The best way to discover the exact nature of Bruce Sterling’s new non-fiction book, Tomorrow Now (Random House, hardcover, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN: 0679463224), may be first to decide what it is not. It is not some kind of Hans Moravec- or Eric Drexler-style plunge into a promised techno-wonderland awaiting somewhere down the line. It’s not some Frank Tipler-style high-minded thinkpiece on mankind’s destiny. It’s not straight reportage, journalism about all the cutting-edge R&D happening around the globe. No, it’s none of these things uniquely, but rather a strange hybrid of all three modes, along with some exquisite ranting, nostalgic taking-stock, a few gobs of Welt-schmerz and some uplifting daily affirmations. Fellow SF writers, looking to dash in and out of this book while light-fingeredly stealing neat gimmicks for their own future stories will be disappointed–the rest of us will be enthralled.

Although the book is subtitled "Envisioning the next fifty years," Sterling paints in broad strokes, offering several alternative timelines instead of a single fate, and generally posing more cogent questions than facile answers. This book honestly reflects the cultural confusion currently dominant, in the wreckage of the "belle époque," a period that Sterling dates from 1989 to 2001. Sure, Sterling as always in his journalism makes bold assertions and pronouncements, couched in his trademark wry brashness. But the reader senses that the author is more willing than ever to be proven wrong, especially when it comes to such looming catastrophes as the greenhouse effect and terrorism.

Sterling adopts a clever format for his book: borrowing Shakespeare’s famous "Seven Ages of Man" speech, he divides humanity’s concerns into seven "stages": the Infant, the Student, the Lover, the Soldier, the Justice, the Pantaloon, and Mere Oblivion. Obvious topics immediately accrue to these stages. The chapter on the Infant will feature speculation on the genetic engineering of embryos, the Soldier will concern postmodern warfare, and so on, down to life extension in Mere Oblivion. But just as often as Sterling examines such nascent technologies as ubiquitous computing, he also dissects current mindsets and cultural currents. Reflective of its title, Sterling’s book focuses equally as much on the present as it does on the future. Much of the text reads like sophisticated op-ed page exegesis pertaining to immediate events. A clear-eyed interpreter of the current scene, Sterling is never less than fascinating and quotable ("A suicide bomber has no encore"), especially when expressing certain contrarian viewpoints in his best Mark Twain fashion. But he never really achieves liftoff into a visionary state. It’s as if he’s a diver intent on building a springboard so solid (his multiplex depiction of 2003) that he creates a industrial-grade, triply redundant launch platform that outshines the eventual leap. It’s certainly not that Sterling can’t dream big–any casual survey of his fiction will disprove that–but rather that he’s deliberately snaffled himself on this outing, forsaking even such mildly non-linear yet plausible speculations as the advent of the hydrogen economy or the creation of an AIDS vaccine, for a tight focus on today’s headlines. Like William Gibson’s newest novel, Pattern Recognition, Sterling’s book presents the future as a fait accompli.

This book reminds me of none other than John Clute’s The Book of End Times (1999). Both are heartfelt attempts to engage the ball of confusion that is our dangerous, perplexing present. Both offer a mix of sunshine and clouds. Perhaps no more honest book of futurism is possible at this dire moment in time.

Indeed, Aylett pulls out all the stops in Karloff’s Circus (Gollancz, trade paper, £9.99, 144 pages, ISBN 0-575-07089-7). First he brings in the titular circus from outside Accomplice, hinting at hitherto-undisclosed realms in his cosmology. This "Circus of the Heart’s Shell" manages to outdo in strangeness the heretofore-unsurpassed daily bizareness of the city, what with its zombie aerialists and Killer Midgets. It’s an LSD-vision of Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), filtered through Bradbury on ecstasy. In this book the hilarious extended setpiece is a boxing match between Gregor ("the Masked Inconvenience") and a demon named Trubshaw in Chapter 9, complete with sports commentary only slightly more inane than what we hear daily.

But underlying the non-stop wackiness of this climactic volume is a real sadness and melancholy, as Barny comes up against the limits of his idealism. Having lost the affections of his girlfriend Chloe Low, and having seen his house and menagerie disassembled, he becomes despondent and, on the point of victory over all his rivals, makes a fatal misstep. A coda removes a little of the sting, but without Barny, Accomplice just isn’t the same, and it’s probably time to quit the scene. Aylett’s courage in rounding off his series so decisively is testament to his own faith–and ours–that he’ll be back with even grander, Firesign-Theater-style romps in the future. As Mike Abblatia, car mechanic turned accidental angel, says, "An artist pulls love from chaos." Steve Aylett is one hell of an artist.

It’s easy and common enough to compare a living SF writer to Cordwainer Smith, that unique purveyor of transhuman future myths. But oftentimes such comparisons rely on the contemporary writer shallowly employing a few superficial icons similar to Smith’s patented ideological armamentarium. But as far as the really deep-rooted otherness of thought and narration that Smith exhibited, it’s rarely enough that anyone today tries for such fictional effects.

One author who has proven that he can portray startling futures radically disengaged from our present, futures whose inhabitants, although human, are quintessentially not us, is Adam Roberts. His first novel, Salt (2000), explored a harsh world where two rival political systems waged overt and covert war against each other, in the manner of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). His sophomore effort, On (2001), was one the best tales of an ontologically warped world–gravity functions at right angles to the surface–since Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974). Now, with his third book, Stone (Gollancz, trade paper £9.99, 261 pages, ISBN: 0575070641), Roberts moves into pure Cordwainer Smith territory, that realm where the daily life of the galaxy’s far-future citizens is radically estranged from everything we take for granted, where nigh-inconceivable social networks rule, and where the actions of a lone individual can have Götterdämmerung effects.

The loosely interlocked affinity of worlds known as the t’T occupy a region of space where FTL travel at many multiples of lightspeed is physically permitted. Adjacent regions permit only slower FTL or none at all. (Here we can observe Roberts fruitfully playing with the Vingean notions first advanced in A Fire Upon the Deep [1992].) Even in the t’T zone, however, FTL travel is constrained to small masses: thus individuals encase themselves and their one-person quantum-drives in protective foam and launch themselves solo from star to star. Such travel is not quite as risky as it would be for you or me, since all the citizens of t’T are protected by dotTech, the omnipresent nanomachinery that confers immortality and near-invulnerability. Such neighboring polities as the Palmettos and the Wheah do not employ dotTech or FTL travel, and are seen as savages.

In the utopian realm of the t’T, murder is virtually unknown. Our female narrator, the abnormal killer known only as Ae, is consequently a disturbing anomaly. Confined to a "jailstar," a prison cell literally within a sun, Ae is contacted by a mysterious outside intelligence that recruits her for a mission of inexplicable genocide. Aided to escape, Ae next embarks on a hegira across the t’T realm (a journey that allows Roberts to introduce us to a number of miraculous worlds). Confused, alternately elated and despondent, wanting to reform and yet also to kill again, Ae undergoes a quest for answers. Primarily a psychological journey, Ae’s quest also becomes a murder mystery (with victim, means, motive, and prime mover unknown until the last minute) and a chase-thriller.

Roberts has Ae telling her story post-capture, using an inanimate stone–one of the few possessions in her ultimate prison–as her silent auditor. His embodiment of Ae’s warped, posthuman persona is seamless and richly emotional. Saving the account of Ae’s formative years until three-quarters of the way through the story, Roberts nonetheless fashions his protagonist into a fully rounded character whose dreams and nightmares become our own. Ae’s depiction is matched by the speculative rigor with which Roberts fashions his exotic future, where the economy of scarcity has been replaced by the ability to fashion anything desired out of raw matter, remake the human form into a million exotic shapes, and hop from star to star on a whim.

After three very different books to date, Roberts has emerged as one of the key writers reinvigorating SF for a new century. Paul Linebarger would be proud.

It’s exceedingly rare to find a debut novel as accomplished as Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (Gollancz, trade paper, £10.99, 404 pages, ISBN: 0575073225; Del Rey, trade paper, $13.95, 384 pages, ISBN 0-345-45768-4). Inevitable comparisons to the initial smash that Neuromancer (1984) made will abound, not only because Altered Carbon is pure third-generation kick-ass cyberpunk, but also due to the fact that this book has been optioned by Hollywood for a cool million dollars. It remains to be seen if Morgan’s career will soar to the same heights as Gibson’s. His sophomore effort, Broken Angels (Gollancz, March 2003), a direct sequel, is just out in the UK as I write this, and its reception and quality will prove whether or not Morgan has the staying power of his literary forebears.

However, there is no gainsaying that Altered Carbon on its own merits is one hell of a ride.

The time is the twenty-sixth century. The setting is Earth, mainly the city of San Francisco. Here we find our narrator/protagonist Take-shi Kovacs, "sleeved" in a new body and set loose to find out the truth behind the apparent suicide of billionaire Laurens Bancroft. The client who hired Kovacs? It’s Bancroft, the suicide victim himself. You see, Morgan’s future involves fully recorded personalities downloaded into fresh bodies, "sleeves" that are either synthetics or clones or essence-wiped adult humans. Kovacs is an Envoy, a near-psychopathic trained killer-soldier from the stars, now installed in new flesh. The living Bancroft is derived from a backup copy of the dead man, and lacks the memories of his own final hours due to backup timing. Bancroft believes he was murdered, and details Kovacs to find his killer.

Almost instantly, Kovacs is plunged into the elaborate and deadly politics of both the local scene and the whole Earth milieu. A large cast of suspects, allies, enemies, and innocent bystanders complicates matters. There’s Kristen Ortega, local cop, who just so happens to be the lover of the body Kovacs is wearing, that of a fellow cop uploaded out of his flesh to the penal Stack for various crimes. There’re professional assassins Trepp and Kadmin, who are stalking Kovacs. There’s the AI that runs the hotel Kovacs is staying at, the Hendrix, who becomes Kovacs’s partner. There are organlegging doctors; hackers known as Dips who take byte-sized pieces of personality backups in transit; and an assortment of whores, drug-dealers, and other unsavory types. Most importantly of all, there’s merciless crimelord Reileen Kawahara, with whom Kovacs has tangled before. When Kovacs begins to step on her toes, the violence amps upward.

Morgan has the essentials of noir fiction nailed down tight. The wisecracks in the face of death, the elaborate similes and metaphors ("less noise than a Catholic orgasm"), the institutional corruption, the way alliances get made despite principles rather than because of principles. The plot is more tangled than six Chandler novels put together, yet Morgan manages to unknot it all at the end. Kovacs is as nasty a hero as any outside of a James Crumley novel, yet we root wholeheartedly for him. And the speculative content is impeccable: a sharp central concept (reminiscent in many ways of the core notion in David Brin’s recent Kiln People), lots of deadly hardware, and plenty of socio-political ramifications.

My one gripe is with the unlikelihood that five centuries have passed since our day. Morgan picks this distant era because he needs to set up a degenerate elite of ancient powerbrokers. (Bancroft and Kawahara are both three centuries old.) But would such things as the UN, tobacco cigarettes, and LED readouts survive unaltered over such a span? What institutions and customs remain to us from Shakespeare’s time? It’s much more likely that the passage of five centuries would result in a future more akin to that in Adam Roberts’s novel. But once you get over this initial implausibility, the action of the book is freed to zigzag madly from one explosive action scene to another, all of them elaborately constructed and recomplicated. Morgan’s unflagging attention to meticulous detail establishes the old saw about genius being an infinite ability for painstakingness.

Morgan shows us that, given a wealth of talent and ambition, no writer need be afraid to tackle any mode of fiction deemed played-out. All those who suspected that the landmark fusion of noir and SF that Gibson pioneered had been done to death are now proved wrong.