Cristal Express

Cyberpunk and Beyond... The literature of science fiction is, to employ the customary buzz word, the literature of "extrapolation," but science-fiction writers vary enormously in their ability to "extrapolate," to envision a futuristic milieu of ceaseless change in which the metamorphosis of humanity becomes an inevitable concomitant. This relative rarity of genuine visionary inspiration makes all the more remarkable the appearance in 1982 of Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," the first of five stories set within the author's richly imagined Shaper/Mechanist universe. In this series the entire solar…