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Green days in Brunei

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Bruce Sterling, given the whole "Circumlunar Space" thing. This has been true for close to two decades, but I certainly still haven't read everything he's published yet. I think I'm getting close. Ish. Yesterday I read a short story he wrote in 1985, called "Green Days in Brunei". I am so glad that I read this for the first time now, and not close to two decades ago when I first started getting into him. I feel like I read it at *exactly* the right time, give or take a year or maybe two. I am just astonished at how closely some of the ideas in this book line up with my own thoughts and those of many others active in Gopher- and Geminispace, and on pubnixes and the Fediverse. It would not have resonated with me anywhere near as hard if I'd read it 10 or 15 years ago.

I don't want to give too much away. I will say that it touches on, or at least comes very close to, ideas that many of you reading this will have seen discussed recently under labels like solarpunk and salvage computing, as well as some of the Smolnet philosophy of disconnecting from a noisy and manipulative global network and replacing it with something else. I will share a couple of choice extracts below. I have changed the names of people and places to clearly ridiculous alternatives (typed in capitals) and shuffled the order of things, to try to avoid creating even a ghost of a narrative which might form proto-spoilers in the mind of anybody who goes on to read it.

I'll also share a link to a pirate PDF copy of the short story collection "Crystal Express", where this story was first collected (it first appeared by itself in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine). I don't feel bad doing this - the story is 35 years old and as far as I can tell Crystal Express is out of print. At least, you can't buy a new copy from Amazon or any of the other large online bookstores I quickly checked at. The only legal way to read it today is to buy a used paper copy - which is exactly what I did, but only because I like paper books. Bruce didn't see a cent of the money I spent. If you really enjoy the PDF, buy something else of his that's still in print.

He would live here and help them. SOUTH CAROLINA was a new world, a world built on a human scale, where people mattered

(I was flabbergasted to see the phrase "human scale" used in the context of technology in a book from 1985. I didn't hear people start talking that way until twenty-something-teen.)

"I don't understand," MARIO said. "They're just sailboats." LUIGI smiled. "To you, maybe. But imagine you're a LATVIAN dock worker living on fish meal and single-cell protein. What're you gonna think of a ship that costs nothing to build, nothing to run, and gives away free food?"

"Freedom of speech," SONIC said. "How free is it when only rich nations can afford to talk? The Net's expensive, SONIC. To you it's a way of life, but for us it's just a giant megaphone for Coca-Cola. We built this to block the shouting of the outside world.

[we] could use a man like you. You're a bricoleur, LINK. You can make do. You can retrofit. That's what bricolage is -- it's using the clutter and rubble to make something worth having. HYRULE's too poor now to start over with fresh clean plans. We've got nothing but the junk the West conned us into buying, every last bloody Coke can and two-car garage. And now we have to live in the rubble, and make it a community.

If all goes to plan this won't be the last post I make this year related to Bruce's work, although the other stuff will concern his non-fiction writing...

PDF of "Crystal Express", a collection of short stories including "Green Days in Brunei"