Heavy Weather

Sterling, Bruce. Heavy Weather. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1994.

The story of Alex Unger and his sister Jane Unger in Mexico and the southwestern United States of 2031, not long after the end of the "State of Emergency" dictatorship. It is a post-Ecodisaster world of deadly conspiracies ("The Great Game" played out by the latest "American secret government" [273]); a world of heavy weather and organized private groups who chase tornadoes, a world of general environmental deterioration, VR, no AI exactly but very high technology and "smart machines" (the opening words of this novel), antibiotic-resistant pathogens, an approaching F6 (the mother of all tornadoes), and probably too many people. If cyberpunk is "the apotheosis of the postmodern" (in Istan Csicery-Ronay's phrase), and if central to po-mo is the death or elimination of nature or the incorporation of nature into culture, HW might be seen as simultaneously cyberpunk and anticyberpunk. Nature has not been killed, defeated, or contained in HW but is alive and, anthropomorphically speaking, very pissed off. Raises seriously but does not answer the question of just when "the human race conclusively lost control over its own destiny" (243), primarily in the sense of the last chance we had to prevent ecological disaster. Among the "Storm Troupers" willing to answer such a question the suggested years are 1967-68, 1989/91, 1914, late 1980s, 1950s, 1945, 1492 and late 19th-c., 1789: suggesting it is now too late to avoid "heavy weather" both literally and figuratively. (RDE, 07/11/98)