DEEP EDDY by Bruce Sterling

After reading BICYCLE REPAIRMAN by Bruce Sterling in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, like a true fan-boy, I wanted to read more short stories within the same setting. I was very glad to find that there were others, two others, three in total, categorized as The Chattanooga Stories because the main characters are from a future Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Deep Eddy is a 22 year old spec user who belongs to a group called CAPCLUG (Computer-Assisted Perception Civil Liberties Users Group). It is a collection of like minded people that use spec to alter and enhance their visual perceptions. Think sunglasses that are able to show you the internet, allow you to process multimedia, including type as if a keyboard existed at the ends of you finger tips, and has the ability to color the world around you as you see fit (or as other spec programs see fit).

Deep Eddy lives in a world where the United States of America is no more, there is only NAFTA. NAFTA is the current government that controls and run all of North America, what were Mexico, the USA, and Canada. In this world politics are philosophy matter more than anything. Deep Eddy has been given the classic cyberpunk or post cyberpunk mission, data smuggling. It is Deep Eddy’s mission to travel to Germany and deliver a book that is hiding a data disk to one of the world’s greatest thinkers, who goes by the name the Cultural Critic and to protect it from his enemy the Moral Referee.

I have to say that I love Sterling’s stories, especially The Chattanooga Stories, I’ll get to the third and final story latter this week. They read like little novels instead of short stories. However, regardless of where they fall, they give me hope for my own fiction. Too many people have told me that what I write should be turned into novels. Typically this workshop code for, “you have too much going on and need to revise and scale down the scope.”

“Deep Eddy” is a great story. Find it read it, I have a feeling that we might soon be living in one of these stories.

Here is a good detailed review of the entire collection, Ascendancies:

Ascendancies by Bruce Sterling
Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy
28 March 2008

Sterling, Bruce. “Deep Eddy.” Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling. Burton: Subterranean Press, 2007. 345 - 378