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(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)
While most of the stories in Sterling's first collection, Crystal Express, are about the comparatively distant future (or past), and therefore reasonably unlikely to run up against reality in the lifetime of any current reader, the stories in Globalhead are set much closer to now, and some have already expired. Also, I think the collection suffers somewhat from Sterling's success: since he most definitely has a following, the editor has felt free to include some somewhat riskier stories. This has some good results, and some more questionable. Overall, though, I would recommend the book heartily to Sterling fans (who probably already have it). Fans of SF with contemporary settings may also prefer this collection, although for the general SF reader I'd recommend Crystal Express first.
Roughly half of the stories in Globalhead are concerned with relations between or among the U.S., the (former) USSR, and the Islamic world. "Storming the Cosmos" is an odd surreal story about a KGB informer and a Soviet scientist who find an odd something that may or may not be an alien star-drive, after a chaotic trip through morasses of Soviet hierarchy, their own psyches, and (of course) Tunguska. It isn't dated, because it's set in the past anyway. And while the subtext on the nature of Soviet politiculture may no longer be directly relevant, it no doubt still applies to various fragments of the USSR, and bits of other governments everywhere. A Soviet expatriot teams up with a very American coin-thief in "Jim and Irene", a story about making connections that I found not quite convincing enough. The ending could have been left off entirely; of course, then it would have been utterly straight fiction. In "The Unthinkable", disarmament talks aren't about nulcear bombs and submarines, but about the hideous Radiance of Azathoth, and leviathans; it's saved from being cute by the darkness of the ending.
"The Compassionate, the Digital" and "We See Things Differently" are about two aspects of Islam. The first is a rather odd and unfinished-feeling story (or perhaps story outline) about Islamic AIs being sent "into the fabric of spacetime"; perhaps Sterling will sometime write the story, and we'll find out what that actually means! "We See Things Differently", on the other hand, is a very well crafted little piece, in which an America gliding into chaos is seen from the viewpoint of a intelligent Muslim. While the narrator's ultimate mission turns out to be rather depressingly stereotyped, the overall characterization is very rich (although I can't judge its accuracy).
"The Gulf Wars" and "The Shores of Bohemia" remind me more of the stories in Crystal Express, for no apparent reason, and I liked them both. The first is about things that all wars have in common; the second, set in a distant and interesting future, is about (as Sterling is usually about) change and how people deal with it.
"Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Sword of Damoclese" and "The Moral Bullet" all struck me as unfinished, and somewhat disappointing. "The Sword of Damoclese" in particular seems unstarted, let alone unfinished. These are the stories that I venture to guess might not have been anthologized if not for Sterling's previous success. On the other hand, they aren't awful, and are worth reading; maybe you'll like them more than I did, as they're all experimental in some sense.
Also experimental is "Dori Bangs", a novel piece of speculative biography: what if two people (real people, I assume) that Sterling admired, and that died young, had met, and partially redeemed each other? He may have started yet another genre here, or this may remain a worthwhile anomaly.
Then there are the two Leggy Starlitz stories. Starlitz is a strange apolitical jack of all trades who has a mysteriously infinite store of cash, and who can't be videotaped ("Either the battery's dead, or the tape jams, or the player blows a chip and just starts blinking twelve o'clock..."). The stories show him as part of a black market operation in rural Azerbaijan ("Hollywood Kremlin") and then in California helping a pair of feminists doing some smuggling of their own ("Are You for 86?"). The stories are fun, and Leggy is quite a character; I suspect they show Sterling as he is tempted to create a series with an aspect of himself as the protagonist ("...you don't know anything about machinery. The way you talk about it, you'd think technology was for what people need!"). And of course "Leggy Starlitz" is obviously a rearrangement of "Galtz Sterliyg", which looks vaguely like "Bruce Sterling". "Are You for 86?" makes its first appearance in Globalhead, which may mean that we'll see more of this character, if Sterling succumbs to temptation; should be interesting...
%A Sterling, Bruce %B Globalhead %I Bantam Books / Spectra %C New York %D 1994 (hardcover 1992) %G 0-553-56281-9 %P 340 pp. %T Our Neural Chernobyl %T Storming the Cosmos %T The Compassionate, the Digital %T Jim and Irene %T The Sword of Damocles %T The Gulf Wars %T The Shores of Bohemia %T The Moral Bullet %T The Unthinkable %T We See Things Differently %T Hollywood Kremlin %T Are You for 86? %T Dori Bangs
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