Heavy Weather

Heavy Weather is a science fiction novel by the American writer Bruce Sterling, first published in 1994.

Sterling was one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement, and here the technology that interests him is meteorological: satellite data, modelling, drones and the computer hardware the Troupe lash to their vehicles in order to get close enough to a storm to record it. The group is led by Jerry Mulcahey, whose ambition is a tornado of a size that the existing scale does not cover, and the promise of the F-6 is what pulls the characters across the plains. The novel is as much about infrastructure as weather, since it imagines a 2030s America in which the money has stopped working properly, drug-resistant disease is common and the state's response to catastrophe is a matter of contracts. Against that background, the storm chasers are a small community with its own ethics and rivalries, and the book's main character is the outsider who has to be accepted by them. The setting links to Sterling's earlier fiction about the same decade and the same collapsing institutions.