Two ways of being human, and neither side will concede. The Mechanists bolt hardware into their own flesh and extend their lives with prosthetics and computation. The Shapers rewrite themselves at the genetic level and breed for talent. Their quarrel runs a hundred and seventy years, out through the orbital habitats and colonies of the solar system, and it takes in economics, diplomacy, terraforming and fashion.

Abelard Lindsay carries the book. Trained as a diplomat in the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic, then exiled from it, he moves between factions as a schemer and a fixer, close to whatever technology is about to change the terms of the argument. Sterling gives each habitat its own economy, jargon and life expectancy, and lets Lindsay age through several incompatible versions of civilization.

This is Sterling's only full-length novel in the Shaper/Mechanist setting. The 1996 collection Schismatrix Plus gathers it with five short stories from the same universe. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1985 and the British Science Fiction Award in 1986. The prose is dry, fast and crowded with ideas, more interested in how posthuman societies fund themselves than in who wins a fight. Come for the cold intelligence of it, and for a 1980s cyberpunk novel that points outward at the solar system instead of down at a city street.