August 07, 2005
Distraction by Bruce Sterling
It's 2044, an election year, and Oscar Valparaiso is the campaign manager who has just gotten his candidate for the Senate, Alcott Bambakias, elected from his Boston constituency. America has become Balkanized -- Louisiana is almost an independent country and some states have burned to the ground and the northeast is mostly flooded. There is roughly 50% unemployment, but everybody is much happier and contented than you would think because you don't need a job to eat anymore due to cheap biotech.
Oscar's next task is to conduct an impromptu review of a large national research lab in Buna, Texas specializing in biotech and neuroscience. Oscar doesn't sleep a lot (because of his `condition') and plots all day and night to create the next big social hack which will engage him and his constantly changing krewe. Along with his new partner, Dr. Greta Penninger, who is a Nobel prize winning neuroscientist and cognitive scientist, Oscar will try and take over this research lab. He risks everything in this maneuver because the Governor of Louisiana thinks of the Buna lab as his own (federally funded) private investment into cognitive technology -- and he is just getting some returns on his investment.
Bruce Sterling does his research. He carefully picks out trendy scientific tidbits and fills his novels with so many ideas that regardless of the overarching plot structure, it is always an interesting read. For me, the details and the atmosphere in a Bruce Sterling book are always far more compelling than the overall experience of the plot. A good example from this novel is the description of a May 1 riot which takes the form of a raid on a bank in Worcester, MA. The `riot' is planned in a completely distributed fashion by people who have never met each other, coordinated by a mysterious computational network of mutual assent by the players.
One of the protagonists, Greta Penninger, uses her neuroscience skills to fashion a watch made out of the circadian neural cells from a rat -- a watch which needs to be fed occasionally and which defecates trace amounts of liquid. The main protagonist, Oscar Valparaiso is a human clone created using massive genetic manipulation which removed most of the introns in his genes, and is constantly treated as a Frankensteinian freak.
High tech weapons, self-organizing architecture which builds houses using unskilled humans, unmanned drones, cute French submarines and viral software populates this book. The coastlines have risen considerably because of global warming and America is in it's second Cold War, this time with Holland. Only Bruce Sterling can take the famous bumper sticker: "Wouldn't it be great if schools had all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale for a new bomber" and make it a reality in his book. It's all pretty cool.
Unfortunately, for someone who tries so hard to say ahead of the curve, in one area Bruce Sterling is clearly behind the times: he is obsessed with countries as objects beyond their actual role in any imagined future (or present for that matter). Bruce Sterling's statements in this book are almost exclusively about nation states like America, Holland or France and their internal structures. Nowhere in the book does Bruce Sterling acknowledge that a high tech research lab (even now, and presumably even more so in his future) are extremely international in their nature. Research labs are filled with people who are citizens from many countries and collaboration in research occurs across national boundaries all the time. Despite Bruce Sterling's professed goal to capture the inner working of a national research lab he never touches on this basic point. The characters in the lab and the Washington bureaucrats are all Bruce Sterling with differing skin color -- clearly American. Bruce Sterling tries and fails to create the authentic atmosphere in a big national research lab.
Also completely implausible is the scenario that the Chinese could completely wreck the American economy by simply giving away all American software for free on the internet. Economies and war machines are too closely tied together for that to happen in a non-violent fashion which is how Bruce Sterling depicts it.
It's a far cry from his Schismatrix series and his excellent short stories -- the details of Bruce Sterling's future have gotten much more detailed, but the characters have shed a dimension or two. Still on balance "Distraction" remains a rewarding read.
%T Distraction %A Bruce Sterling %I Bantam Books %D 1998 %G ISBN: 0553576399 (pb) %P 532 %K science-fiction
Review written: 2001/05/30
Posted by anoop at August 7, 2005 09:23 PM