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Kiosk, by Bruce Sterling [from the current Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine]
A street-level view of cultural and economic revolution, with a sooty kind of optimism. "Kids, by the nature of kids, weren't burdened with a lot of cash. Taking their money was not his real goal. What the kids brought to his kiosk was what kids had to give him - futurity. Their little churn of street energy - that was the symptom of something bigger, just over the horizon. He didn't have a word for that yet, but he could feel it, in the way he felt a coming thunderstorm inside his aching leg.
Futurity might bring a man money. Money never saved a man with no future."
Says Sterling, "I’ve been in an eight-year struggle to write ‘a kind of science fiction that could only be written in the 21st century.’ With the possible exception of my forthcoming novel, this story is my best result from that effort." I don't know if he succeeded precisely in his goal, but I do know that the story excites me the way sci-fi used to. |
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