Politics is the art of the possible, the "doable", as Sterling's skewed hero, Oscar Valparaiso, keeps calling his wild improvised plans as if saying the word made them so. Oscar's usually successful schemes are as cobbled together as his own genetics—Oscar is not quite human. Investigating a genetic research facility for a Senate committee, he finds a potential power base, and an enemy worth his attention—the Governor of Louisiana has taken to conquering federal facilities using gangs of the homeless as his deniable mercenaries, and his interest in biotech makes the genetically anomalous Oscar, and the scientist he has fallen for, attractive acquisitions. Having a senator he has just help get elected go stark mad, and finding himself on the Net-wide hit list of every nut with a grudge, are the sort of things with which Oscar copes all the time—love and other altered states of consciousness are a bit more of a problem. Endless witty extrapolations of social and scientific paradoxes and a constant cheeky elaboration of already convoluted plot lines give this the brio of Sterling's best short fiction—if there is a more entertaining near-future SF novel this year, we will be in luck. —Roz Kaveney

This is a paperback collection of seven short stories by former cyberpunk guru turned socio/cultural prognosticator Bruce Sterling. Most of the works here come with impressive pedigrees, ranging from a Hugo Award for "Bicycle Repairman" to Hugo nominations for "Maneki Neko" and "Taklamakan". Another piece, "Big Jelly", was co-written by Sterling's fellow cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker.

These stories have a lot in common. They all take place in the near future, and most are action oriented, involving colourful characters such as secret agents, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, mafiosi and revolutionaries. But they are also personal tales that tend to focus on individuals rather than ideas, which makes them hit home more often than standard SF fare. The best of the bunch is probably "Taklamakan", a high- concept piece about two freelance spies sent to a central Asian desert called Taklamakan, where the Asian Sphere is doing some sort of secret research into space flight. "Bicycle Repairman" is set in the same world but instead of an Asian desert it takes place in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the spies in this story aren't the good guys. It's a less successful piece than "Taklamakan" but also a good read.

Not all of the stories in this collection have the edgy, this-is-what-tomorrow-will-be- like quality that typifies Sterling's best work. But even when Sterling isn't at his best he's entertaining, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future is certainly that. —Craig E. Engler

The Zenith Angle, futurist Bruce Sterling's first novel since Zeitgeist, tells the story of Derek "Van" Vandeveer. As the story opens, Van sits peacefully at his breakfast table enjoying life as a new homeowner and happily married man, with a new son and a fortune in stock options. Then the morning news reports a jetliner has crashed in nearby Manhattan—colliding with the World Trade Centre. Like many other Americans' lives, Van's will never be the same. He leaves his corporate job to work fighting terrorism for the US government. He soon finds himself sequestered at a top-secret undisclosed location while his fortune vanishes, his former company sinks into a morass of lawsuits and arrests, and his wife and son move to the far side of the country. As Van is transformed from cyber-whiz to spook, he finds himself changing in ways he would never have imagined. —Cynthia Ward, Amazon.com

Generally regarded as the classic tale of life struggling on after a global disaster, Earth Abides (1949) was George R. Stewart's only venture into SF. Before the first page the human race has been almost completely wiped out by plague. Our hero Isherwood "Ish" Williams discovers a female survivor and fumblingly tries to bring up a new civilization in the ruins of California. It's an elegiac story of loss as humanity makes it through the crisis, at the cost of our race's painfully gathered knowledge—which seems irrelevant to the new generations as they develop a hunter-gatherer society reminiscent of the old Amerindian tribes, and see no practicality in the fabulous tales of the old days told them by Ish. His nickname is deliberately reminiscent of Ishi, the once famous Californian Indian who was also the last of his tribe and became a misfit in a new world, in his case early 20th-century America. Annoyingly for fans of survivalist SF who reckon civilization can be rebuilt in about a month with a Swiss army knife, Earth Abides proposes that the cycle of regrowth will take significant time ... but there is always time. Stewart's title and epigraph echo the Book of Ecclesiastes: "Men go and come, but Earth abides." One of the sadder, gentler Millennium SF Masterworks reissues. —David Langford