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A review by nigellicus
The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling
5.0
With the world undergoing disastrous disintegration from man-made causes, who better to bring together the man-made solutions than three female clones as damaged and traumatised and dysfunctional as the world they're supposed to save? Most of their sisters are dead, their mother/sister is out of reach from the forces of law and order in orbit and the four surviving clones are scattered over the world, engaged in various morally dubious projects of reclamation, amelioration, sterilisation and terrorism. One man sets out to bring them together and hopes by doing so to mend the ideological divisions hampering the task of global salvation.
Well, I liked it. Sterling is too optimistic to let the world die screaming, but too much of a realist to make survival easy pr cost free. The clones are like a fractured human psyche, half-mad and self-hating, to the extent that getting anything useful other than tragedy and heartbreak out of them seems impossible. Whether they succeed, and whether Sterling succeeds, is for the reader to decide.
Well, I liked it. Sterling is too optimistic to let the world die screaming, but too much of a realist to make survival easy pr cost free. The clones are like a fractured human psyche, half-mad and self-hating, to the extent that getting anything useful other than tragedy and heartbreak out of them seems impossible. Whether they succeed, and whether Sterling succeeds, is for the reader to decide.