Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Spectra (1999), 544 pages
Description
2044 and the US is coming apart at the seams. The people live nomadic lives and the new cold war is with the Dutch, fought mostly over the Net. This is your future, and Oscar Valparaiso's too - or it would be if he wasn't half human, half genetically modified.
Media reviews
Great science fiction is more than a gripping plot or interesting setting—it offers a densely textured, plausible alternative reality layered on top of our own. Few novels have done that more successfully than Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, a science-fiction novel that was released 20 years ago.
It's a powerful concoction, this book, and now, ten years after its initial publication, it's possible to assess just how prescient, how visionary, Sterling is.
User reviews
LibraryThing member djfoobarmatt
Bruce sterlings books are always interesting and original. I find the ideas aren't familiar so you need to process what's going on a bit. Perhaps he's just not a very good writer but I find that I have to keep switching gears in order to keep up. He's not very descriptive of some things so you have
In distraction, we meet a wierd junior politician of the future (Oscar) who is making a place for himself in the almost failed nation of america. He takes on an assignment to clean up a research centre that has suffered from years of corruption. It seems like a pretty boring story but things gradually heat up as Oscar makes friends and enemies with a rampaging psycho governer, various security spooks, a genius nuero-researcher, the president, a bunch of nomadic tech warlords and a talking brick.
The book is not so much about the action but about the psychology, ideas and values of the characters. It's about the inventions and things that might happen if we look at what's happening today and extrapolate in the extreme. The effect of todays ideas, trends and discoveries on the future as seen (and exagerated to make a story) by Sterling. I guess Sterling's appeal is a futurist and scifi trend setter rather than a smooth writer.
A few snippets:
In the future, the internet is remembered as the tool that the chinese used to break into all of america's software companies and break the economy.
In the future, anglos are a repressed minority.
In the future, scientists are bored with software, computers and genes. They are into hacking neurology.
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to use your imagination a bit more. He does describe in detail certain elements of the story but other scenes are left for you to picture for yourself. Kind of like having tunnel vision.In distraction, we meet a wierd junior politician of the future (Oscar) who is making a place for himself in the almost failed nation of america. He takes on an assignment to clean up a research centre that has suffered from years of corruption. It seems like a pretty boring story but things gradually heat up as Oscar makes friends and enemies with a rampaging psycho governer, various security spooks, a genius nuero-researcher, the president, a bunch of nomadic tech warlords and a talking brick.
The book is not so much about the action but about the psychology, ideas and values of the characters. It's about the inventions and things that might happen if we look at what's happening today and extrapolate in the extreme. The effect of todays ideas, trends and discoveries on the future as seen (and exagerated to make a story) by Sterling. I guess Sterling's appeal is a futurist and scifi trend setter rather than a smooth writer.
A few snippets:
In the future, the internet is remembered as the tool that the chinese used to break into all of america's software companies and break the economy.
In the future, anglos are a repressed minority.
In the future, scientists are bored with software, computers and genes. They are into hacking neurology.
Show Less
LibraryThing member aarch235
I've read most of Bruce Sterling's books, and I think this is the best since Schismatrix. Many of his stories are about characters who find their situations in constant motion - not adventures as such, but adaption and evolution to events that coincide with them. This sees the pattern reach a kind
Sterling uses Oscar as a lightning rod for the sorts of changes that he has speculated about in blogs and essays - biotech, IT, alternative social structures, environmental issues - in what is a romp through the almost total collapse of mid 21stC America. It's funny, weird and times breathtaking in the extremity of change envisaged. Reading it ten years later, many aspects seem almost familiar, proving Sterling once again to be an ace futurologist.
It is big, and a little daunting, best read slowly in little chunks. But it is bulging with imagination, and the author's clear concern about how the rapid changes surrounding us now will reap disaster or otherwise in the future.
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of high-point - Oscar Valparaiso is essentially addicted to social change and crisis management. Sterling uses Oscar as a lightning rod for the sorts of changes that he has speculated about in blogs and essays - biotech, IT, alternative social structures, environmental issues - in what is a romp through the almost total collapse of mid 21stC America. It's funny, weird and times breathtaking in the extremity of change envisaged. Reading it ten years later, many aspects seem almost familiar, proving Sterling once again to be an ace futurologist.
It is big, and a little daunting, best read slowly in little chunks. But it is bulging with imagination, and the author's clear concern about how the rapid changes surrounding us now will reap disaster or otherwise in the future.
Show Less
LibraryThing member adzebill
Near future science fiction and political satire. Hilarious. Great for people who think they hate SF.
LibraryThing member wfzimmerman
Most people seem to regard this as rather minor Sterling, but I quite enjoyed it.
LibraryThing member edella
Politics is the art of the possible, the "doable", as Sterling's skewed hero, Oscar Valparaiso, keeps calling his wild improvised plans as if saying the word made them so. Oscar's usually successful schemes are as cobbled together as his own genetics--Oscar is not quite human. Investigating a
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genetic research facility for a Senate committee, he finds a potential power base, and an enemy worth his attention--the Governor of Louisiana has taken to conquering federal facilities using gangs of the homeless as his deniable mercenaries, and his interest in biotech makes the genetically anomalous Oscar, and the scientist he has fallen for, attractive acquisitions. Having a senator he has just help get elected go stark mad, and finding himself on the Net-wide hit list of every nut with a grudge, are the sort of things with which Oscar copes all the time--love and other altered states of consciousness are a bit more of a problem. Endless witty extrapolations of social and scientific paradoxes and a constant cheeky elaboration of already convoluted plot lines give this the brio of Sterling's best short fiction Show Less
LibraryThing member Brumby18
A distraction...but only just.
Awards
Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 1999)
John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (Finalist — 1999)
Arthur C. Clarke Award (Winner — 2000)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1998
Physical description
544 p.; 4.17 inches
ISBN
0553576399 / 9780553576399