War of the Coin's Two Halves, The: Bruce Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper Narratives

'''Maddox, Tom. "The War of the Coin's Two Halves: Bruce Sterling's Mechanist/Shaper Narratives."' MR47/48'': 237-44 (see this Category, Larry McCaffery, guest ed.).

On Sterling's "Swarm," "Spider Rose," "Cicada Queen," "Sunken Gardens," "Twenty Evocations . . . ," and Schistmatrix (listed under Fiction). Shapers and Mechanists are "the primary posthumanist modes of being—binary opposites in the dialectic of mankind's fate"; TM quotes "Sunken Gardens" on Shapers' having "seized control of their own genetics, abandoning mankind in a burst of artificial evolution"—opposed to Mechanists, who "had replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics" (MR47/48: 238). TM compares and contrasts "Olaf Stapledon's bloodless sagas," A. C. Clarke's Childhood's End and 2001, and F. Herbert's Dune series (239).