The Bottle Imps" -- new short fiction by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling

“The Bottle Imps” is the latest short fiction offering from Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, released as part of the second edition of their anthology “Transreal Cyberpunk.” The collection’s pitch leans into “transreal” cyberpunk themes, with 11 stories in total plus two additional tales in this edition, and includes notes by the authors and an introduction by SF scholar Rob Latham. The new story centers on a pair of genies emerging from a piece of Jade Cove in Big Sur—though the source is left ambiguous as a bottle, a chunk of jade, or even a 4D tunnel to a parallel world. The opening follows Lou, a former marine biology professor at UFO, who turns to hunting rare bubble jade, diving more than 100 feet below Jade Cove as his life and career unravel.