It seems that every time I go to the library, I come back with a collection of science fiction short stories. This one contains stories by Bruce Sterling written in the eighties (but no foreword, not by Sterling, not by the editor, not by anyone else), and is divided into three parts.

The first part is called Shaper/Mechanist, and has five stories set against a common dark future background, where humanity has evolved into two competing factions, the genetically engineered Shapers and the mechanically enhanced Mechanists, with the Investors, a superior space-faring race playing them off against each other for their own commercial benefit.

The second part (Science Fiction) consists of three independent stories set in the not-so-far future, the longest one telling the story of a Chinese-Canadian engineer who tries to escape the triad background of his corrupt bad cop grandfather by taking a job in Brunei, which isolated itself from the rest of the world after the oil wells ran dry.

The third part (Fantasy Stories) has four stories about an eighteenth century natural scientists whose increasingly popular theories draw the anger of Ignorance and her three daughters Faith, Hope, and the Church, about a little magic shop in New York City and its most loyal customer throughout the decades, about the changes brought upon Tokyo and its citizens when the country opened itself to the West in the Meiji Restoration, and about the downfall of a great West African city in the eleventh century.

There have been calls for me to rate books with points, just as I rate movies. No can do. Everyone can be a movie critic, but literature is another league and I have to leave this to the professionals (i.e.: people who do not only read on trains). However, since I start reading about twice as many books as I finish, and only report on the latter type, you can be sure that I did not totally dislike the books mentioned here.