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A review by jdhacker
Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
This one had several false starts before I managed to grit my way through it, hence the long gap between start and finish dates.
To be fair, I did have this mixed up with an entirely different cyberpunk book, Mother of Storms, when I picked it up so that wasn't helping much. I also, generally speaking, really enjoy Bruce Sterling, and the genre in general, so this was a bit of a let down.
Heavy Weather features a number of Bruce Sterling's prescient cultural and technological predictions, but its nested in this Twister (the movie)-esque subsetting of cyberpunk that feels very jarring. In this case, it also predicts the EF scale and the rash of terrible, heretofore unseen, giant tornadoes we had in Oklahoma. I know folks are big on it predicting climate change, but I feel that to one degree or another that's part and parcel of the genre. If not climate change in particular, then just humans wrecking the environment more broadly.
The plot felt fragmented as well as dragged out and slow to start, the characterizations felt kind of weak, and the imaginary lingo was heavy, thick, and obscure even for a cyberpunk novel. Skip this one in favor of the aforementioned Mother of Storms (for another weather disaster related cyberpunk novel that was more engaging), or just some of Sterling's other work.
To be fair, I did have this mixed up with an entirely different cyberpunk book, Mother of Storms, when I picked it up so that wasn't helping much. I also, generally speaking, really enjoy Bruce Sterling, and the genre in general, so this was a bit of a let down.
Heavy Weather features a number of Bruce Sterling's prescient cultural and technological predictions, but its nested in this Twister (the movie)-esque subsetting of cyberpunk that feels very jarring. In this case, it also predicts the EF scale and the rash of terrible, heretofore unseen, giant tornadoes we had in Oklahoma. I know folks are big on it predicting climate change, but I feel that to one degree or another that's part and parcel of the genre. If not climate change in particular, then just humans wrecking the environment more broadly.
The plot felt fragmented as well as dragged out and slow to start, the characterizations felt kind of weak, and the imaginary lingo was heavy, thick, and obscure even for a cyberpunk novel. Skip this one in favor of the aforementioned Mother of Storms (for another weather disaster related cyberpunk novel that was more engaging), or just some of Sterling's other work.