Yong (0.5/26): "Bicycle Repairman" by Bruce Sterling
I'm not actually supposed to be reading any books between September and June. No time, papers to grade, you see. But I cheated, snuck in a quick fix, just another form of procrastination, really. Not even a book, hence the .5, just a short story, technically a novella. Forty pages in an anthology with rather large type, more like twenty, if that. A crappy resolution version can be "Looked Inside" on Amazon, but I found a (probably illicit) copy here. Post-cyber-punk science fiction, they call this stuff. Hugo award winner. Not bad. Some socio-political commentary, takes me back to the days when I read Bicycling magazine. Good for a quick fix. Get yours, too. Okay, back to grading...
posted by yong at 7:18 PM
2 Comments:
Okay, I feel a little better about calling this my book 1, because in the name of procrastination, I read a second story from the website, a longer one, and a better one. "Taklamakan", which feeds the reader both economics and geography. Overlapping characters with "Bicycle Repairman", big picture issues, even learned a little geography by looking up the Taklamakan Desert on Wikipedia. And I suspect I'll read other stories, too. I'd read this one over the former to see if you like the universe that Sterling spins up. Neat stuff.
thanks for the short tidbits! i'm behind in my posting *and* reading, i'm afraid...
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