Distraction

Rating:
Summary: Setting over character
Review: As in most of Sterling's works, the real brilliance of this comes through in the dramatic, fully realized world of the future he created for us. It all seems plausible if you know the political references he makes, but surprising enough to be entertaining. The sense of humor he showed in _Holy Fire_ and some of his short works falls in as well, adding some much needed levity in a very dark and turbulent world.

Where Sterling falls short is with characterization. This is a critcism I have of many works in this style, be it by Sterling, Gibson, Stephenson, et al. While the plot moves along, it's like in a classic horror movie; there are times you just yell at the characters for their actions, and you can't understand why they act so idiotic at times.

All in all, though, it is an entertaining read with some thought provoking questions about the current state of the world. Sterling is better at this type of novel than most anyone else, and this is probably his best work next to _Holy Fire_. He won't change your mind about political sci-fi, but you'll enjoy it if you're already a fan.

Rating:
Summary: It's okay
Review: The story here is decent but not exactly what it's pitched as. To read the description would lead you to believe that you're going to read a book about two people trying to change a corrupt, lost America. But by the time you finish, it's obvious that the story is more about two people who are caught up in their own bubble and have not really made an effort to fix America. Instead they have played a bunch of "dangerous" games with a few politicians and some crazies who have dropped out of society becuase there are just not jobs left.
I was also constantly mystified at how everyone reacts to Oscar in this story. Every single character he comes across just stares in amazement at his skills to think and plan quickly and to get the upper hand. That is fine and all except that he never actually earns this respect. At no point in the story did he have a thought that was really that original or dashing. Sure, he can talk quick but lots of people can do that. There were no ideas he put forward that the reader couldn't see coming. Perhaps the moral of the lesson is that in the future everyone will be so slow that a "normal" thinker by our standards will be nearly super-human.
But the one thing this book has going for it is that it has a sharp, believable future. If we don't fix our system now, it is not difficult to see the America painted here as a reality. That vision of the future alone does make this worth reading and saved the book from some serious issues that I had with it.

Rating:
Summary: A work of precision intensity and intelligence
Review: Bruce Sterling addresses every major topic of our time. It is a transformational futurists view of the social impact that biotechnology, nanotech, and a global network may have. The sheer number of concepts that have been intertwined and projected into the future are staggering. It is a massive vision, and yet it is told simply and with a sensitivity for suspense and overall appeal.

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and Cynic political satire. Read this book.
Review: Bruce Sterling has changed tack from the elegaic feel of his previous book HOLY FIRE for a fast and furious satire of the American political system. In the form of a genetically mutated political spin doctor and a brilliant neuroscientist, the hero and heroine are hopeful monsters, brilliant outsiders able to see a better future that no one else can, and have set out against the odds to bring it on, even if it kills them. Readers with short attention spans have accused the characters of being two dimensional when the opposite is true; Sterling depicts them from a standpoint of total objectivity, as if they were specimens being examined from the outside, yet with complete understanding of their inner workings. The twists and turns are fast and furious, and the portrait of an insanely fractured American political system is exhilarating and not improbable, with a deeply cynical twist at the end when the President unveils his solution to America's political mess... a twist so unexpected that even the hero loses his remaining shred of innocence. As the world changes, so the protagonists adapt, and thrive, retaining their curiosity to see what comes next. A wise and funny novel, filled with enough throwaway ideas that usual fill up dozens of lesser writers' books.

Rating:
Summary: Sterling's strongest most imaginative & humorous novel.
Review: A razzle-dazzle tour of American politics a little less than 50 years from now. To me at least, this book captured the strong imaginative elemments of Sterling's shorter works (see _Globalhead_ for an excellent collection) into a novel form. The book kept me grinning and off balence. For example the "anglos" as the minority group with a bad rep, which people seem to be uncomfortable about or unapoligetic or the very strong central character who is not always likeable - he "uses" people and is clearly ambitious. A really good read, I suspect this one will hold up on re-reading better than some of Sterlings earlier work. Like _Heavy Weather_ and _Holy Fire_ the future presented seems to ring true, but this time Sterling has played with having more elements of humor as well. Nothing too off the wall, but things like a cold war with the Dutch over global warming.

The ending is excellent and may disappoint traditional SF readers.

Rating:
Summary: Great Near Future Sci-Fi
Review: Sterling does it again with this book, prescient and witty. It tells the tale of two people stuck in a civil war of sorts between the old world and the new. It is a great read if you are into "Emergence Theory," as you watch the city of Buna unfold.

Rating:
Summary: Confirming once again the whole genre of Sci-fFi
Review: I've recently felt compelled to re-read 'Distraction', and I've been really enjoying myself. The character of Oscar Valparaiso has snuck up on me and won me over; my copy is all marked up in pink and purple highliner. There are so many great and clever lines.

The people who don't like the plot are probably looking for a conventional Triumph of the Individual Against All Odds adventure. "Distraction" is that rarity in speculative fiction, character-driven Sci-Fi. For an S-F novel to be character-driven, the character(s) must be recognizable and well-observed, but also modified by some speculative concept. The ability to observe well a person who cannot yet exist requires an intuitive vision that, if successful, confirms the whole genre of Sci-fi as a literary artform. I think Bruce Sterling pulls it off.

The whole delightfully wierd rambling plot, about feuding anarchistic nomad bands and the power-grappling over a national
biological laboratory by 16 political parties and neurological Gumbo a la Bayou, are loaded with flip ideas and throw-away shaggy-dog genius, but are ultimately a... well, a distraction. The real story is about Oscar himself, whose plight as the ultimate outsider seems like it must be a sublimation of something the author knows about personally. I'm sorry to say that I worry that Oscar's in-vitro birth as a genetic experiment in a black-market off-shore Columbian Mafia baby-selling operation may be occurring in real life right now. How the scary dark unavoidable abuses of our unprecedented technology impact on human souls is the real subject of this book.

Oscar's dark alter-ego, Green Huey, says to him,"I finally got you all figured out... You're always gonna have your nose pressed up against the glass, watchin' other folks drink the champagne. Nothing you do will last. You'll be a sideshow and a shadow, and you'll stay one till you die. But, son, if you got a big head start on the coming revolution, .... you can goddamn have Massachusetts." But Oscar consistantly chooses quietly perserving his own dignity over exploiting his tremendos gifts, which would only re-enforce his alienation. 'Distraction' is for anyone who's ever found their nose pressed up against the glass in this present bewildering Cyber-Age.

Rating:
Summary: Sterling's Inner Struggle
Review: OK, the first thing that you need to know is that this is an above-average Bruce Sterling Novel. Translation: buy it and read it as soon as you can. Put off sleep or friendly relations with your loved ones if necessary. Bruce Sterling is the most insightful writer about the near future currently on the planet, and he also writes better dialogue than anyone else in science fiction. His work reminds me of the plays of GB Shaw, in that one finds oneself always agreeing with the last person who spoke, even if what he or she says represents a 180 degree reversal from what was said on the previous page.

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.

Rating:
Summary: Which world is this?
Review: Two series of questions divide the kingdom of literature: "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? What am I in it?" This world, hidden secrets and a self secure, hence, the detective story.

"Which world is this? What is to be done with it? Which of my selves is to do it?" Ontological insecurity, many worlds, the ungrounded self, hence, science fiction. But how can such a tacky genre carry so much philosophical freight?

Oscar Valparaiso, the protagonist of Bruce Sterling's novel DISTRACTION, is a political operative with a personal background problem. He does not live in our world, but in one of the possible trajectories of our world into the near future - the year 2042. Oscar is a creature riven. The adopted son of a famous screen actor, he may not be human. Oscar was never born, he was grown in a vat in a Columbian embryo mill. In order to try and make the zygotes' DNA more viable, they lopped off most of the introns. Oscar's extraordinary talents in the political world may or may not be a function of this genetic pruning.

Sterling creates a world, and from the opening sentence we are in that world. It is a world which resembles our own, but it has gone into a different future, and the distance of 40 years creates a disturbing parallax. Much of the frisson of the novel comes from the double vision the reader experiences seeing through the present into this future space. Mostly the changes are small, but even the smallest changes are propelled by ontological differences of startling strangeness.

Not the least of these changes is in the practice of politics. Oscar has grasped a new principle in human affairs: "One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of reality." He is delighted by the utility of this formulation, and intoxicated by the power of it. In the novel's early going, his youth, his charisma, his stylish wardrobe both charm us and repel us. His charm is in his innocence and his hopefulness, yet he is also disgusting because he is so glib. All tactics and no strategy. All surface and no depth. It may be that he is incapable of wisdom. It may be that the "junk DNA" which was thrown out of the egg from which he was formed sealed his destiny before he drew his first breath.

Oscar seems incapable of faulty political analysis. In his world, every move counts for something, and he has all the right moves. Like a great basketballeur, he knows instinctively where to position himself for the best shot. But he may also be incapable of ethical behavior. He does not consider the effects of his actions on others, except insofar as these effects serve his political goals.

Two themes emerge, however, which distract him more and more from his ballistic program. The first is an affair with the geekoid, Nobel Prize winning neurobiologist Dr. Greta Penninger, whom he meets in his role as science advisor for the U.S. Senate Science Committee. The second is his increasingly desperate and fateful encounters with Green Huey, the populist, demagogic governor of Louisiana, who has discovered a neural technology which turns people into placid bodies, the perfect worker bees in the hive mind of Green Huey's visionary new political state.

Will Oscar win the heart of the girl? Will he triumph over the evil Governor? Well, the charm of the book is not in the plot, which follows a predictable arc. And why not? You either get the girl or you don't. You either beat the bad guy or you don't.

The charm of the book is in the writing. We enter another world, and with every page we turn that world becomes stranger and more familiar. Sterling has created a world with mesmerizing textural density, and it is not possible to talk convincingly ABOUT that world because of its hyper-reality, its incompressible code. Why something is strange, or funny, or sad in that world, takes a great deal of explanation. It is fiction with the felt reality of our own world, but with a different set of constraints on the possibilities. Like the bouquets with which Oscar woos Greta, knowing that the flowers are both a sensual delight and an encoded message, the novel creates a space which must be lived in to be made sense of.

The adventure in this novel does not come from discovering hidden secrets, although there are secrets to be discovered. The adventure comes from answering the questions already asked: "Which world is this? What is to be done with it? Which of my selves is to do it?" The vast potential of the genre - that famous negative space - is to build a world where these questions can be explored and analyzed by the reader who has become a denizen of this other world. Thoreau wrote that all the questions of philosophy would be answered if we could but experience for a short time what another person experiences. In a manner of writing, Sterling has done this, by language which litera(ry)lly moves us out of the linear stream of consciousness into a bicamerality of existence.

As the path of the novel bifurcated, and bifurcated again, like real life on the edge of chaos, I was delightfully surprised. I felt sad as Oscar sought unsuccessfully for a person he could trust without abandonment, I felt happy when he found and loved Greta, I felt sad again when he was variously betrayed. By the end, I cared about Oscar and Greta. I wished I might sit with them and talk about their lives. They felt like friends. In reading the novel I had meditated on trust and betrayal, on love and loss, on the fictional past and the fictitious future. I felt royally entertained. Not bad. Not bad at all for a tacky science fiction novel.

Rating:
Summary: Marvelous one
Review: I found the future described in this book extremely fascinating, especially as it diverges from the usual run-of-the-mill SF(either you have an utopian Star-Trek future, or Cyperpunk/After-The-Bomb-kind of future).

Sterlings future is almost believable (even with some weird points, but those only make the book more fun). The book also voices thoughts on various questions of humanity today - such as what we will do if jobs for 'normal people' keep disappearing like they do, or on how Americans think vs. the way Europeans think.

It also, in an odd way, is pretty optimistic about humanity's future.

If Heinlein said 'Humanity will survive because its too tough to die', then Stirling says 'Humanity will muddle its way through, because it's too alive to die'.

PS: There's also a nice love story in it (yeah ;-) that is more believable than many I have read.