Who Goes There?

Bruce Sterling was born in 1954, in Brownsville, Texas, but later moved to Austin, because that’s the thing to do if you’re at least a little eccentric. I had stated somewhere before that Sterling genre debut was the novel Involution Ocean, but actually the short story “Man-Made Self” predates it by a year. While these two works were published in the ’70s, it wasn’t until the early ’80s that Sterling started to become prominent in earnest. He didn’t write another short story for six years, but when he did, it was the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated “Swarm,” the first entry in his Shaper/Mechanist future history. “Swarm” is still probably Sterling’s most reprinted story, but more importantly, it introduced a series that can be considered akin to post-human space opera, although Sterling insists on calling the Shaper/Mechanist stories cyberpunk. These stories appeared over the next few years, each garnering awards attention and marking the end of Sterling’s apprentice phase, with the series culminating in the novel Schismatrix, considered by some to be Sterling’s best.

“Sunken Gardens” is the penultimate short story in this series leading up to Schismatrix, and appropriately it takes place late in the future history. While it works just fine on its own, it’s better appreciated within the larger context of the series. While there’s a fair amount of explaining for the first-time reader’s sake, there are nuggets of worldbuilding that are likely to fly over your head. The plot, however, is rather simple. As with other entries in the series, “Sunken Gardens” earned a major award nomination in the form of a Nebula nod, and it’s well-earned.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1984 issue of Omni. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and the Sterling collections Crystal Express and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling. You can also find it by picking up Schismatrix Plus, which contains all of the Shaper/Mechanist stories.

Enhancing Image

The Shapers and Mechanists are factions of humans that have gone in radically different directions, each with its own offshoot. Mirasol, the heroine of this story, is a Patternist, an offshoot of the Shapers. While the Shapers are people who’ve adapted to outer space and on other worlds through genetic engineering, the Patternists have engineered their brains so as to be better at (you guessed it) forming and recognizing patterns. They have a knack for invention, but this comes at a cost. Because of their “cerebral asymmetry,” the Patternists also inherited some “grave weaknesses” like “autism, fugue states, and paranoia.” Well, this is unfortunate in its phrasing. On the plus, “Sunken Gardens” is a rare SF story of its vintage to have an explicitly autistic protagonist; and while the aforementioned traits are framed as flaws, Mirasol is still made out to be a decent person. Incidentally, the Patternists and similar factions who toy with the human mind reminds me a bit of one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser novels, Clans of the Alphane Moon. What if we had a society totally populated with and run by neurodivergent people? What if a furry convention was a country, or at least a town? The Patternists and others like them live in so-called redemption camps, isolated from each other and indeed from the Regals in Terraform-Kluster (calling it T-K from now on), a society of rich assholes orbiting Mars.

Typically in stories about efforts to terraform Mars there are a couple factions, but “Sunken Gardens” puts a twist on this by making the fight between factions a sort of battle royale. The short of it is this: The Regals have chosen champions from six factions, of which the Patternists are one, and with Mirasol being their champion. This is not a kill-everyone sort of battle royale, but instead the champions are given a set time to begin terraforming pockets of a large crater, called the Ibis Crater. The winner of this competition is to go “up the Ladder” and become a Regal. The Regals themselves are backed by the Investors, “those star-traveling reptiles of enormous wealth.” We don’t see the Investors in this story, and we have only a meager idea as to what the Regals are like; but then again, what we do find out about them isn’t promising. Mind you that the Regals have spent the past century hammering Mars with huge chunks of ice, turning the planet into a kind of winter wonderland. I’m not kidding. It’s an icy shithole, and the idea now is that there must be a batter alternative. The ramifications of Mars getting iced over a long period of time (although by terraforming standards, a hundred years isn’t that long) will only be gradually revealed, but for now it’s important that Mirasol wins—if only because winning means being uplifted to become like the Regals.

Tellingly, we’re told little about what happens in the competition. We’re not told much about how Mirasol dealt with her little pocket of the crater, and we’re told very little about her rivals. I don’t think we even get any of their names. The only other named character of note is a Regal, Arkadya Sorienti, Incorporated (I’m not kidding), “a member of T-K’s ruling oligarchy.” In case it hasn’t become apparent by now, Sterling’s anti-capitalist sentiments (he’s decidedly on the left, and quite open about it) are made clear. Rather than cooperate, the factions are incentivized to work against each other in the name of prestige. “The Regals had held [these competitions] for decades as an objective test of the skills of rival factions. It helped the Regals’ divide-and-conquer policy, to set the factions against one another.” The Regals have the Investors and the so-called Lobster King on their side, while the human factions don’t even have each other for support. The situation is bleak. To make things just a shade darker, one of the six competitors never shows up to the final briefing, and their territory gets forfeited. Wisely Sterling doesn’t tell us why the sixth competitor didn’t appear. The sunken gardens of the title are the isolated patches of land each competitor has to play with—to work as a “gardener.” “Sunken Gardens” plays with the idea of terraforming on almost a micro level, which I don’t think is something I’ve seen much in SF written even after this point.

The pacing here is a bit odd. There’s a lot of backstory for something that only totals about fifteen pages—mind you that “Sunken Gardens” is about tied for the shortest of the Shaper/Mechanist stories. The plot is straightforward enough, but there isn’t actually much of it, or at least not much we’re told about. Very feasibly Sterling could’ve turned this into a novella, what with the density of the dynamics between the different factions and the Regals, but he chose not to. This also seems to be the only entry in the series where Mirasol appears, but then it also takes place late in the timeline. My big gripe, I guess, is that I wish it was longer, which is a rather positive-sounding complaint to have about something. There’s also the pleasure of Sterling’s style, which is more literate than the average bear’s, such that I’ve pulled more quotes here than usual.

There Be Spoilers Here

So, Mirasol wins the competition, but it comes at a cost—not to herself personally, but to the people who, it turns out, were already living in her sector of the crater. Something kept secret from the competitors was that there was was already a human population, small and semi-civilized but quite intelligent, lurking in the crater. And, inadvertently, Mirasol had killed them. The Regals had apparently been meaning to kill anyone on Mars who’s run the risk of becoming too technologically advanced—God forbid they discover one of the Investors’ great secrets, without their help. This sparks a crisis of conscience for Mirasol, but “her corporate ladyship” will have none of it. There’s a faint glimmer of hope at the very end, since Mirasol has earned her way up the Ladder and as such will come to have a modicum of power, but it’s hard to say if anything will come of it. Personally I could’ve done without that last-second attempt at optimism, but that is a very small quibble; otherwise this is a haunting ending.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read “Swarm” and “Sunken Gardens,” which makes me think I should probably get to it and read Schismatrix (or rather Schismatrix Plus, since that’s the edition in print nowadays and it’s the one I have) already. Partly this is because I’m sold on the Shaper/Mechanist series, but also this is a case where reading any one of these stories in isolation doesn’t give one a full impression as to the setting. Only after having gone through everything will I finally get the picture, as it were. Sterling said he intended to leave the series be after Schismatrix, a stance he makes perfectly clear in his introduction to Schismatrix Plus. This means that the centuries-spanning saga of the Shapers and Mechanists comes to about… maybe 400 pages. I sure miss when SF tended to be concisely written.

See you next time.