| Title | : | Heavy Weather |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 055357292X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780553572926 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 310 |
| Publication | : | First published October 1, 1994 |
| Awards | : | Locus Award Best SF Novel (1995) |
Forty years from now, Earth's climate has been drastically changed by the greenhouse effect. Tornadoes of almost unimaginable force roam the open spaces of Texas. And on their trail are the Storm Troupers: a ragtag band of computer experts and atmospheric scientists who live to hack heavy weather -- to document it and spread the information as far as the digital networks will stretch, using virtual reality to explore the eye of the storm.
Although it's incredibly addictive, this is no game. The Troupers' computer models suggest that soon an "F-6" will strike -- a tornado of an intensity that exceeds any existing scale; a storm so devastating that it may never stop. And they're going to be there when all hell breaks loose.
Heavy Weather Reviews
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Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather presents a fully realized vision of the seemingly inevitable future of our planet, where massive storms caused by climate change occur frequently, where entire areas have become uninhabitable and their inhabitants have been displaced (West Texas in the book), and where governments have fallen apart and lawlessness runs rampant.
The only thing he seems to have gotten wrong about this future is the year; in Heavy Weather these events have all occurred by 2031, the year the book is set in. In reality it will be later than that, but we've already seen signs that we're destined for such a fate. In this story, Juanita (Jane) Unger is a storm chaser with an organization known as the Storm Troupe (they call themselves "Storm Troupers", heh). Juanita rescues her brother Alex from a black market health clinic and takes him, against his will, from his drifting, miserable life of perpetual sickness into the Troupe, where together they will try to hunt the mathematically predicted but theoretically impossible F-6 tornado. Such a storm would be the largest and most devastating the world has ever seen. But does it really exist? Can Jane and Alex survive it? And what will the world look like when it's over?
This was an interesting book, and overall I liked it, though it was very boring at times, as Sterling spends large segments outlining things like financial collapses and the rise of private currency. He also dropped a ton of storm and meteorological terminology in this book, explaining very little of it. At times, this made it hard to even visualize what he was describing. It's almost like you have to be a meteorologist to fully understand this book. I also didn't like how little of this book was actually chasing storms. The book starts out very exciting, but then meanders into boring subplots involving the Troupers, and offers such storylines as Jane wondering if she should have sex while she has a yeast infection, and ultimately doing so. Gross!
On the plus side, I really liked Alex's character, and the book is very well written. The ending and epilogue close things out on a good note as well, and I found them to be very touching and relatable...a nice little exploration of the value of life, even in the aftermath of disaster, and of the importance and meaning of being part of a family.
The funniest thing about this book is that Sterling is so prescient...unbelievably so, actually...to the point where he predicted many things that actually came to pass and to where this book, as a result, feels like it almost could have been written yesterday instead of in 1994. But then somehow in Sterling's future, there are still fax machines? Lol. Apparently this is also the case in another of his books (which I own but haven't read yet), Islands in the Net, so I guess for whatever reason, despite his otherwise impressive prescience, he somehow couldn't predict the fall of that painfully-obviously dinosaur technology.
Overall, an interesting and decent read, but for me this one was a bit of a disappointment, given my high expectations for it.
3.5 stars -
This is by far my favorite Sterling book. Unlike his earlier Mechist-Shaper story cycle, this book still seems all-too-possible. Plus, I want that Jumping Jeep with the Smart Wheels. How awesome was THAT thing?! Daaaamn.
At times the clunky prose intrudes, as do some of the obvious "As you know Bob" moments, but overall this is solid stuff, and still feels like it could happen. -
This was a top notch science fiction novel. More than a hint of cyberpunk and fully dystopian, it is a complex story which is extremely rich in subject matter, descriptions, science and general literary standard. When I first picked it up I thought it might be a fast read, but there is so much detail in it and the descriptions are so intricate and absorbing that it turned out to be anything BUT a fast read - in the best possible way.
We start in a dodgy private clinic in Mexico. Alex Unger has admitted himself for... we are not quite sure, but it is clearly dodgy and very expensive. The descriptions of the clinic and it's medical procedures are pretty lurid and wholly fascinating. In the last part, Alex submits to having his lungs filled with weird blue fluid to clean them. At this point Janey Unger, his estranged sister appears of the scene and pretty much kidnaps him out of the clinic with her military surplus, weird, spider car (I kind of want one like it). All this section is very, very cyberpunk in flavour, good, old school cyberpunk in the best possible way.
The cybernetic, future science is a theme all the way through the story, but after Janey acquires Alex the tone changes dramatically. Janey has thrown in with a Storm Troupe and together they chase heavy weather throughout Texas. They live a rough life in the post-apocalyptic landscape of the impossibly arid landscape that North America has become and the description of their lifestyle, while not a primary focus is excellent. The primary focus is the weather they chase, with details of how they "hack" the weather systems, chase it, record it and get the information out there.
Slowly we learn more about Alex's condition and the condition of this post apocalyptic world, we learn that the Troupe are chasing an F6, a major league storm that has never before been seen but has been modelled as likely to come into being soon. This is totally the book for anyone who follows the Higgins Storm Chasers, as well as anyone who is fascinated by scary weather and it's consequences, because it turns out an F6 does develop...
I enjoyed the writing, it is strong, dynamic and as I said before very rich in the minutiae of future technology and details. The way the characters get a slow reveal is also excellent; at first Alex comes across as a kind of junky, one that is into medical procedures rather than dope, but still a junky. As the novel progresses we learn more about him and I love the way he develops, not so much AS a character, rather INTO a very complex character. His sister goes through a similar transformation. Janey is kind of psycho at first encounter, obviously running on a high energy, low tolerance. Her reasons for dragging her younger brother into the Troupe seem obscure at first but they do slowly resolve as the story progresses. Also the incredibly dysfunctional relationship between Alex and Janey develops slowly and very convincingly.
Reading wise, while I enjoyed it from the start, the story actually got better and better as the novel progressed, with the big storm being just as dramatic as promised but with a host of secondary plots and characters and more about the world political system than one would expect from the early charters. Great ending, GREAT. Anything after the F6 should really have been a let down, but the author manages to make the ending as hard hitting as the rest of the text and extremely satisfying. -
Heavy Weather is Twister in book form - pure and simple.
In some ways the parallels are amazing. The book and the movie came out within two years of each other (can't remember which came first. Both works depict a storm chasing group in the midwest whose lead protagonist is trying to prove a theory. Both even depict...flying cows!
Sterling is one of the best known "cyberpunk" authors, but its important to realize that this book is not cyberpunk in any real sense. It is more "post-apocalyptic" in the Mad Max sense. So, write Twister as a book, and change the setting to a near future environmental post-apocalyptic scenario, add in a dash of medical issues, and you've got a good bit of Heavy Weather.
The book does suffer from a lagging middle. Sterling does a good job with his characterization to a large extent. The ideas produced near the ending, I thought, were worthy of the book, and a bit surprising.
All in all, pretty good. -
Fun Bruce Sterling novel about post-apocalyptic group of dubious scientists chasing tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma, in search of the ultimate tornado that would be so big that it would be permanent and open a vortex into space. Somewhat of a sci-fi comedy as well.
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2022 re-read, & even better than I had recalled. Classic Sterling Cyberpunk, with good science and spectacularly good characterizations. I found a copy on my shelves, ex-Seattle library. From a library book-sale, maybe?
Here's Rick the Code Geek, talking to Jane the financier (who's out of money). She's hoping to tap into her brother's inheritance,
Rick: "It's funny what men and women argue about . . . . from what I see, it's three basic things, sex, money and committment. Right?
Jane said nothing.
Let's go see what gems other reviewers have picked out for quotes....
See below for my picks! Sterling certainly can turn a phrase!
Strong 4 stars. I have notes, & will write them up, likely tomorrow. (Didn't happen.) One of Sterling's better novels.
A good review online:
http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2022... -
Maybe a lot closer to a 3, but sex scenes in books are boring enough as it is, and I'm pretty sure adding an anti-condom homily did nothing to improve the situation.
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I liked the basic concept of a futuristic storm-chasing team in the quest to intercept and record a tornado of an apocalyptic magnitude (an F-6 ... yes, the book is old enough that it predates the Enhanced Fujita scaled or EF for measuring a twister's intensity by the destruction left behind, and no, there's no such thing as an F-6 OR an EF-6).
However, there was just far too much talking that was less than relevant to that brilliant concept. There was some interesting perspective on climate change, which is seen as responsible for even the possibility of an F-6. But a fair bit of the conversations between characters quickly became tiresome when I found myself skipping large chunks of it without missing a thing as far as character development and plot. Unfortunately, both were considerably sacrificed to further the dialogue.
The other problem I had was with the idea of the team being in the right place at the right time to observe a tornado of the specific magnitude they were looking for. This was far too convenient, given the unpredictable nature of tornadoes in the first place, the extreme rarity of even an F-5/EF-5, and the fact that twisters never get assigned their EF-numbers until after damage survey experts examine the destruction when the storm is over (you can predict 'strong tornadoes' and give a rough estimate for a range of possible EF-numbers ... but you can't specifically say an EF-5 is going to strike right here at this exact time). -
Heavy Weather looks like an adaptation of the movie Twister on the surface: giant tornadoes, obsessed scientists, even that one scene with the flying cow, but it's actually a smart dark mirror that seriously asks and answers the question "What would it be like to live through the worst of anthropocentric climate change?"
In the year 2031, Alex Unger is dying in a private Mexican hospital when his sister Janey breaks him out and takes him for one last fling chasing tornadoes in blasted West Texas, where civilization simply dried up and blew away in a megadrought. It's bad everywhere: governments have collapsed into emergency management posses; pandemics strike with regularity; and the best that people can do is scrape out a shallow grave of a life before something kills them. The goal for the characters is the F-6 Super-Tornado, a storm a whole order of magnitude bigger than anything on this Earth. There's some amazing lyrical descriptions of storms across the Texas wastes, and the thrill of chasing tornadoes.
But where this book shines is its nihilistic shadow government. The Very Serious People who have decided that for civilization to survive, the population must fall. Nothing so crass as a Holocaust, just little tweaks here and there to ensure the birth rate falls and the death rate rises. All the chaos and suffering is careful planned by a distributed cadre of secret survivalists... Life boat cannibals who are willing to do anything to see that some of us get through, rather than none.
Heavy Weather is supremely creepy, and has only become more so in the past twenty years. Sure, an honest reviewer would note that some of the dialog is clunky, and that Janey might not be the best character, but it's got a solid dozen or so moments that make my hair stand on end, even after years of rereading.
I'll ask you, like Sterling asks in one of my favorite scenes in all of literature, "When did mankind lose control of its destiny?" -
Given the extreme weather conditions we have experienced in 2012, this novel from one of the creators of cyberpunk, feels almost ripped from the headlines. And yet, it was published 18 years ago. This is a book about extreme climate change and the the meteorology of North American plains. Weatherpunk? The basic set-up is a band of tornado chasers who operate in 2031 West Texas, a land of declining economics, declining civil order, and declining human survivability. At one point, I did some research on the side so as to have some factual knowledge of the formation and behavior of tornadoes.
The brother and sister characters of Alex and Jane were well developed, and I totally believed their relationship with each other. In addition, I found the sexual relationship between Jane and Jerry to be full of divergent expectations and understanding as to be believable. The emotions here are some heavy weather themselves.
Jerry's obsessive search for the mythical F-6 tornado event began to remind of me of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Once I thought of that, I began to see other parallels in characters and plot was well as symbolism. However, this is far from a retelling - and the ending is not a done deal.
Philosophically the novel poses the dilemma of the dedicated observer, who considers whether taking action would be a more appropriate response to the world. And it asks the question, where did the meddling with nature begin and who bears the responsibility. Maybe Sterling's answer is that humanity just does what humanity must do - are we then "damaged goods right out of the box"? -
Third reading of Heavy Weather. I love the descriptions of the tornado chases, they give a visceral thrill to a weather-geek like me (just wish there had been more discussion/description of the F6 tornado and just more about the weather full stop). The political fallout of climate change induced "Heavy weather" are well explored, and considering this book was written in 1993, some of the tech and environmental stuff predicted by Sterling for 2030 are looking pretty likely.
The downside of the book is that the characterisation is not so hot as people's motivations are dropped in but never expanded on and to be honest as is usual in Sterling's work, not a single character is particularly realistic, empathetic or likable and the ending's a bit abrupt and "happy ever after".
Update June 2013: Looks like Sterling was pretty prescient with his tornado armageddon forecasting. Two EF5 tornadoes over Oklahoma in less than a week, including one on 31st May 2013 which is officially the widest ever recorded at 2.6 MILES wide with 300mph winds
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/c... -
Good premise, but the author tries way too hard to be edgy and high tech. His overstretch technical lingo left me feeling annoyed more than impressed more often than not. Beware the story that aims to preach its post-human excess "this is what Global Warming will do to us" message before it attempts to develop solid characters or plot lines. If you want to scare people with this type of material, write non-fiction. Reality is terrifying enough without embellishment.
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Didn't finish the book. I thought I would like it because of the weather theme but it was hard to follow between the virtual and actual weather scenes, and I didn't really develop any interest in the characters.
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A good novel. I'm not a fan of long-chapter books, but it kept up a good pace nevertheless. I'm impressed with the small bit of near-future Earth Bruce Sterling presents, especially the "heavy weather" the Storm Troupe chases. Everything seemed very real...and frightening. I enjoyed the culture of the Storm Troupe, not because I'd want to live it, but because I felt like I understood why THEY would choose to live it. The end was a bit weird in terms of how some of the characters came to their resolutions, but still enjoyable. A good work of scifi.
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4 and a half stars, but damn this is good
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review of
Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 24, 2017
[See the full review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ]
I keep picking on Cyberpunk writing in much the same way I pick on Surrealist writing. At the same time that I like it in theory I'm annoyed by it in praxis. What was the last cyberpunk novel I read & reviewed? Weeellll, that depends on how one defines Cyberpunk, obviously. Is Cyberpunk any story in wch societally fringe & rebellious characters are expert with computers? Hackers perhaps?
Wd a novel like Geoff Ryman's "The Child Garden"
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ) Or do I have to go all the way back to January 6, 2011, to my review of William Gibson's "Spook Country" (2007)? (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... )
The point is that as soon as a genre name is coined & a vague definition attached to it there're bound to be people who then point out examples such as the above that might not be slotted into the market-speak but wch might still qualify - or proto-examples that lessen the importance of the term by significantly predating it. I think of Cyberpunk as starting with Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) but, then, wouldn't Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) have an important place in there somewhere? A place that seems monumental in contrast to Neuromancer? Or what about Alfred Bester's Golem100 (1980)? Visually, Golem100 is stunning in contrast to the design-banality of Neuromancer.
Heavy Weather, for me, is clearly Cyberpunk from the get-go & that probably helps sell Sterling's bks - but I don't really know if Sterling likes the term or just accepts it as a 'necessary evil' for marketing. I liked Heavy Weather, it's about storm chasers in a near-future (or present at this point 23 yrs after the bk was published in 1994) when the ecosystem has become increasingly disturbed by human intervention & extreme storms are more & more common. I can't object to that, the more humanity's reminded that our uses of the environment do have effects that we'd better take into consideration the better. Still, I think of John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) (
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3... ) as a much more important example.
What happened when I started reading this? I was immediately sucked into the writing, it was thrilling, it's a thriller of sorts. I could identify with the characters, the lunatic fringe obsessed w/ studying tornadoes. Am I a storm chaser? Nope. Am I a meteorologist? Nope. Am I a hacker? Nope. So it really just plays into an aspect of my fantasy life. I am, however, an 'outsider', a person barely tolerated by a society of robopaths. & it's from that highly experienced position that I started questioning the narrative POV of Heavy Weather: Is this something written by someone who knows how to write a thriller but who doesn't necessarily come from the social milieu that his heros are located in? I don't know, I don't know anything about Sterling so my suspicion that he's more cyber than he is punk is a gut-level reaction. At least he's sympathetic to the ecologically concerned instead of dismissive of them as Michael Crichton is in his State of Fear (2004) (
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15... ).
OK, I'm pretty pessimistic at times about the present, I think what passes for the 'news' for most people in the world (if I can make such a generalization) is such despicable propaganda that I find this amusing:
"And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news. Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 2010, had watched the news grow steadily more glossy and cheerful for all his twenty-one years. As a mere tot, he'd witnessed hundreds of hours of raw bloodstained footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, ghastly military wreckage, all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets." - pp 5-6
It's funny-odd to me how I react to the above: for one thing I'm sooooo sick of how the so-called 'news' distorts life to make it seem like a constant threat - to keep people mentally-glued to the disasters & tragedies that the stns are just using as fodder to attract advertisers & suckers alike. On the other sharpened hook, I'm against censorship. Is the happy medium to devote the amount of media time that's statistically appropriate to the subject? Hence murder cd still be reported about accurately but wd occupy a very small time slot? That wd be a disaster for those poor struggling arms dealers - I'm told that after the latest mass murder in Las Vegas by one of those responsible legal gun owners the NRA is always telling us about gun sales went waaaaayyyyyy up. Fancy that. Fear tactics are the best marketing strategy. Maybe the accountant/murderer was just trying to give the economy a boost, eh?
"Concepcíon left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi. Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence. Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important." - p 7
Go get 'em Sterling! I was once denied treatment at a clinic by a so-called doctor when, as response to the question: "How are you?" I replied: "I'd be alot better if you hadn't kept me waiting for an hr & 40 minutes." This in a clinic devoid of patients other than me. When I become supreme dictator, doctors who keep patients waiting will have to have a patient's excuse to justify it (that's a take-off on doctor's excuse, get it?) & if the patient kept waiting doesn't accept the excuse as valid then the doctor will have to pay the patient the doctor's own wages for that time period. 3 strikes & they have to practice in prison until the patients say they may be released. It's only fair. I go to the doctor's as a patient not to become IMpatient. Doctors beware, my supreme dictatorship is just a hop, skip, & a jump away so get yr shit together you pompous pampered creeps.
"Jerry was thirty-two, and he could remember when people did most of their own driving, and even the robots always left their headlights on. Jane, by contrast, found the darkness soothing. If there was really anything boring about the experience of driving at night, it was that grim chore of gripping a wheel with your own hands and staring stiff-necked for hours into a narrow-cone of glare. In darkness you could see the open sky. The big dark Texas sky, that great abyss." - p 24
Hhmm, a robot car driving w/ its headlights off might be a tad bit dangerous for us pedestrians. Living in Pittsburgh, as I do, where robot cabs are common, I love being a mere 23 yrs in the future of the novel's copyright date & being already almost there. How many people wd've believed that there'd be robot taxis in 2017? I still haven't ridden one. Sterling's good at descriptions of what he imagines as post-industrial conditions:
"Here and there along the highway dead windmills loomed, their tapered tin vanes shot to hell, their concrete cisterns cracked and dust empty above an aquifer leached to bare sandstone. . . . They'd sucked the landscape dry, and abandoned their mechanical vampire teeth in place, like the torn-off mandibles of a tick. . . ." - p 33
Concerns about aquifers are important. Ask an Australian aboriginal forced to live in the outback by the European invaders. My collaborator etta cetera & I made a movie in Australia called Don't Walk Backwards & we visited a camp of resisters to in situ leeching whose concern was w/ the destruction of the aquifer by uranium mining. The link to a possible beginning to the relevant section is here:
https://youtu.be/kODzM_2_bRM?t=1h48m9s . Thrilling novels are designed to provide depictions of heightened situations, Heavy Weather does an excellent job of this, the reader is likely to be engrossed & excited. For a more realistic look at such activism, that is, nonetheless, not didactically dry, one might try absorbing the whole experience of Don't Walk Backwards instead.
""What the heck kind of drought can kill a mesquite tree?"
""Look, dude, if it doesn't rain at all, for more than a year, then everything dies. Mesquite, cactus, everything. Everything around this place died, fifteen years ago."
""Heavy weather," Buzzard said somberly.
"Martha nodded. "It looks pretty good right now, but that's because all this grass and stuff came back from seed, and this country has been getting a lot of rain lately. But, man, that's why nobody can live out here anymore. There's no water left underground, nothing left in the aquifer, so whenever a drought hits, it hits bad.["]" - p 77
How many people read such a passage & become concerned imagining the possibilities? If you lived near Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre you'd be likely to take such a threat a bit more seriously - esp if the lake became increasingly smaller bodies of water without returning periodically a few times a century to its more filled condition.
"Now Alex understood why Buzzard and Martha lay half-collapsed in their sling chairs beneath their sunshade, the two of them torpid as lizards while their eyes and ears flew for them. Sweat was water too. Civilization had been killed in West Texas, killed as dead as Arizona's Anasazi cliff-dweller Indians, because there just wasn't enough water here, and no easy way to get water anymore." - p 92
Of course, Cyberpunk novels just have to have cutting edge technology in them & characters who get their kicks pushing that technology to its limits. On example of this, here, is the use of ornithopters. An ornithopter is an aircraft that imitates birds by having wings that it flaps. The storm chasers use them to get close footage of the heavy weather in action.
""There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch-black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light—red and infrared. I dunno what we'll see, dude, but we'll see something."" - p 103
"Jesse", an ornithopter, is about to flown by remote-control into a tornado to get data. The person controlling it will be experiencing it as virtual reality, it'll be terrifying but at least they'll be able to breathe. This is what they do.
"The Troupe had scared up an F2" [a scale rating for a tornado] "early in the day. The spike had come very suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, and out in the middle of nowhere. And that was all to the good, because the Troupe had had the spike all to themselves. Greg and Carol had taped the entire development sequence, from wall-cloud to rope-out, at close range from the ground. Buzzard and Martha had nailed it with chaff, so Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus had gotten some very good internal data. That one had to be counted a success." - p 110
Purposeful social groups tend to organize around direction. I prefer the anarchistic ones where direction is provided by the most articulate spokespeople rather than by the people who consolidate power around themselves through dirty tricks. Sterling has the 'mastermind' of this group request something of one member after she'd gotten into a fight with another.
"A vow of silence was a very weird request. But she had never seen Jerry more serious. It was crystal clear that he was giving her a deliberate challenge, setting her an act of ritual discipline. Worst of all, she could tell that Jerry really doubted that she had the necessary strength of character to go through with it." - p 112
I think a temporary vow of silence would be an interesting discipline for many people to go through - just like I think fasting is a good thing. Like fasting, it could just be for a day or a wk or 2 wks or 3 wks or a mnth. A mnth seems stretching it. A thoughtful person might learn something from the increased introspection. I'm tempted to try it. Answering the phone wd be tough. Does txting break the rules? I think so. It wd have to be a vow of no communication maybe.
Cyberpunk novels seem to thrive on zeitgeists of fairly large subcultures. A little anti-money sentiment goes a long way w/ me:
"Rick grimaced. She'd brought up the subject of money; the Troupe's ultimate taboo. From the look on Rick's round, stubbled face, he seemed to be in genuine spiritual pain. She knew he'd be too embarrassed to complain anymore." - p 114
There will always be barter, there will always be bad deals where someone feels like they got the shitty end of the stick, so what's the solution? For every transaction to have to meet a standard of absolute integrity? & what wd that be? There will always be generous people & there will always be thieves.
""The density of information embodied in the modern technological object creates deep conceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface. . . . Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their own environment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."" - p 170
& now there's a Center for PostNatural History created & operated by Rich Pell in Pittsburgh. Check it out!
"Before heavy weather, there had been about nine hundred tornadoes every year in the United States. Nowadays, there were about four thousand. Before heavy weather, a year's worth of tornadoes killed about a hundred people and cause about $200 million (constant 1975 dollars) in damage. Now, despite vastly better warning systems, tornadoes killed about a thousand people a year, and the damage was impossible to estimate accurately because the basic economic nature of both "value" and "currency" had gone nonlinear." - p 182
So where are we at in 2017? A wikipedia page informs me that there've been 1,234 tornadoes so far this yr in the US (as of October 24, 2017) so, apparently, we're not quite to heavy weather yet. What about mass shootings in the US? There're plenty of statistics on that online, a chart from Mother Jones online covering 1982 to 2017 yields:
1982: 1 mass shooting, 8 killed
1983: NO mass shootings
1984: 2 mass shootings, 28 killed
1985: NO mass shootings
1986: 1, 15 killed
1987: 1, 6 killed
1988: 1, 7 killed
1989: 2, 15 killed
1990: 1, 10 killed
1991: 3, 35 killed
1992: 2, 9 killed
1993: 4, 23 killed
1994: 1, 5 killed
1995: 1, 6 killed
1996: 1, 6 killed
1997: 2, 9 killed
1998: 3, 14 killed
1999: 5, 42 killed
2000: 1, 7 killed
2001: 1, 5 killed
2002: NO mass shootings
2003: 1, 7 killed
2004: 1, 5 killed
2005: 2, 17 killed
2006: 3, 21 killed
2007: 4, 53 killed
2008: 3, 17 killed
2009: 4, 39 killed
2010: 1, 9 killed
2011: 3, 19 killed
2012: 7, 71 killed
2013: 5, 35 killed
2014: 4, 18 killed
2015: 7, 46 killed
2016: 6, 71 killed
2017: 8, 83+ killed
I was planning to look at the statistics from various sources but I think the above will do. Mass shooters in the US haven't quite become a force of nature yet but maybe if they had a convention they could pool their resources & practice on each other. It would be good to have all the arms dealers there too explaining why guns are such a great idea. Since pro-gun people seem to pull out a fair amount of statistics on how knives have been used in more murders, maybe at the convention they could have a contest to see who could kill the most people?: the automatic weapons users or the knife-wielders? The arms dealers could each get a steak knife, e.g., & they could prove their point by killing all the guys who have machine guns aimed at them. Just a thought, y'know, sometimes I'm moved by an image of an arms dealer going hungry while one of those vicious knife murderers carves up a juicy steak that's rightfully the dealer's.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, I was hoping Sterling wd throw in a little Fortean froggian stuff n'at:
""That's nothin' either. Once I saw a rain of meat."
""What?"
""Meat fell out of the sky," he said simply. "I saw it with my own two eyes." He sighed. "You don't believe me do ya, kid? Well, go back in the anomaly records sometime and have a look at the stuff people have seen in the past, faling out of the sky. Amazing stuff! Black hail. Black rain. red rain. Big rocks. Frogs. Rains of fishes. Snails. Jelly. Red snow, black snow. Chunks of ice have fallen out of the sky as big as fuckin' elephants. Dude, I saw meat fall out of the sky."
""What kind of meat?" Alex asked.
""Shaved meat. No hair on it or anything. Looked kinda like, I dunno, slice mushrooms or slice potatoes or something, except it was red and bloody wet and it had little veins in it.["]" - pp 191-192
Next thing you know I was wackin' myself off & that meat was talkin' to me!
That's nuthin', man, I saw rain once that wasn't acid rain.
No fuckin' way!
I've been lovers with many women who were prone to self-destructive activities who weren't so self-destructive when they were with me even if we had very volatile times together. As such, I highly identify w/ this next passage:
"Jerry made her do crazy things. But Jerry's crazy things had always made her better and stronger, and with Jerry around, for the first time in her life she no longer felt miserably troubled about being her own worst enemy. She's always been wrapped too tight, and wired too high, and with a devil inside; in retrospect, she could see that clearly now. Jerry was the first and only man in her life who had really appreciated her devil, who had accepted her devil and been sweet to it, and had given her devil some proper down-and-dirty devil things to do. Her devil no longer had idle hands. Her devil was working its ass off, all the time.
"So now she and her devil were quite all right, really." - p 203
So, yeah, my friends & I have done pretty 'extreme' things but what would we have been doing if we hadn't learned to channel our anger as creatively as we have? What if I were just a psychopath instead of a psychopathfinder?: "Seriousness is Death":
https://youtu.be/fIr1_U-dDHI .
"every once in a while some anxious weedy-looking guy would show up at camp who didn't give a hit about tornadoes and really, really wanted Jerry to forget all about it and get back to proving how many soap bubbles could fit inside a collapsing torus in hyperspace. Jerry was always terribly kind to those people." - p 205
[See the full review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ] -
Initially, I thought Bruce Sterling was trying to pull a classic PKD trick with his odd syntax. Then I realized by pp12 that Bruce is just not a terribly good writer.
I muscled my way through this one. It was not without its moments: Published in 1994, Sterling envisioned the likes of YouTube, Napster and other tech achievements that were at least a few years away at that point. He did, unfortunately, expect the fax machine to somehow survive in the world of 2031, but earns half marks for anticipating a few ways in which the fledgling dial-up internet of c1994 could change the world. And he clearly did some research on tornadoes and climate change, as it was articulated in some form at that point. The rest, though... just a sophomoric romp not worth anyone's precious reading time. -
I'm somewhat torn over Bruce Sterling. Most of his books that I have read are from the late Eighties/early Nineties. The reader is usually introduced to a group of characters with an occupation that is out of the norm, in this case storm chasers/"weather hackers". I always find this aspect of the story very intriguing, with the technical details of the occupation being brought to the forefront to show the ways that these folks might view life differently than the rest of us. It's the endings that leave me a little empty inside. The group will face their challenge, and then everything tends to just settle back down. The main character may start a consortium of concerned citizens to discuss the issue and write their congressman, but I never see the Earth shattering epiphany and resolution that shows that everything forever after will be different for that character. I think most literature provides this to some extent. Perhaps I have seen one too many movies that involve many explosions followed by the tough, yet likeable rogue getting together with the busty girl at the end.
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This is a cautionary near-future sci-fi story of the impact of global warming on weather patterns. We are already seeing the beginning of increased storms, tornados, hurricanes, and tsunamis (or Heavy Weather).
In 2030, the time period of the story, the majority of the U.S. government's budget goes toward disaster relief. Thousands are homeless, the U.S. economy has collapsed, entire geographic areas are abandoned, and some wildlife species die off while others grow out of control.
The story follows The Storm Troupe, a team of storm chasers studying tornadoes in the West Texas and Oklahoma area, searching for "the big one." The movie Twister was heavily influenced by this book, and some scenes in the movie are direct rip-offs from the book. Nevertheless, Heavy Weather is a much more interesting story. Sterling is a Texas native, and his imagery paints a vivid picture of a post-apocalyptic Texas prairie. The action is fast-paced and gripping, with fewer of the long narratives that sometimes plague Sterling books. One of my new favorites. -
Actual rating is 2.5.
I liked this book at first.
It looked like a book about The Adventure of semi-professionals' & science enthusiasts' group. Everyday life at camp against half-ruined world, usual people, usual desires. Calm-to-extreme routine and F-6 storm somewhere in future.
It felt somehow new - smooth plot, not so outstanding characters, no hard intrigue, but every aspect was well-balanced creating a pleasant picture.
Then the F-6 came. And it still clicked with everything else. What didn't is a sudden world level conspiracy. Was it necessary? No. Did it have strong influence on characters? No. Did it help to understand the world of the book better? More or less. Did it help to develop a plot? No. Did it ruin the book's mood? Yes. And the most unbelievable - the ending was the same. Place and "job" have changed but it still was a smooth calm everyday life as if there was no conspiracy at all. Then why the hell it was for?
As a result I was very disappointed. -
More character-oriented than my taste. Not sure if character-oriented readers will feel character development is deep enough.
A near-future tale with climate change (and resulting social changes) give a background for a group of tornado chasers / data collectors - and the seriously ill brother of a member of the group. The increased "heavy weather" seems scientifically founded, but I'm not so sure about the basis for the super-storm the tornado chasers are anticipating. When that focus of the book becomes a one-time event, I felt the speculative value of the book was less significant. -
The characters are interesting and you want to know about them. In terms of plot, everything up to the climax was interesting and well-crafted, albeit majorly depressing. The climax was ok, the stuff that followed was stupid and nonsense. Spoiler alert: The last thing a book like this needs is a "They lived happily ever after" ending. What a rip.
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A must read for all cyberpunk fans of Sterling. I loved all the technology he envisioned in this book. Somehow, someway, every scene in this book will probably take place. If you want to know how our future turns out, read Sterling. It's a must.
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This book was. hm. a giant pile of suck. Don't bother.
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Scary as hell, and prescient as ever!
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Sterling was hip to our climate change disaster way before it was widely acknowledged.
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More reviews over at my blog: consumingcyberpunk.com
"I just can't believe that civilization is going to get off the hook that easy. 'The end of civilization'—what end? What civilization, for that matter?...the kind of trouble we got, they aren't allowed to have any end."
It's the year 2031 in Heavy Weather, and perhaps unsurprisingly, things haven't gotten better. Global economies have crashed. Governments hardly function. Currency, communication, and borders have rapidly changed due to the massive changes heavy weather has caused. Once lush and fertile land is now ravaged by drought.
"...so that's really what you're doing, huh? You chase thunderstorms for a living these days?
Oh, not for a living."
The book alternates between Jane and Alex Unger. Jane makes her way to Mexico to break out her younger brother Alex from a clinica. Alex is billed to the reader as having a lot of problems, not entirely uncommon after the collapse of 1st world nations as we know them. Alex ostensibly suffers from a myriad of retroviruses and Jane, believing the clinica is ripping him off and not curing him at all, decides to bail him out.
"...the code was cryptware—it reencrypted itself every goddamn month and demanded a payoff before unfreezing."
During the State Of Emergency, when the heavy weather first became a huge problem for mankind after constantly disregarding climate problems, almost all data and information systems went down. Society collapsed as countries were not prepared to deal with massive climate swings, some people decided to take matters into their own hands. Calling them "Structure hits", people would take down buildings that contributed to global warming and other systemic problems. Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spinning inner walls were a blurry streaky gas, and a liquid rippling sheen, and a hard black wobbling solid, all at once. Great bulging rhythmical waves of hollows of peristalsis were creeping up the funnel core, slow and dignified, like great black smoke rings in the throat of a deep thinker.
The concept of hacking has undergone a bit of a change as well. "Hacking" seems to refer to any modifications to anything at all. From kites to ornithopters and especially--to heavy weather. After Jane breaks out Alex they return to the Storm Troupe. This band of misfits chase "spikes" in weather in an attempt to gather more information on it. Still little is known about it, apparently, but this troupe, each with their own way of hacking something, aim to find the mother of all tornadoes: the f6.
"I hack kites...Balloons, chaff, ultralights, parafoils...chutes are my favourite though, I like to structure-jump."
Throughout the novel, we find out that there are still spooks working for what is left of a functioning government. There are still border guards but they don't really care about the imaginary line on the ground anymore. Technology is still somewhat futuristic but not typically cyberpunk, ie, there are no cybernetics. There is no Internet, either. People live poorly and barely survive. All that is left is the individual drives people have. These punks only care about money in so far as how it can help them better hack heavy weather.
"...all workable standards of wealth has vaporized, digitized, and into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thing air."
This is where the book really shines. The world building, the technology, and the fiction specifically about these storm chasers and how they hack them is very cool. They use ultralight manned drones to scout out ahead. There are ornithopters with tech that casts the cameras feed into the helmeted view of people piloting them back at camp. When they send these into the tornado to "punch the core", they gain even more data. It's exciting and interesting.
As the Emergency had deepened, the packing Regime had rammed its data nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsive effort, the very nature of money and information had both mutated beyond any repair.
Things lag a bit with character work, which is for the most part good. Marrying speculative climate change fiction with cyberpunk is genius and the characters mostly do the premise justice. Jane is a pretty well realized female protagonist but also used as the main vehicle for communicating her main drive, hunting these storms, is really the only thing that defines her. The troupers all substitute some aspects of their lives and only feel like truly functioning human beings when they are being adrenaline junkies, all other wannabees who don't feel the same way never stay.
"There is no more alternative society. Just people who will probably survive and people who probably won't."
This idea that Jane can only be whole while she is pursuing something only somewhat works due to the books ending, which I was pretty lukewarm about. The sins of the previous generation are visited upon the next generation of people. There are too many people in the world for it to sustain it. You're still only useful if you can contribute the way they want you to, despite it being post-capitalism and a mostly dystopia world.
"It's me alright, it's very much part of me, but it's not something I'm in command of and I don't control it. It's like a force, a compulsion, that tears at things, and shreds them, and chops them up, and comprehends them, and I don't control it, and I never have. I can't. You understand?
Yes. I do understand. It's like a spike, inside."
These are all somewhat interesting things to explore but they always end up on the peripheral and feel a little bit weird when injected. It wants to say so much more and sometimes comments on misogyny in organizations like the Texas Rangers, as well as what is expected of women like Jane. But this is mostly Twister with cyberpunk aesthetic and an interesting bit of speculation. It doesn't have the deep questions good cyberpunk fiction often has along with the action. It's too bad because it does dip its toes, it just never gets in.
"We were just trying to kill the machinery. Get rid of it. All that junk that had killed our world, y'know?"
The world and the action is worth the cost of admission and it is a fast read. This concept inspired a whole new game design I've been working on, in tandem with other fiction. More speculative fiction on climate issues married with post-cyberpunk is something I would love to see more of.
You can nab the hardcover of paperback cheap these days, interestingly though, you cannot get it digitally.
"Even the blackest cloud has a chrome lining." -
This may be a product of my expectations, but I liked how this novel was similar and distinctly different from a lot of science fiction. The orientation and world view is “futurist,” in that it is a thought experiment that projects how a very real event (e.g., climate change) and realistic technological change (e.g., virtual reality, autonomous vehicles) fuse with politics, economics, professions, and social life generally. It envisions a world that arises out of the one we are familiar with. In this case, instead of predicting trends to form the basis of a strategic business model, Sterling is raising issues worth thinking about and acting upon now.
As far as that futurism goes, this novel offers a compellingly “possible” world with some useful concepts and frames of thinking that could conceivably arise. Also, there are some eerie, accidental connections to our modern age with the vague references to “impeachments” and the “State of Emergency” that were situated around 2019 in the story timeline. The “State of Emergency” was likely some kind of climate disaster, but connections like this are fun. -
I enjoyed the atmosphere, it was really immersive for me and easy to visualize. The kind of cyberpunk I was hoping for. I have to confess, I was a bit struggling at first to understand the motivation of the characters, although it gets clearer later - way later.
I would have enjoyed it much more, but the climax and the ending killed it for me. Introducing a whole bunch of new characters in the climax only to do a brain dump on you about what is really going on, after which these characters disappear again, didn't work well for me and doesn't go well with the "show, don't tell" principle. And the ending was just too unnaturally rosy for the setting.
Still, I'm definitely on the hunt for more of that kind of novels.
