Sterling Reviews

Frankly, I liked the book best when Adam had to deal with people, so that means the beginning and end. At the start, Adam goes from reluctant participant in a North Pole expedition that promises both glory and wealth, to someone who remains silent when he suspects his fiance, Clodagh (think Neferteri, from Heston's The Ten Commandments), of smoothing his way onto the expedition roster by poisoning rivals, to someone willing to kill and hide the body, out on the ice, during the final windswept run for the top of the world. The opening struggles of Adam are perhaps the most exciting, and they also force him to be a survivor, while at the same time laying him bare as a man of questionable character.

But the purple cloud changes everything, wreaking worldwide destruction, as Adam treks back from the north, alone. Once he re-enters the domain of civilized humanity again, he watches as the evidence slowly mounts: the real loneliness is just beginning, all the people are dead.

Thus begin the prolonged middle sections of the novel, where I feel we lose touch with Adam's psyche, where the emphasis is on what he is doing, not why he is doing it. It's very odd: The narrative is in the first-person singular, and yet it's as if we watch Adam swing from city-burner to pious temple-builder and back again--over decades, in fact--but it's like watching an unpredictable madman do both sacred and profane things, without knowing why. True, he appears mad, but the narrative itself remains clear, mostly sensible, if florid. Adam, then, becomes a very active whirlwind--almost like the living tail end of the purple cloud--and the only thing that really becomes clear, at one point, is that he does become content to be king of a dead world. Then he meets Leda.

The introduction of a second survivor of the apocalypse does help revitalize the book, and some of Adam's old complexity in dealing with people resurfaces. Just how will he treat Leda? It becomes clear, as he educates her and communicates with her once she knows words, that he is highly resistant to repopulating the world. In fact, he begins to think of murder.

This is a novel that actually fits in well with other scientific romances, long and short, of the time, most notably, works by Jack London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course H. G. Wells. It is a fairly quick read despite the language, and Adam's movements across a barren landscape are, I suppose, an interesting way to try and understand what has happened to his mind. But the evidence suggests that the purple cloud traps us on a world with a madman, who may be too far gone even when the last woman arrives to try and save him.

Interesting but somewhat unsatisfying reading, visionary for its time.

I wanted to like this book more. Early in the book, Adam finds himself in many morally challenging situations, but he has these voices in his head that more or less compel him to act in certain ways, so the reader is prevented from really entering into any moral struggles with him. I liked the writing, but each place Adam goes is essentially like the rest--everyone's dead--and I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Near the end, something finally did, but then I mostly wanted to slap Adam around for being so dense.

Maybe I'm just jaded from reading too many post-apocalyptic stories and that's why I'm not more enthusiastic about this book. If you're new to this sort of story, you might find this book to be a powerful exploration of loneliness and the meaning of human society and human life.

Things I didn't like about the book (don't worry, nothing really revealing here): the Flying Island, Crossbow and the Chairman's transformation, a climax you wouldn't exactly call exciting. Also, the Crossbow Body was a pretty shaky and only vaguely accounted-for concept.

I found this book in the library, of all places, back when I was in junior high school in 1982. Crouched between all that hoary Silverberg and Simak that I didn't want to read, it said "Psssst!". I haven't been the same since. The Kid jumped out and smacked me across the forehead with his lush, tweaked-out postpunk setting and sweeping, interconnected plot. A little bit of old-world pangalacticism, a little futuristic DIY chopsocky, a bunch of toungues in cheeks, and loads of high-tech wetware polymers and lurching biomasses, from before wetware polymers and lurching biomasses were cool. And all the while, Sterling's trademark core of optimism shines through.

It's taken the world about ten years to catch up to this baby, and it's about damn time. If you don't know Bruce Sterling, this is a fine place to start. Now, where's my Smuff?

John Zero (jzero@onramp.net), Dallas, Texas

This book was as fingernails on slate by the time I was half through so I stopped. It is self-consciously clever- so much so I blushed with embarassment for the author. A 10 year old girl demonstrated a working familiarity with scholarly writings on existentialism and feminist politics to her estranged-but-loveable dad. He didn't comment on this absurd precosity. That's when I gave up.

As much as I read books and these reviews which often guide my purchases, I rarely post anything, myself. Here I make the effort to save you -stranger- from a distinctly unpleasant dose of forced
and insincere mirth.

The plot was interesting. Starlitz is peddling stupid pop music and trashy G7 gals with zero talent from the worlds richest countries to the some of the world's poorest. At stories end, in contrast to the G7 girls whose tour ended in monetary disaster, Starlitz likes the idea of next trying the tour with seven very talented gals from seven obscure countries singing the best music with the ambition of making no money at all. Their success could support Sterling's idea that reality depends entirely on the words used-the narrative.

Overall, I would give this book a marginal recommendation to sci-fi buffs and perhaps disaster buffs. It moves slowly at times, but there are enough interesting ideas to make it worth your while if you're interested in the subject matter.

Maybe it's just because I've read Bruce Sterling short stories and I know that he can write. Maybe it's because I've read Neal Stephenson and compared to Snowcrash, other books in the cyberpunk genre are plodding. But mostly it's just not a very good book.

Set in the 2030 this book concerns a democratic corporation and the information pirates that it's trying to bring to heel. Instead of focusing on the pirates, as Gibson would do, this book concerns itself with the corporate types that are trying to figure out what's going on in the assassinations.

The world set-up in this opening is dull. Most of the characters are talking heads to spout philosophical mumbo-jumbo. A church of goddess worshipping prostitutes was probably innovative in its time but Starhawk's fifteen minutes are up, and paganism has moved away from the hippie garbage finally.

Halfway through the book it becomes a travelogue of the various places in this world. Here's where it begins to get good. Zelazny compares it to Candide. Sadly it's nowhere near as funny as Candide - which could be the fault of the main character whose nowhere near as innocent or cynical as she would need to be to pull off a Candide. Instead she's simply morally outraged.

When the book gets to Africa it begins to pick up, but then the protagonist is rescued by a Noam Chomsky type reporter whose running a guerrila army. This is where the book again falls flat on its face - by presupposing that Noam Chomsky would actually be able to run a workable system - rather than criticize the unworkabiility of current systems.

There are moments, but mostly this book is a lifeless remnant of the cyberpunk explosion.

This book surprised me. The title has nothing to do with the book. I had to force myself to read the whole thing and I only did that because it was hard to get (I know now why was out of print).

The main character, Laura, and those that surround her are probably the most annoyingly self-righteous cast of characters I've seen. They live in the future, think they know everything, have genetic engineering, yet they still do natural child birth. The criminal element in this book is way more interesting and believable.

I re-read my favorite science fiction when I either see it on my self and forget what it was about or every couple of years. Islands in the net is a laborous read that I wouldn't repeat.

The world Sterling creates alone would make this worthwhile reading, but his characterization is strong and unconventional, and he tells an extremely interesting story that travels all over the world. This isn't really a fast-paced pageturner, and it isn't immersed in hard-science details about how things work in the future--it's more like real life for most of us, where technology is part of the background, and just works. So if those are the kinds of things you value in a SF novel, this may not be your book. But the traditional virtues of plot, characterization, and setting make this an outstanding novel.

This is a political novel. Sterling is a deeply conflicted guy about politics. All of his protagonists are two-fisted individualist types of the sort more or less familiar from Hollywood movies and highschool US History textbooks (except that here they're about five hundred per cent more articulate and interesting). Clearly, though, in a part of his mind he believes that these sorts of people will come to seem redundant - faintly ridiculous, even - in a world where technology and environmental change have accelerated to the point at which the only way for human life to be made livable is to have everything run by a rich, benevolently paternalistic quasi-socialist central government. As a socialist myself, I'm more comfortable with his vision of the future than I am with his views about what's truly admirable in human nature, but some of his most endearing system-bucking characters both here and in his best book, _Holy Fire_, do sort of give me pause.

In _Distraction_, unlike in _Holy Fire_, the internal conflicts of Sterling's world-view appear to have interfered with his plotting of the novel a bit. He doesn't seem to have been entirely sure what to do with his two main characters, Oscar the political hack and Greta the neurobiologist, at the end of the book, and they seem to just sort of drift off into nowhere as the story concludes. Reading the last few pages I felt like I was watching Sterling throw up his hands in despair at the prospect of finding any way to reconcile what's best about American individualism with the social realities of the near future, which made me a bit sad. Maybe he's right, though.

Sterling's writing is quirky, intelligent, and real. He makes implausible situations (such as a cold war between the US and the Netherlands) feel both believable and appropriate.

The characters are wonderfully drawn. I was in love with Oscar-- the fast-talking campaign manager who isn't quite human but can always find the angle in a situation. I believed in his odd relationship with the unlikely and awkward Dr. Penninger simply because it was so improbable but at the same time so true.

I can understand why the ending felt unsatisfying to a lot of readers, because it fails to hand you simple or predictable resolution. Indeed, a lot like life, the plot almost fades away, leaving us with the main characters' relationship as the primary movement in the novel. Oddly appropriate for a book written about a time where everyone seems to be frantically sitting still, but grantedly atypical for science fiction.