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"Schismatrix is set in the same solar system of Mechanists and Shapers and covers 170 years in the personal history of Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay, a young aristocrat trained to Shaper ways...

"This artificial, high-tech society is incredibly diverse in its sects, cults, philosophies and even kinds of people. Lindsay is a social chameleon, making his way through this society, learning and changing and maturing constantly as the novel progresses. And as his life shifts, so we see society shifting and changing, as rapidly as he. Bacteriological engineering, microsurgery techniques and genetic experimentation race ahead, creating what Sterling calls 'clades'; new, daughter species to Mankind -- a form of posthumanity, growing steadily more diverse...

"Schismatrix avoids all temptations to lecture or obfuscate with technical jargon. It is readable, comprehensible, even, perhaps, poetic in its expression. It presents its complexity with the vividness of a mainstream author describing a 1970s bedsit. It is a novel that takes the most difficult concept of all in science fiction -- the social complexity resulting from technical and biotechnical progress -- and presents it as naturally as if it had been experienced and were merely being described afterwards. No higher praise can be given." --Brian W.Aldiss (in Trillion Year Spree, 1986).

• Biograph -- Bruce Sterling

• Books by Bruce Sterling