Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dinner in Audoghast (in Asimov’s) | 1985 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 2 | Flowers of Edo (in Asimov’s) | 1987 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 3 | Our Neural Chernobyl (in F&SF) | 1988 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 4 | Dori Bangs (in Asimov’s) | 1989 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 5 | Deep Eddy (in Asimov’s) | 1993 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 6 | Bicycle Repairman (in A Good Old-Fashioned Future) | 1996 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 7 | The Parthenopean Scalpel | 2010 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 8 | Black Swan | 2010 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 9 | Good Night, Moon | 2011 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 10 | Loco | 2012 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 11 | Totem Poles | 2016 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
Sterling’s short fiction runs parallel to his novels across four decades, and several of the pieces in this list represent him at his most direct and precise. Where his novels tend to be idea-dense and episodic, his shorter work can focus on a single premise or character moment and let it breathe.
Dinner in Audoghast (1985), one of his earliest Asimov’s pieces, showed an ambition the cyberpunk label never fully captured — a historical story set in a medieval Ghanaian empire, told with the dry anthropological tone Sterling would use throughout his career. Flowers of Edo (1987) applied a similar approach to Edo-period Japan. Both pieces are formally unusual for science fiction of the era.
The later 1980s and early 1990s stories are more explicitly cyberpunk in setting — Deep Eddy (1993) and Bicycle Repairman (1996) are set in the same subdivided, surveilled near-future that informed his novels. The post-2010 pieces, including Black Swan and Good Night Moon, are harder to categorize, reflecting Sterling’s ongoing engagement with design and futures thinking as much as traditional science fiction.