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Distraction

Distraction

List Price: $7.50
Your Price: $6.75
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Gloriously Cynical
Review: I have read one or two of Bruce Sterling's short stories butonly picked this novel up on the strength of it's Hugo nomination. Iam glad I did! This is gloriously cynical satire. Sterling examines the twists and turns of a very plausible future US political landscape. Worryingly plausible!!

Other reviews here have alluded to the main characters of this novel being two-dimensional. I disagree - Sterling's protagonist is engaging and witty, brilliant and suave and wonderfully flawed to boot. I found great pleasure being in his company for the duration of the book.

Much of the book is cleverly and compellingly written in dialogue form - allowing the author to warm to his subject through his characters instead of off-loading his political philophies as wordy exposition. Sterling handles this expertly, drawing the reader in and entertaining them thoroughly in the process.

Worth the bother? Definitely!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Disappointing and sketchy
Review: I'd expected more from Sterling. Distraction could have been a much better book, if the author had decided what exactly it was supposed to be about. Instead the book jumps from subject to subject, never spending enough time on any of them to convince, and none of the characters are well-enough drawn to make you care about them. Sure, Distraction is full of interesting ideas, but none of them are immediately, intuitively convincing, and because they're skipped over so rapidly, they just aren't supported. I've always found science-fiction to be most interesting when it deals with the results of scientific discovery or societal change, so Distraction should have been a bargain, since it includes about twenty times as many changes as most or SF novels. Instead, its very unsatisfying, because instead of exploring the effects of one idea, Sterling throws another one at you. I remain unconvinced.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not Sterling's best
Review: I was disappointed with this novel, which I don't feel reaches the levels of some of Sterling's past efforts. I will pass along a favor given to me--if you haven't tried Glenn Kleier yet, pick up a copy of his novel, "The Last Day." It is unquestionably one of the finest novels I've ever read. Enjoy! Elaine C.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: if you wanna waste your time here you go
Review: Lame. Want a real Sterling book read Schismatrix. That book required momumental thought and effort to write. This requires rewrites.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: above-average concept, average execution
Review: I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I found the description of American politics and society in the year 2044 to be fascinating and utterly plausible. Nonetheless, Sterling's characters and narrative style left me rather flat. Try as he might, I ultimately found most all the characters two-dimensional. The book also seemed to lack a strong narrative drive and I often found myself asking "why is he writing about this." This novel is worth reading for Sterling's intriguing vision of our political future, but I certainly did not get much more than that out of it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Hip, but Hollow
Review: I like Sterling, and I've read almost everything he's written. This is not his best.

Borrowing heavily on the background of his "Chatanooga" series of short stories this is a story that starts out being written with tongue firmly in cheek. However, the author slips repeatedly, and the result is uneven.

"Distraction" is worth the read for fans, but "Holy Fire" remains the author's best in recent memory.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Well written and highly plausible
Review: I read "Heavy Weather" and thought it was fairly good but missing a dimension in the character development. Bruce Sterling has finally hit his full stride with this one. I got it for Christmas and had it read by New Years Eve despite incessant family obligations. Sterling's vision of the future is both highly entertaining and disturbingly plausible.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Complex, enervating political SF
Review:

Imagine the ambiguous feelings of a tabby shut away with all of catnip toys, fat mice, and gold fish it could want . . . in a running clothes dryer.

That's how _Distraction_ made me feel. It has everything that endears me to Sterling's writing: imaginative but imaginable futures, cheeky humor, and a refusal to cleave to SF genre tropes. But this is a _political_ novel, with a hero who dresses to a tee and rolls his eyes at socially and stylistically clueless geeks. Science and technology don't come to the rescue; they just make a hopelessly complex situation more complex.

Campaign director-turned-would-be-national savior Oscar Valpariso isn't after trancendence or knowledge or personal freedom; he's a pol, and a driven and somewhat ruthless one at that. I never quite felt quite comfortable with or sympathetic toward the guy, probably because I'm a confirmed geek.

But _Distraction_ is a welcome return to the sort of near-future politically savvy SF novel that hasn't been seen much since Pohl and Kornbluth (_Gladiator at Law_) stopped collaborating, or at least since Brunner's hair-raising near future novels (_The Sheep Look Up_, _Stand on Zanzibar_). Most of the current political SF I'm aware of is of the fan-pleasing miraculous-libertarian-revolution variety. This one deals with politics in a world on the verge of becoming deeply strange, thanks to advances in neurology that threaten, or promise, to forever change human nature.

Sterling pulls off a difficult task, mostly. The ideas didn't keep me up nights, the way some of the notions in _Holy Fire_ did. A lot of the details of his Greenhouse-afflicted, economically-pummeled, fractious U.S. are told rather than being shown, rendering it kind of flat in spots. This is also a very talky novel . . . but, hey, that's what politics is about, yah? And a lot of the talk is pretty fascinating.

At the very least, _Distraction_ shows Sterling's flexibility. It is nothing like the wonder-filled _Holy Fire_, or the brooding _Difference Engine_.

--Stefan Jones

Rating: 3 stars
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: 5 stars
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.


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