Cover by Rocky Kelley
As we barrel toward the August 29 premiere of Rayguns Over Texas at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention) in San Antonio, I am presenting book excerpts, one contributor per day.
Today’s selection comes from Bruce Sterling’s introduction “Texas Over Rayguns.”
Sterling’s self-penned biography for the anthology barely acknowledges his importance within the annals of Texas science fiction. He fails to mention his seminal place within the cyberpunk genre nor his involvement with The Turkey City Writers Workshop, whose alumni include Howard Waldrop, Lewis Shiner, George W. Proctor, Lisa Tuttle, and many of the contributors to Rayguns. Throughout the 90s and early 00s until his leaving Texas for the wilds of Europe, Sterling embraced his role as the focal point of Texas science fiction, hosting bi-annual Turkey Citys and other events for the Austin creative community.
In other words, Sterling was my first and best choice to write the book’s introduction.
It takes some grit to be a Texan science fiction writer, for they’ve never been over-burdened with help and are blissfully unaware of other people’s literary rules. Somewhere within this form of genre writing there remains the tall-tale braggadocio of a thinly scattered people taking root in a vast frontier.
Texas is rough and tough. It boasts a violent climate replete with tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. It’s been the site of massacres, ethic cleansing and colossal natural and industrial disasters. Politically, Texas has always been a one-party state, with its public affairs in the hands of a camarilla of alcaldes and good old boys. Texas has handguns galore and one of the planet’s largest prison populations. Texas has known economic collapse, military defeat, occupation, and centuries of racial oppression and grinding rural poverty. Those may be the stark facts, but they don’t much bother any creative figure in this book. If anything, all that merely gives them some extra swagger.
Texas is also advanced. The raw, spectacular landscape of this former republic is covered with superbly engineered infrastructure of highways, oil derricks, gas lines, transmission towers… windmills, ports, canals, spacecraft control centers, military bases… drones, nuclear weapons assembly plants, ultra-clean computer chip assembly factories — yes, most anything that technology can conjure up has been deployed on the people of Texas. Commonly they even inflict that stuff on other people.
Excerpt from “Texas Over Rayguns” © 2013 by Bruce Sterling.