Are there any Bruce Sterling fans here?

[babylonsister]

I am not familiar with him, but just read this review of a book published in 1998 that made me curious.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/17/bruce-sterlings-visi.html

Bruce Sterling's visionary novel Distraction: still brilliant a decade later
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 17, 2008 2:43 PM | permalink

I just finished re-reading (for the nth time) Bruce Sterling's 1998 novel Distraction. I didn't mean to -- I picked it up in a used bookstore in Milwaukee on my way to a quick dinner in my hotel room, thinking I'd just read a few pages of this old friend and then leave it behind for the next guest to discover and enjoy. Now it's 18 hours later and I've read all 500-some pages of it, and, as ever, my mind is a-whirl with the incredible ideas, people and speculation in this remarkable, remarkable book.

Distraction is the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones. The action revolves around Oscar Valparaiso, a one-of-a-kind political operator who has just put his man -- a billionaire sustainable architecture freak -- into the Senate and is looking for some downtime. But a funny thing happens on the way to the R&R: Oscar and his "krewe" (the feudal entourage who trail after him, looking after his clothes, research, security, systems and so on) end up embroiled in a complex piece of political theater, a media war between the rogue governor of the drowned state of Louisiana, the Air Force, the newly elected president, and a weird, pork-barrel science park in its own glassed-in dome.

Every single chapter -- every one! -- has at least enough material for five great speculative short stories. From the net-gang hobos (and their remarkable, cellular-automata driven fleamarkets) to the weird economic boom in cognition research, to the idea of leisure unions and anti-work activist techno-triumphalists, this book fizzes with awesome ideas.

But that's only one of its three signal virtues. The other two are: the insight Sterling brings to the nature of politics and the political process in the age of networked economies and systems; and the vivid, larger-than-life characters who populate this book. They are, to a one, likable, frustrating, believable, admirable and enraging.

It's a powerful concoction, this book, and now, ten years after its initial publication, it's possible to asses just how prescient, how visionary, Sterling is. I love all of Bruce's books, but this one may just be my favorite. It's the kind of friend you end up staying up all night chatting with, even when all you plan on doing is saying a quick hello. Link

[MrModerate]

1. Not on topic (although I'm a sci-fi reader and have liked a lot of Sterling's work) . . .

But what's with the "Don't Donate" graphic?

I admit to having hidden out from DU of late (too many airborne turds for my taste) but I'm suffering from a little cognitive dissonance here . . .

(or is that a grovelbot/humor thing that went over/past/underneath my head?)

[babylonsister]

2. It's a grovelbot/admin/humor thing. They claim it's the worst fund

drive ever (or least it started off the slowest in DU history) so it's really just an attention-getter. You certainly aren't the first person who wondered what was going on. It ends tomorrow, I think.

[juno jones]

3. Haven't read that particular Sterling, but his stuff is pretty good,

I'd recommend it. William Gibson and Paul DiFillipo are also good reads in the same *genre* (speculative fiction).

[eppur_se_muova]

4. I read it several years ago, so don't remember everything about it ...

but remember it being a hugely entertaining book. Sterling's stories are usually set in a recognizable near future, where things have changed, but in reasonably plausible ways. The science in his stories is mostly extrapolated from current science, rather than being too far out, and the stories are as much sociological/political "speculative fiction" as "science" fiction.

The near future, political setting of Distraction can be compared to Islands in the Net (although very different stories): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_in_the_Net

Try browsing his wiki entry. The man's not a one-man movement, but several!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling

[YankeyMCC]

5. I haven't read his novels but they are widely praised in SF

he Seeker novel won a Nebula I believe.

[YankeyMCC]

6. Yikes

had a different author on my mind, he did not write Seeker.

[mzteris]

7. Schismatrix and Islands in the Net

are good - the former is really wild!

I did NOT like "Heavy Weather" - in fact, it's one of the very few books in my life I did not finish.

edit to add - do you know there is a SF forum here? Unfortunately, it is more often focused on visual, but some books, too.