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A review by bent
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling
1.0
I thought this was a terrible book. Maybe I'm just not a big cyberpunk fan - I've read Neuromancer twice and neither time did it really stay with me - but I thought this was just a plotless, chain of events that really went nowhere, with a protagonist that it was hard to feel any real interest in. It started out fine - Laura and her husband run a hotel for a giant corporation. Then they go down to Grenada, which started fine and then partway through that section of the book I was thinking "why are they here?" Then she goes to Singapore, which made even less sense. If she's so important, why did they have her running a hotel? Then a bunch of other things happen - nuclear submarines, nuclear bombs, a bunch of confusing plot points. None of it makes a lot of sense.
Some of it seems a little racist - Africa is a mess but a white American is going to save it, Laura, a white woman in a green sari, becomes a figurehead for Singapore discontent with the government. The last section where she's with the white guy that's going to save Africa and the denouement at the end just made me angry. And the big shocking news is that nuclear bombs that can blow up cities exist - this seems less shocking since this book was written at the tail end of the Cold War. Instead, it seems to suffer from a paucity of imagination.
It's a pointless, meandering book. Laura isn't interesting or sympathetic in any way, subplots get picked up and dropped - the impending Ryzome election, Laura's family, there's mention early on that Galveston is suffering because of a gas shortage but there seem to be planes, helicopters and automobiles galore, the mayor of Galveston, the fact that Ryzome is a Canadian company - none of these threads ever get picked up or developed. A lot of the positive reviews are from people who love cyberpunk or seem to read this as sort of prediction of how the world was going to turn out, but I read this as just a crappy, crappy book.
Some of it seems a little racist - Africa is a mess but a white American is going to save it, Laura, a white woman in a green sari, becomes a figurehead for Singapore discontent with the government. The last section where she's with the white guy that's going to save Africa and the denouement at the end just made me angry. And the big shocking news is that nuclear bombs that can blow up cities exist - this seems less shocking since this book was written at the tail end of the Cold War. Instead, it seems to suffer from a paucity of imagination.
It's a pointless, meandering book. Laura isn't interesting or sympathetic in any way, subplots get picked up and dropped - the impending Ryzome election, Laura's family, there's mention early on that Galveston is suffering because of a gas shortage but there seem to be planes, helicopters and automobiles galore, the mayor of Galveston, the fact that Ryzome is a Canadian company - none of these threads ever get picked up or developed. A lot of the positive reviews are from people who love cyberpunk or seem to read this as sort of prediction of how the world was going to turn out, but I read this as just a crappy, crappy book.