But the Saigon years would not be happy ones. After all those years learning control, discipline, making those the touchstones of his life, Max Taylor was now confronted by the wild irrationality, the deviousness, the maliciousness and venality of the South Vietnamese. It was somehow unfair; people who are about to be saved from the Communists should feel some element of gratitude, and at the very least the gratitude should surface in the form of knowing they were being saved, and more important, wanting to be saved.

But the Saigon years would not be happy ones. After all those years learning control, discipline, making those the touchstones of his life, Max Taylor was now confronted by the wild irrationality, the deviousness, the maliciousness and venality of the South Vietnamese. It was somehow unfair; people who are about to be saved from the Communists should feel some element of gratitude, and at the very least the gratitude should surface in the form of knowing they were being saved, and more important, wanting to be saved.

Having finished up The Caryatids and the spime-tastic (unintentional) playbook for IBM's "Smart Planet" Shaping Things, I've now read all (I'm pretty sure...except for the Difference Engine, co-authored with William Gibson) of Bruce Sterling's books. There's a passel of them, but I'm a pretty big fan of his fiction and non-fiction. The list above is incomplete, of course, but it's the things I thought of as reoccurring several times through-out the short stories, fiction, and non-fiction.