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From the subversive to the antic, the uproarious to the disturbing, the stories of Bruce Sterling are restless, energy-filled journeys through a world running on empty--The visionary work of one of our most imaginative and insightful modern writers.

They live as strangers in strange lands. In the worlds that have fallen--or should have. They wage battles in wars already lost and become heroes--and sometimes martyrs--in their last ditch efforts to preserve the dignity and individuality of humanity.

A hack Indian filmmaker takes the pulse of a wounded and declining civilization--21st century Britain. A pair of swashbuckling Silicon Valley entrepreneurs join forces to make a commercial killing--in organic underground slime and computer-generated jellyfish. A man in a Japanese city takes orders from a talking cat while pursuing a drama of danger and adventure that has become the very essence of his life.

From "The Littlest Jackal", a dark hilarious thriller of mercs and gunrunners set in Finland, to a stark vision of a post-atomic netherworld in his haunting tale "Taklamakan", Bruce Sterling once again breaks boundaries, breaks icons, and breaks rules to unleash the most dangerously provocative and intelligent science fiction being written today.

Table of Contents:

• Maneki Neko - (1998) - shortstory
• Big Jelly - (1994) - novelette with Rudy Rucker
• The Littlest Jackal - (1996) - novella
• Sacred Cow - (1993) - shortstory
• Deep Eddy - (1993) - novelette
• Bicycle Repairman - (1996) - novelette
• Taklamakan - (1998) - novelette

This short story originally appeared in Subterranean Online, Spring 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

"I'm and entertainer in the military-entertainment complex." - Bruce Sterling, polemicist, provocateur, futurist, "visionary in residence", Bruce Sterling has been out there, personally sharpening the cutting edge of science fiction for more than thirty years. from his first story "Man-Made Self"- in 1976 to his latest "Kiosk" in 2007, Sterling has written science fiction that is fast moving, sharply extrapolated, technologically literate, and as brilliant and cohesive as a laser, as he himself once said of William Gibson. His Shaper/Mechanist" stories were an essential part of the "cyberpunk" movement of the 80's, just as his "Leggy Starlitz" and "Chattanooga" stories wrangled the near future of the 90's better than anyone else. Whether writing about the deep future in Schismatrix or the deep present in Holy Fire, he has developed into the best science fiction writer working in the world today. Born in Texas in 1954, Sterling has traveled the globe writing and working for The New York Times, Nature, Wired, Newsday, and a number of industrial design magazines. His short fiction has appeared in almost every major publication in the science fiction field. His novels include far future adventures Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Islands in the Net, The Difference Engine, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction, and The Zenith Angle.

Sidewise Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Interzone, #221 March-April 2009. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012).

This is a collection of short science fiction stories.

Stories include: "Swarm", "Spider Rose", "Cicada Queen", "Sunken Gardens", Twenty Evocations", "Green Days in Brunei", "Spook", "The Beautiful and the Sublime", "Telliamed", "The Little Magic Shop", "Flowers of Edo", "Dinner in Audoghast"

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1985 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2013. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 12 (1986) edited by Arthur W. Saha, Future Earths: Under African Skies (1993) edited by Gardner Dozois and Mike Resnick and Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Crystal Express (1989) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

From Bruce Sterling, bestselling author of Heavy Weather and Holy Fire, comes this startling, disturbing, and darkly comic vision of the future of America. It is the story of a once great nation coming apart at the seams while an unending spectacle of politics, science, sex, and corruption has everyone too busy to notice....

It's November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The federal government is broke, cities are privately owned, the military is shaking down citizens in the streets, and Wyoming is on fire. The last place anyone expects to find an answer is the nation's capital.

Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A master political spin doctor, Oscar has been in the background for years, doing his best to put the proper spin on anything that comes up. Now he wants to do something quite unusual in politics. He wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet: a grotesque and unspeakable scandal that haunts his personal life.

He has one unexpected ally: Dr. Greta Penninger. She is a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together Oscar and Greta know the human mind inside and out. And they are about to use that knowledge to spread a very powerful message: that it's a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's an idea whose time has come...again. And once again so have its enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and reactionary laptop assassin in America.

Like all revolutionaries, Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they're determined to put a new spin on it.

Hugo, Nebula and Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1989. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (1990), edited Ellen Datlow and Terri Windlingv, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection (1990), edited Gardner Dozois and Modern Classics of Science Fiction (1991), edited by Gardner Dozios. It is included in the collections Globalhead (1992) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World (2017), edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1987. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 23 (1989), edited by Michael Bishop, and Modern Classics of Fantasy (1997), edited by Gardner Dozios. It is included in the collections Crystal Express (1989) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Featuring thirteen satirical short stories, a unique collection includes scientific superstars, a rock singer who is a voice of the people, and two lost souls who drive off the edge of the world and find each other.

Short Stories included: "Our Neural Chernobyl", "Storming the Cosmos", "The Compassionate, the Digital", "Jim and Irene", "The Sword of Damocles, "The Gulf War", "The Shoes of Bohemia", "The Moral Bullet", "The Unthinkable", "We See Things Differently", "Hollywood Kremlin", "Are You For 86?", "Dori Bangs"

Carlo Morse and Jimmy Ganzer pioneered dream-fabbing, but these days people only want to close their eyes to trashy stuff -- not the mention the kids and their fancy imported tech. It's a good thing Schwartz's Deli is still the same.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

He's the legendary Cyberpunk Guru. He roams our postmodern planet, from the polychrome tinsel of Los Angeles to the chicken-fried cyberculture of Austin... From the heretical Communist slums of gritty Belgrade to the Gothic industrial castles of artsy Torino... always whipping that slider-bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable.

He's a Californian design visionary. He's an European electronic-art curator. He's a Swiss professor of media philosophy. He's a Prophet of Augmented Reality, even. He's an author, journalist, editor, critic, theorist, futurist, and blogger. Obviously he's pretty much anything that he can get his hands on.

And he never stops typing. This sixth collection of his fantastic stories is a comic arsenal of dark euphoria. It's even weirder, harsher and more twisted than the scary decade that inspired it. Boy, that's saying something.

If there's one thing dear to the heart of this exotic character, one vital prize he will never, ever surrender, one stony core to his mutable, globalized being, it's his fanatical allegiance to the radical potential of science fiction. That is the truth. Really. That is one hundred percent accurate. You could look that up on Wikipedia.

Just like some far-fetched, globe-trotting antihero from one of his own unsettling, yet darkly prophetic novels, he is... Actually, never mind who he is. Does that matter? Is that an issue for us, really? You know what? We're all done here. Turn the page. We need to pretty much move right along.

Table of Contents:

• I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google
• Kiosk
• The Hypersurface of This Decade
• White Fungus
• The Exterminator's Want Ad
• Esoteric City
• The Parthenopean Scalpel
• The Lustration
• Windsor Executive Solutions by Chris Nakashima-Brown and Bruce Sterling
• A Plain Tale from Our Hills
• The Interoperation
• Black Swan

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, October 1985. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986), edited by Gardner Dozois, Future on Fire (1991), edited by Orson Scott Card and The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002) edited by Pat Cadigan. It is included in the collections Crystal Express (1989) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Bruce Sterling, one of the founding fathers of the cyberpunk genre, now presents a novel of vivid imagination and invention that proves his talent for creating brilliant speculative fiction is sharper than ever. Forty years from now, Earth's climate has been drastically changed by the greenhouse effect. Tornadoes of almost unimaginable force roam the open spaces of Texas. And on their trail are the Storm Troupers: a ragtag band of computer experts and atmospheric scientists who live to hack heavy weather -- to document it and spread the information as far as the digital networks will stretch, using virtual reality to explore the eye of the storm. Although it's incredibly addictive, this is no game. The Troupers' computer models suggest that soon an "F-6" will strike -- a tornado of an intensity that exceeds any existing scale; a storm so devastating that it may never stop. And they're going to be there when all hell breaks loose.

The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. Meanwhile, the young live on the fringes of society, ekeing out a meagre survival on free, government-issued rations and a black market in stolen technological gadgetry from an earlier, less sophisticated age.

Mia Ziemann is a 94-year-old medical economist who enjoys all the benefits of her position. But a deathbed visit with a long-ago ex-lover and a chance meeting with a young bohemian dress-designer brings Mia to an awful revelation. She has lived her life with such caution that it has been totally bereft of pleasure and adventure. She has one chance to do it all over. But first she must submit herself to a radical--and painful--experimental procedure which promises to make her young again. The procedure is not without risk and her second chance at life will not come without a price. But first she will have to escape her team of medical keepers.

Hitching a ride on a plane to Europe, Mia sets out on a wild intercontinental quest in search of spiritual gratification, erotic revelation, and the thing she missed most of all: the holy fire of the creative experience. She joins a group of outlaw anarchists whose leader may be the man of her dreams... or her undoing. Worst of all, Mia will have to undergo one last radical procedure that could cost her a second life.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2002. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 8 (2003), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Visionary in Residence (2006) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

The powerful narcotic syncophine, commonly known as Flare, comes from only one source: the oil of the gargantuan whale-like beasts that swim the dust sea of Nullaqua.

It was John Newhouse's addiction to the substance that made him a dealer and forced him to move to this airless, inhospitable planet But when the all-powerful galactic Confederacy declares Flare illegal, the needs of Newhouse and his clientele leave the desperate off-worlder no choice but to sign on as an able seaman aboard a dustwhaler and hunt the giant creatures himself.

Joining a crew of junkies and misfits, including a mad captain with his own dark and secret agenda and a bewitching, batlike alien woman who is pained by human touch, Newhouse sets out across the silica ocean at the bottom of a seventy-mile-deep crater in search of release and redemption ...and sails toward a fateful confrontation between man and beast that could lead to catastrophe.

In the high-tech twenty-first century, a family of "corporate associates" descends into an underworld of data pirates and bootleg biogenetics to discover the identity of new-order terrorists.

This short story originally appeared in Nature, April 7, 2005. . It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Visionary in Residence (2006).

Read the full story for free at Nature.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2007. The story can also be found in the athologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007) and Gothic High-Tech (2012).

"The feds aren't going to fund you anymore. Not when your boss is a self-flattening radioactive pancake." Desperate times call for desperate inventions.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Locus Award-winning and Hugo and Sturgeon Award-nominated short story. It originally appeared in Japanese translation in Hayakawa's Science Fiction Magazine. The first English publication was in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1998. It was later reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2011. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell
• The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (1999), edited by Gordon Van Gelder and Edward L. Ferman
• The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), edited by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan
• Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams
• The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 2 (2014), edited by Gordon Van Gelder

It is included in the collections A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

With their hard-edged, street-wise prose, they created frighteningly probable futures of high-tech societies and low-life hustlers. Fans and critics call their world cyberpunk. Here is the definitive "cyberpunk" short fiction collection.

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay by Bruce Sterling
• The Gernsback Continuum - (1981) - shortstory by William Gibson
• Snake-Eyes - (1986) - shortstory by Tom Maddox
• Rock On - (1984) - shortstory by Pat Cadigan
• Tales of Houdini - (1981) - shortstory by Rudy Rucker
• 400 Boys - (1983) - shortstory by Marc Laidlaw
• Solstice - (1985) - novelette by James Patrick Kelly
• Petra - (1982) - shortstory by Greg Bear
• Till Human Voices Wake Us - (1984) - shortstory by Lewis Shiner
• Freezone - (1985) - shortstory by John Shirley
• Stone Lives - (1985) - novelette by Paul Di Filippo
• Red Star, Winter Orbit - (1983) - novelette by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
• Mozart in Mirrorshades - (1985) - shortstory by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1988. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (1989), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Hackers (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann. It is included in the collections Globalhead (1992) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Original introduction by Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and Gun Machine

Who are these bold rebels pillaging their European neighbors in the name of revolution? The Futurists! Utopian pirate warriors of the diminutive Regency of Carnaro, scourge of the Adriatic Sea. Mortal enemies of communists, capitalists, and even fascists (to whom they are not entirely unsympathetic).

The ambitious Soldier-Citizens of Carnaro are led by a brilliant and passionate coterie of the perhaps insane. Lorenzo Secondari, World War I veteran, engineering genius, and leader of Croatian raiders. Frau Piffer, Syndicalist manufacturer of torpedos at a factory run by and for women. The Ace of Hearts, a dashing Milanese aristocrat, spymaster, and tactical savant. And the Prophet, a seductive warrior-poet who leads via free love and military ruthlessness.

Fresh off of a worldwide demonstration of their might, can the Futurists engage the aid of sinister American traitors and establish world domination?

This short story first appeared in Omni in July 1983. It was later reprinted in Gibson's collection Burning Chrome, and in Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling.

This short story originally appeared Omni, January 1993. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999).

Against a background of self-contained space habitats, interplanetary conquest, and bioengineering, two former friends--separated by politics and the death of the woman they both loved--slowly stage elaborate revenge plots. Over the course of several centuries, the two embody the ideological and political conflicts between the Shapers and the Mechanists--the two primary groups of post-humans in Sterling's classic far-future epic.

Acclaimed science fiction luminary and a godfather of the genre's remarkable offspring--cyberpunk--Bruce Sterling carries readers to a far-future universe where stunning achievements in human development have been tainted by a virulent outbreak of prejudice and hatred.

Many thousands of years in the future, the human race has split into two incompatible factions. The aristocratic Mechanists believe that humans can only achieve their greatest potential through technology and enhancing their bodies with powerful prosthetics. The rebel Shapers view these "improvements" as abominations, and their faith in genetic enhancements over mechanical ones has led to violent, even murderous, clashes between the two sects.

One man is caught in the middle. The child of Mechanists, Abelard Lindsay is a former Shaper diplomat who was betrayed and cast out of the fold. Scrupulously trained in the fine art of treachery and deceit, he travels freely between the warring camps during his never-ending exile, embracing piracy and revolution all along the way. But while saving his own skin is Lindsay's main motivation, a greater destiny awaits him, one that could offer a bold new hope for a tragically sundered humankind.

A breathtaking flight of unparalleled imagination, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix Plus also includes every subsequent excursion into the Mechanist and Shaper universe, complementing his acclaimed novel with the complete collection of mind-boggling Schismatrix short fiction. The result is is a total immersion into the Mechanist/Shaper universe from the Hugo, Campbell, and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author called "a writer of excellent fineness" by Harlan Ellison and "one of the very best" by Publishers Weekly.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Circumsolar Frolics - essay
• Schismatrix - (1985) - novel
• Swarm - (1982) - novelette
• Spider Rose - (1982) - short story
• Cicada Queen - (1983) - novelette
• Sunken Gardens - (1984) - short story
• Twenty Evocations - (1984) - short story
• A Shaper/Mechanist Chronology - essay

The Artificial Kid takes place on the planet Reverie, a world of coral continents, levitating islands, and the corrosive, transformative wilderness of "The Mass." Reverie has been transformed into a utopia/dystopia, with a stark class division.

Arti, a heavily biologically modified boy from the Decriminalized Zone, becomes a pop star by selling videos of himself engaging in bloody combat with other fighters for the entertainment of the upper classes. When Reverie's founder, Moses Moses emerges from seven centuries of cryosleep, and Arti discovers an unpleasant secret about his past, both have to flee to escape from the powers of the "Cabal" that controls Reverie from behind the scenes.

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1986. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection (1987), edited Gardner Dozois, and The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Crystal Express (1989).

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2005. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois and Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005 (2006), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It is included in the collections Visionary in Residence (2006) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Alongside William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling stands at the forefront of a select group of writers whose pitch-perfect grasp of the cultural and scientific zeitgeist endows their works of speculative near-future fiction with uncanny verisimilitude. To read a novel by Sterling is to receive a dispatch from a time traveler. Now, with The Caryatids, Sterling has written a stunning testament of faith in the power of human intellect, creativity, and spirit to overcome any obstacle–even the obstacles we carry inside ourselves.

The world of 2060 is divided into three spheres of influence, each fighting with the others over the resources of fallen nations and an environment degraded almost to the point of no return. There is the Dispensation, centered in Los Angeles, where entertainment and capitalism have fused with the highest of high-tech. There is the Acquis, a Green-centered collective that uses invasive neurological technology to create a networked utopia. And there is China, the sole surviving nation-state, a dinosaur that has prospered only by pitilessly pruning its own population. Products of this monstrous world, the daughters of a monstrous mother, and–according to some–monsters themselves, are the Caryatids: the four surviving female clones of a mad Balkan genius and wanted war criminal now ensconced, safely beyond extradition, on an orbiting space station. Radmila is a Dispensation star determined to forget her past by building a glittering, impregnable future. Vera is an Acquis functionary dedicated to reclaiming their home, the Croatian island of Mljet, from catastrophic pollution. Sonja is a medical specialist in China renowned for selflessly risking herself to help others. And Biserka is a one-woman terrorist network. The four "sisters" are united only by their hatred for their "mother"–and for one another.

When evidence surfaces of a coming environmental cataclysm, the Dispensation sends its greatest statesman–or salesman–John Montgomery Montalban, husband of Radmila, and lover of Vera and Sonja, to gather the Caryatids together in an audacious plan to save the world.

The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time with Charles Babbage's perfection of his Analytical Engine. The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the development of steam-driven cybernetic Engines, is in full and drastic swing. Great Britain, with her calculating-cannons, steam dreamnoughts, machine-guns and information technology, prepares to better the world's lot...

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November-December 2010. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is inlcuded in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012).

Read the full story for free at Sharable.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse (2011) edited by Gordon Van Gelder. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

This short story originally appeared in Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales, Issue #12, Fall-Winter, 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Edge of Infinity (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David. G. Hartwell.

Like his peers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, bestselling author Bruce Sterling writes cutting-edge speculative fiction firmly rooted in today's reality. Now in The Zenith Angle, he has created a timely thriller about an information-age security expert caught up in America's escalating war on terror.

Infowar. Cybercombat. Digital security and techno-terror. It's how nations and networks secretly battle, now and into the future. And for Derek "Van" Vandeveer, pioneering computer wizard, a new cyberwarrior career begins on the fateful date of September 11, 2001.

Happily married with a new baby, pulling down mind-blowing money as a VP of research and development for a booming Internet company, Van has been living extralarge. Then the devastating attacks on America change everything. And Van must decide if he's willing to use the talents that built his perfect world in order to defend it.

"It's our networks versus their death cult," says the government operative who recruits Van as the key member of an ultraelite federal computer-security team. In a matter of days, Van has traded his cushy life inside the dot-com bubble for the labyrinthine trenches of the Washington intelligence community--where rival agencies must grudgingly abandon decades of distrust and infighting to join forces against chilling new threats. Van's special genius is needed to make the country's defense systems hacker-proof. And if he makes headway there, he'll find himself troubleshooting ultrasecret spy satellites.

America's most powerful and crucial "eye in the sky," the KH-13 satellite--capable of detecting terrorist hotbeds worldwide with pinpoint accuracy--is perilously close to becoming an orbiting billion-dollar boondoggle, unless Van can debug the glitch that's knocked it out of commission. Little does he suspect that the problem has nothing at all to do with software... and that what's really wrong with the KH-13 will force Van to make the unlikely leap from scientist to spy, team up with a ruthlessly resourceful ex-Special Forces commando, and root out an unknown enemy... one with access to an undreamed of weapon of untold destructive power.

The saucer aliens are here. They're healing the planet. They've got to be stopped.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

I'm a science fiction writer. This is a golden opportunity to get up to most any mischief imaginable. With this fourth collection of my stories, I'm going to prove this to you. With these words, Bruce Sterling--author of New York times Notable Books of the Year and one of the great names in contemporary fiction--introduces his latest collection of thirteen tales. If you're familiar with his cyberpunk creations you won't be disappointed, but these stories range far beyond the limits of future technology. Visionary in Residence takes the reader to places never imagined and certainly where no one has ever been.

Table of Contents:

• Science Fiction - (2006) - essay
• In Paradise - (2002) - short story
• Fiction About Science - (2006) - essay
• Luciferase - (2004) - short story
• Fiction for Scientists - (2006) - essay
• Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct - (1999) - short story
• Ivory Tower - (2005) - short story
• Message Found in a Bottle - (2006) - short story
• Architecture Fiction - (2006) - essay
• The Growthing - (2004) - short story
• Design Fiction - (2006) - essay
• User-Centric - (1999) - short story
• Mainstream Fiction - (2006) - essay
• Code - (2001) - short story
• Cyberpunk to Ribofunk - (2006) - essay
• The Scab's Progress - (2001) - novella by Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling
• Junk DNA - (2003) - novelette by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling
• The Past Is a Future That Already Happened - (2006) - essay
• The Necropolis of Thebes - (2003) - short story
• The Blemmye's Strategem - (2005) - novelette
• The Denial - (2005) - short story

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Semiotext[e] SF (1989), edited by Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. The story is included in the collections Globalhead (1992) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

It's 1999, and in the Turkish half of Cyprus, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted - pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the G-7 girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl rock group ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex.

His market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7's massive merchandising campaign - and to wildly anticipate music the band will never release.

Leggy's brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world's most dangerous people. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, he must act quickly and decisively. Y2K is just around the corner - and the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000.

But Leggy's G-7 Zeitgeist is in serious jeopardy, for in Istanbul his former partners are getting restless - and the G-7 girls are beginning to die....

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1993. The story is included in the collections A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Hugo Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology (1996), edited by John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner and was reprinted in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 1996. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collections A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Hugo and Locus Award winning and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 1998, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2017. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collections A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Universe 13 (1983), edited by Terry Carr. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Crystal Express (1989), Schismatrix Plus (1996) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2008).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1982. The story is included in the collections Crystal Express (1989) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, June 1984. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois, Genometry (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, and the collections Crystal Express (1989), Schismatrix Plus (1996) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1982. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year #12 (1983), edited by Terry Carr
• The Nebula Awards #18 (1983), edited by Robert Silverberg
• The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (1992), edited by Tom Shippey
• The Science Fiction Century (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell
• The Good New Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois
• A Science Fiction Omnibus (2007) edited by Brian Aldiss
• Alien Contact (2012), edited by Marty Halpern

It is included in the collections Crystal Express (1989), Schismatrix Plus (1996) and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007).