast-talking campaign manager who isn't quite human but can always find the angle in a situation. I believed in his odd relationship with the unlikely and awkward Dr. Penninger simply because it was so improbable but at the same time so true.

I can understand why the ending felt unsatisfying to a lot of readers, because it fails to hand you simple or predictable resolution. Indeed, a lot like life, the plot almost fades away, leaving us with the main characters' relationship as the primary movement in the novel. Oddly appropriate for a book written about a time where everyone seems to be frantically sitting still, but grantedly atypical for science fiction.

But the rest?

Filler. The ideas about the importance of networks in the future (whether cell based terrorist groups, or profiteers) are covered in more depth in both sterling's fictional DISTRACTION and Rheingold's SMART MOBS. The critique of education is pedantic, as is the discussion about the future of politics.

I get the sense that these pieces were just lying around on the hard drive, and he realized there was a book in there. He was almost right...some tight editing would've been very helpful.

And why do I especially like this book? It's the first instance I remember of what soon came to be known as "steam-punk." A technology-based yarn, but with Victorian techno, not computers. Not exactly. There are three principal characters here: Sybil Gerard, daughter of Walter Gerard, the great Luddite agitator and orator; Dr. Edward Mallory, dinosaur-hunter, afficionado of steam-gurneys, and stalwart of the Industrial Radical Party; and Laurence Oliphant, who pretends to be only a somewhat adventuresome journalist-cum-diplomat but who is actually a top intelligence operative and handler for Her Majesty's government. And then there's Inspector Fraser, part of the very Special Branch, as well as a number of nicely realized supporting characters.

But, of course, the story is really about the world of 1855 in which Charles Babbage was very successful in developing his mechanical computer, a marvelous Engine (always capitalized here) of wheels and rods and gears and punch cards that has put Britain well on top of things, and the government in many ways well on top of its citizens. The plot device that gets things going is the theft of a box of punched Engine cards, the purpose of which is never quite divulged -- though we know the program they contain is Important. It's all a great deal of fun in the Idea-as-Hero tradition. Gibson and Sterling (mostly the latter, I think) have definitely got the feel of the times and the city of London, immersing the reader in authentic jargon and cant, but without casting you adrift.

Frankly, I don't understand the antipathy of the other reviewers. It's a pretty good story and most people I know personally, even those who aren't big Gibson fans, liked it. In fact, my only real complaint is in an area where Gibson's hand definitely shows, and that's the ending of the book. Actually, it doesn't really end; it just stops, and with a bit of Gibsonian mysticism regarding the set of cards thrown in.