"Bicycle Repairman"

1996 Sterling, [Michael] Bruce (b. 1954). “Bicycle Repairman.” Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology. Ed. John [Joseph Vincent] Kessel, Mark L. Van Name, and Richard Butner (New York: Tor, 1996), 22-56 with “Workshop Comments” on 57-59 and “Afterword to ‘Bicycle Repairman’” on 59). Rpt. in Asimov’s Science Fiction 20.10&11 (250-51) (October/November 1996): 156-85; in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Fourteenth Annual Collection. Ed. Gardner [Raymond] Dozois (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 254-78; in Isaac Asimov’s Utopias. Ed. Gardner [Raymond] Dozois and Sheila Williams (New York: Ace Books, 2000), 234-78 without the added material and with a note on 234-35; in his A Good Old-Fashioned Future. Stories New York: Bantam Books, 1999, 188-228; U.K. ed. as A Good Old-Fashioned Future (London: Gollancz, 2001), 188-228; in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. James P. Kelley and John Kessel (San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2007), 3-35; and in Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction. Ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2011), 790-807 with an editor’s note on 790. CU-Riv, PSt

Dystopia set in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2037. The background to the story is the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area) Government, a new country that has abolished the U.S. Constitution. The story focuses on an independent bicycle repairman working in a shop in part of a building that was burned out in a riot in an area where people are leading independent lives free from the authoritarian system that surrounds them. The ending suggests that the area will regenerate, and the rich will move back.