SOURCE: Maddox, Tom. “The Wars of the Coin's Two Halves: Bruce Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper Narratives.” In Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, pp. 324-30. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1988, Maddox provides a thematic overview of Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper stories.

Cyberpunk, science fiction's new movement of the 1980s, continues the style and spirit of the 1960s' New Wave: literary, insurgent, contemptuous of the genre's prevailing standards. As critics have remarked, however, the new writers differ in not being repulsed by technology; rather, they use hard science and technology as the stone on which to hone their aesthetic edge.

Bruce Sterling is one of the movement's most visible and characteristic figures, its leading pamphleteer, provocateur, promoter, and critic; also one of its most accomplished and influential novelists and short story...