Monday, August 20, 2001
Title: Distraction
Author: Bruce Sterling
Publisher: Gollancz
Looking for something to read recently I came across a new collection of short stories by Bruce Sterling. Which in turn reminded me that I had never gotten round to reading his last novel - so from that I picked up Distraction, and like the last book by him I read, Heavy Weather, it was a book worth reading.
Set in the 2040's America is in a state of severe social and political flux. The country has been in a state of emergency given the economic crash and the emergency councils seem reluctant to return power to the president. The economic crash came as a result of going head to head with China and losing, China making all knowledge free via the internet undermined the entire economy of the USA. The result of which is that vast amounts of the population are unemployed, resulting in nomadic techno-tribes drifting across the country and no longer playing a part in the system. Meanwhile water levels are rising all over the world, which is affecting America, but not nearly as much as the remains of the Netherlands. This puts the Netherlands against America in a new cold war, one which is being fought for political advantage.
At the heart of the story is Oscar, a master tactician who has just managed to get a no one senator elected. Dedicated to the visionary senator and the new party of change he gets involved in a hot political situation. Which gets more out of hand than he had planned - as he goes head-to-head with another senator, starts a small revolution and has to get more involved with the dispossessed nomads than he ever would want to. Apart from which Oscar has a personal problem, he is a rare and illegal clone - engineered in South American labs and liberated from harsh conditions in Denmark. This has meant that throughout his life he has been the subject of discrimination - though perhaps not as much as the Anglos, America's least trusted minority group. Apart from which the technology used to create him wasn't perfect, so in biological terms he is different as well.
It is with works like this that Sterling is particularly strong. Keeping his story in a very real context with just enough changes in technology, environment and society to make it speculative fiction that we can see as an extraction of the present. Weather is a big concern with our current environment, and just as storms were the context of Heavy Weather, rising sea levels is an issue here. But the biggest thing with Distraction is the question of how the world will change as the current tech-culture evolves - what will be the real impact as the paradigm shifts beyond the control of those that desperately want to keep control and keep making their money? The answer from this is grim, though the story with it is highly readable and most enjoyable.
RVWR: PTR
August 2001
