Rating: 
Summary: Bruce Sterlings best.
Review: One of the best books from the cyberpunk originals. Very plausible, and packed with near future concepts. A must read for people that think SF can be high quality literature
Rating: 
Summary: Good...but in an awkward way.
Review: Perhaps I may be unfair in my review of Islands, for I expected something very different, but I was not as impressed by it as I thought I'd be. The book is a good and solid story of a relatively simple corporate woman thrown into a whirlwind of an international power struggle. The awkwardness lies in the editing -- it easily could have down with shaving off 75 or so pages -- for Sterling has a tendancy to too involved with details in the story that once the reading of the novel is complete, and looking back, were quite unimportant (even to backdrop, characterization, etc. -- not just plot). Another awkward point is the main character, an amazingly simple and flat character that I had a hard time caring about at all. Finally, the last awkward point is Sterling's obvious fascination with foreign countries, political struggles, etc. This can be interesting, for while most cyberpunk books put the corporate inter-fighting ahead of any political tussles, Sterling offers a glimpse of why that might come to be (ie., the rise of corporations of political structures); however, Sterling frequently gets bogged down into try to explain and display too much of these cultures he fancies.Overall, however, the story is good, the characterization, setting, etc. are all good, and in the end, you *are* left with a solid sense of what the author intended (thoughts about world-wide changes over time...revolutions...*ideas*...sweeping political changes), and thus, the novel is effective and entertaining.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: The headline isn't entirely fair as the last third of the book gets pretty good. Sadly most of the book just drags along with characters that you don't like, political philosophies that should have died with Communism and a worldview firmly rooted in the 80s. 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.
Rating:
Summary: Intricacies abound in "Islands"
Review: The most cogent and well-realized examination of power--in all its forms--that I've read. Sterling presents a dense future. Readers can squabble about minor technical mispredictions, but the overall effect is timeless; this is a very unsettling and very prescient novel.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly underrated, though not for everyone
Review: This is one of the gutsiest SF novels I know of. Bruce Sterling has set his novel in one of the most incredibly detailed, well thought out futures ever developed. He's thought about his world geopolitically, economically, ideologically, and on a host of other levels, including how people live on a day to day basis. His people have internalized genuinely different ideas because of the world that has shaped them. In this sense it is most like some of the best Heinlein novels. 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The worst book I've ever read
Review: This was without a doubt the worst book I've ever read. Astoundingly boring, pointless, and then all of a sudden really preachy in the last third or so. Years and hundreds of pages pass and nothing happens, and the characters are completely uncompelling, especially the main character, who for all she goes through does not change one whit. Why was this book written? There's bad and then there's bad; this wasn't even fun-to-read-it's-so-bad bad. If I had had anything better to do with my bus ride, I would have stopped reading it after about the half-way point when it becomes clear that no, the story's not actually going to get exciting.
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