2021 Locus Recommended Reading List

“Sterling’s latest collection is rich and wide, a cross between Primo Levi and Jorge Luis Borges—with a touch of Phil Dick and Bill Gibson. I love it.”
—Greg Bear, author of The Unfinished Land

“Imagine an American science fiction writer from Texas, transplanted to Italy, now writing in the voice of an Italian alter ego, and you might have a sense of the gonzo delights inhabiting Bruce Sterling’s Robot Artists and Black Swans.”
—Washington Post

“Sterling is a visionary, equally at home writing about the future as he is of the past, and his inspired prose continues to provoke and satisfy. For his latest foray in storytelling, Sterling adopts the Italian persona, Bruno Argento, ‘an unlikely “cyber-punk” Texan who somehow decides to become Turinese,’ in order to mine the treasures of his adoptive country in this series of fantastic (or fantascienza) stories. As Argento, Sterling embraces his new identity wholeheartedly, evoking such former denizens of the locale as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi (who wrote sf under the moniker Damiano Malabaila), even Friedrich Nietzche (who resided there while madness overtook him). In the titular ‘Black Swan,’ a tech blogger follows a suave industrial spy across multiple Turins, each one on a different trajectory—watch for cameos from Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni. The robot artist of the title appears in ‘Robot in Roses,’ in which an art critic accompanies (and attempts to explain) The Winkler, a robot in the form of a wheelchair, as it navigates the ruins of a radioactive future Rome. Sharp, witty, erudite dialogue keeps the stories moving along.”
—Booklist

“It’s all here, this time with an Italian flavor: the inventive tech, the meticulously detailed futures, the stylish and sardonic prose, the creative adjectival combinations. Set in Turin, Rome, and an upgraded Hell (Italian designers are good), these stories could only have been written by Bruce Sterling. Treat yourself to one of the most original voices in science fiction.”
—Nancy Kress, author of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

“Playfully spanning a range of genres, modes and ideas, the Bruno Argento stories show one of the great science fictional minds at work, processing exciting new ideas in a novel context and reaching towards an increasingly uncertain future . . . Both ‘Robot In Roses’ and ‘Black Swan’ are powerful examples of Sterling at his best, and are reason enough on their own to make the collection essential reading.”
—Fantasy Hive

“Bruce Sterling ‘literally’ takes you to Hell and back and back in this sprawling, delirious tour of an Italy jarred just slightly off-kilter, parallel universe, nineteenth-century terrorists and bicephalous recluses, cigar-smoking mummies and wandering performance artists who happen to be wheelchairs.”
—Peter Watts, author of The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Bruce Sterling’s Italian short fiction is like an Asti Spumante from the vineyard where futurism was first fermented.”
—Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes Series

“Set largely in Turin, Italy, this urbane collection of seven stories from futurist Sterling (Pirate Utopia) reflects the author’s wholehearted embrace of both the post-human future and Italian culture. The narrator of the 2061-set “Kill the Moon” is charitably embarrassed by the sentimentality of his countrymen (“Why are we Italians the only people who still believe that space flight is romantic?”) as they giddily celebrate Italy’s belated mission to the moon. For readers unsatisfied with only one future Italy, “Black Swan” offers a tour through a series of alternate versions of the country, imagining a technologically advanced Italy built on the computer work of fantasist Italo Calvino but threatened by the skullduggery of underworld kingpin Nicholas Sarkozy. In “Pilgrims of the Round World,” a couple facing a long journey from 1463 Turin to the court of the Queen of Jerusalem in Cyprus argue over the value of art just as ferociously as a 2187 art dealer and a post-human anthropologist debate the nature of robotic creation in “Robot in Roses.” Sterling’s clever, compassionate work will appeal to fans of intelligent cyberpunk.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Utterly unlike Sterling and unmistakably the work of Sterling: Robot Artists & Black Swans is a sardonic, madcap tour through the grand passions and strange centuries of Italian sf.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Walkaway

“Full of clever and original lateral-thinking insights into society and the universe, still rife with outsider characters and streetwise scenario . . . [a] thoroughly entertaining collection of nimble and bright tales.”
—Locus

“Bruno Argento is the Calvino of the Cyberpunks, and in this new collection Bruce Sterling channels his Turinese alter ego to conjure dark and wondrous visions of alternate Europes past, present and future. A perfectly curated selection of the best recent works from a living master of short form SF, Robot Artists & Black Swans shows what can be achieved when a writer fully embraces the possibilities of becoming a character in one of his own stories.”
—Christopher Brown, author of Failed State

“Seven Italian-flavored confections from one of the prime architects of cyberpunk, who lives in Turin. It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Sterling, most recently with the novella Pirate Utopia (2016), a piece of what the Italians call fantascienza, an SF–adjacent combination of history and speculation. Here, he takes it to another level, labeling these seven stories as the work of Bruno Argento, his alter ego, a renowned dramatist who has driven the Italian subgenre into the mainstream. With an introduction by Sterling’s spiritual offspring Neal Stephenson and a nod to Primo Levi, arguably the most famous denizen of Sterling’s adopted hometown, this collection resurrects some recent works published previously as e-books and introduces a handful of stories in a similar vein. ‘Kill the Moon’ is endearing in its naïve imagination as it expounds on the embarrassment the narrator feels in 2061 about Italy reaching the moon. ‘Black Swan,’ in the manner of Pirate Utopia, hinges on futuristic technology that serves as a MacGuffin but also plays havoc with history, postulating an alternative reality in which a journalist whose world features Nicolas Sarkozy as an underground terrorist suddenly finds himself presented with multifarious realities. ‘Elephant on Table’ is less Matrix than Chaucer as the denizens of a medieval-flavored Shadow House navigate the inevitable politics of imperial power. ‘Pilgrims of the Round World’ continues the royal drama as Sterling delivers a Shakespearean tale set a century or so before the bard took the stage. ‘The Parthenopean Scalpel,’ previously published in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012), is rich but will probably carry more weight with readers familiar with Turin’s history. Finally, there’s ‘Esoteric City,’ explaining how Italian hell is different from regular hell, and ‘Robot in Roses,’ an imaginative take on the moral quandaries of Blade Runner, finishes the ride. A delightful mix of high fantasy and futuristic speculation featuring royalty, noblemen, bandits, and other scoundrels.”
—Kirkus

“Sterling emerges as an Italian cultural figure, within hailing distance of Italo Calvino and Federico Fellini.”
—Rudy Rucker, author of The Hacker and the Ants

“A fantastic fantascienza concoction of percolated ideas and concepts . . . These complex fantasies of Italy relate to universal truths and desires conjured up by Texan Bruce Sterling’s alter ego Bruno Argento as he sips his Lavazza Red coffee with a well-selected pasta. Bravo.”
—Starburst

“A lot of punch is packed into these seven stories. I didn’t know what to expect out of this collection, but in the end I was thoroughly entertained. If Bruno Argento does indeed exist, then the residents of Italy are lucky to have him.”
—MT Void