A good nest of laurels? Not exactly. A lot of silly stuff came out of the whole cyberpunk trend. Beforehand, when you were on the Internet you were merely slouched out in a chair, typing onto a Compuserve message board or something. Afterwards, you were flying bodilessly through cyberspace, a creature of pure data, communing with other cyberbeings through virtual reality. It's taken years to get people to stop talking that way, not to mention believing some of that bunkum. Also, the books mostly haven't held up well. In just over a decade, early renderings of the Internet have come to seem quaint and self-astonished in the same way as Jules Verne's "A Trip to the Moon" must've seemed during the height of the space age. Less so, but in that way, Sterling's 1988 novel "Islands in the Net" flourishes that sexy new com-tech apparatus, the fax machine. All the same, when the day comes, they'll use that "cyber" word way up top in Sterling's obituary -- there's no avoiding it.

He deserves better. If any classification fits Sterling's fiction easily, it's one of his own making: He coined the term "slipstream" to denote books and authors that share some of the speculative, experimental ends of good science fiction, but which use different, often more mainstream, ways of reaching them. Thomas Pynchon would be a slipstream author, as would Kurt Vonnegut and Iain Banks, maybe David Foster Wallace, and definitely Borges and Kafka.

Sterling remains a science-fiction loyalist in principle, but there's long been a hint of ambivalence, a hint perhaps of thwartedness and pique, in the way he champions pure SF in his essays while excoriating the SF scene as it really exists because it produces mostly genre paperbacks, tie-ins, paint-by-numbers imitations and sequels-of-sequels-of-sequels. Conversely, writing on John Updike's "slipstream" novel "Roger's Version" in the fanzine SF Eye, he comes off like a heavy-metal kid apologizing to his friends about liking Beethoven. Like: I know what you're thinking; it's just some boring old geezer. But wait! If you pay attention to it -- like really give it a chance -- the guy really has something going! Sterling has serious authorly instincts and sensibilities, and "Zeitgeist" is proof of his being too large for his current aquarium.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"