Review of Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker are two of science fiction's most imaginative minds.* Sterling broke fresh ground in the 80s and 90s with cyberpunk, ground still being farmed to this day, while the only element common to Rucker's oeuvre carries the sparkly label 'gonzo sf'. The two writers collaborated enough over the past decades that in 2016 a collection of their dual efforts was released, Transreal Cyberpunk**.

Kicking the collection's doors off is “Storming the Cosmos”. Two Russians in the 1940s chase down a reported UFO landing through a web of KGB, mosquitoes, and tribal voodoo deep in Siberia. A wild ride, you never knowing what's coming next or where the story is going, only that you want to hang on to find out. Pure Soviet gonzo. Tug-Tug Mesoglea is an entrepreneur with an idea: "Artificial Jellyfish: Your Route to Postindustrial Global Competitiveness!", and in the story “Big Jelly” his idea comes to spectacular life with the help of a drug snorting, broad-minded Texan venture capitalist named Revel Pullen. Tug and Revel alter egos to Rucker and Sterling, the story is not only a cyberpunk romp about a product in development that goes wild, but a formula-setter for the most of the remaining stories in the collection.

Following a similar pattern of “two guys collaborate on wacky idea and end the world”, the story “Junk DNA” looks at selling bio pets based on junk DNA. Corpprate hijinks and corporate piss-taking ensue. Despite a cameo by Tug and Pullen, this story goes too far down its own rabbit hole, and becomes an exercise in navel gazing. Same with the story “Hormiga Canyon”. It begins with promise. A basement tech virtuoso with his own internet made of 10,000 linked cellphones discovers he has an ant problem at his LA home. He calls in a down-on-his-luck-friend to solve the problem, leading to a Honey I Shrunk the Kids mixed with 50s sf that I'm not sure works. Add to this choppy dialogue, and it makes for a difficult read.

Bucking the formula of the prior three stories is the wonderful “Colliding Branes”. While technically a romance, it's only a romance Sterling and Rucker could write. The story tells of two star-crossed blogger/influencer lovers named Rabiteen and Angelo who, in reaction to the conspiracy theories their posts and videos promulgate, escape civilization to find the black egg at the center of universe branes colliding. The story has purposeful echoes of our own frenetic media-consuming lives, but with a Ghostbusters/Chthulu imaginative twist. Those 21st century quests for likes, posts, subscribers, followers, retweets, etc. may lead somewhere colorful after all. While the title echoes the Children's book of the same name, “Good Night, Moon” is less peaceful. It dabbles in nanogoo that makes dreams come true (poetry included). A story almost Dali-esque in nature, where Dali focused on dreamscapes, however, Rucker and Sterling look to Hollywood, then undercut it. “Loco” returns to the formula of “Big Jelly”, “Junk DNA”, and “Hormiga Canyon”. A piece of surrealist madhouse scifiery, two government workers get in over their heads with a digital pixel project gone bezerk. The project steamrolls their boss, but instead of dying, he lives on as a rolled up tube. The story has some special sanity that allows it to escape its own madhouse, and for that is readable.

What is likely the least kinetic story in the collection, “ Totem Poles” starts with the titular Northwestern USA indigenous artifacts, then quickly changes course to flying saucers benevolently freeing Earth of all pollution. But humanity will not have it, at least some humans, and they fight back. The story just never settles into a groove. Odd tempo and melody switches lead to a bizarro story that never makes itself relevant. Closing the collection is “Kraken and Sage”—the lone original story in the collection. In a collection of absurd speculation, this one truly jumps the shark. Programmable organisms interacting with sentient jellyfish growing into giant kraken...

In the end, there are multiple ways publishers can theme a collection, and one of the more unique is certainly along the lines of author collaboration. Combine this with the uniqueness of Rucker and Sterling's imaginations and energizing prose, and something more special is possible. But whether this collection is actually special will depend on the expectations the reader brings to the table (not to mention it was crowdfunded, as opposed to traditional publishing). If you are looking for out-there tech possibilities escalated, sometimes to absurdity, in near-future settings featuring nerdy conversations, the majority of the collection fits that bill.

Written between 1985 and 2016, the following are the nine stories collected in Transreal Cyberpunk:

Storming the Cosmos

Big Jelly

Junk DNA

Hormiga Canyon

Colliding Branes

Good Night, Moon

Loco

Totem Poles

Kraken and Sage

*How to measure imagination? you ask. One way is how often a science fiction writer eschews well-trodden genre paths and firmly established genre motifs. Yet another way is how novel the future technology deployed in their fiction is, at least at the time of writing. Sterling and Rucker both score high on these metrics.

**Sterling once lobbied for 'transreal' as a better signifier of science fiction than 'science fiction'. In case you didn't notice, it never caught on. Perhaps both he and Rucker came up with the term, hence the inclusion in the collection's title?