In astronomy, a technique called Active Optics uses a dynamically warping mirror to counteract atmospheric disturbances and show clear pictures of the sky. In futurism, the same technique is owned by Bruce Sterling.

Futurity runs like a live wire through this collection. Bruce Sterling is a man trying to throw himself boldly into the future. These stories feature architects and bloggers crouching in the ruined cities of the American Midwest and Central Europe. Assassins and necromancers arrange their plots in scenic Turin and Tuscany. But there's not a lot of traditional fiction here, the well-crafted stories that you might remember from a "A Good Old Fashioned Future" are interspersed with screeds on design, governance, and sustainability, and a few of the stories take a stylized avante-garde approach to world-building that reminds me of Expressionist film. Sterling is like a man trying to build a glider as he plummets from a cliff, and there crude edges and open circuits everywhere. But the book is full of those sharp turns that Sterling specializes in, the sentence that takes some bullshit we all accept because that's the way it is, in turns it inside-out to show what's really going on.

This is a spiky, thorny book. The 12 pieces in here are nominally short fiction, or at least they don't describe the surface of our consensus reality and none of them are longer than 20 pages, but most of them aren't the kind science-fiction you'd see at a boring bookstore like B&N or the dearly departed Borders. Rather, like Bruce himself, it's an uneven mixture of Texan orneriness, California cyberdelia, and European design criticism. This is not a book for people who just want to be entertained, and it's not for people who want answers, but if you're looking to turn 2012 into a year of Transition and wind up on top at the end, this might be the book for you.