re:mote voices

Title:Islands In The Net
Author: Bruce Sterling
Publisher: Legend

Laura and David Webster have built a concretized sand lodge, an outpost of the Rhizome Corporation that they belong to. Rhizome is a new kind of corporation, an economic democracy. Technically they have taken some time out to raise a family and run this small outpost. But Laura keeps in touch with her connections and is ambitious to climb up the company's hierarchy. It is through these connections that she gets the head's up, her lodge has been selected as the location for key negotiations. Gathering three groups of data pirates together, representatives of edgy cultures, where technically illegal activitities have been given the backing of small island nations and bought governments. However early in the meeting one of the Grenadine representatives is murdered and Rhizome are exposed as having dealings with pirates.

This is the set up for the immersion of Laura in a culture foreign to her. Where corporations and pirates have more global, cross-border influence than world governments or forces. The novel shifts from America to Grenada to Singapore to Africa. Exploring technologies and cultures, the shifts that Sterling extrapolates from the point of writing in the late 1980's. Of course having been written something like 18 years ago, Islands In The Net is dated to some degree. Perhaps feeling more so than novels that are even older, because we are closer to the point of origin. Novels from the 1960's can sometimes feel weird and wonderful from a point 40 years on. But at a point where the net was just emerging it would be hard to predict how things have indeed ended up. So comments about fax machines, tele-conferencing and it being cheaper to send video at night rates all seem a little curious, a little off.

But to a degree, the technologies aren't entirely the point of Islands In The Net. Reading the first pages of the book, I find that I see parallels between Sterling and Kim Stanley Robinson that I wasn't conscious of before. Though on reflection, the kind of eco themes that Robinson is known for have always been present in Sterling's work as well - here the novel starts with a post hurricane beach scene and makes a variety of references to food and resource shortages, while Distraction had an undercurrent reference to rising sea levels and Heavy Weather dealt with the threat of storms. Wars over oil and cataclysmic storms and organisations with more power than governments are all realities, so the fact that Sterling and the like were writing about these things so far back is interesting and telling. How have things changed, how did people then see things changing? Its always a risk with science fiction, setting a novel in the near future, how quickly are you going to be proved wrong? But sometimes its a risk that has to be taken, particularly for some of the most relevant material.

Curiously one of Sterling's most recent novels was Zeitgeist, which was had a distinct magic realism to it, much more contemporary and weird than anything else that he had written. Yet there are undercurrents of magic realism in here, muddled up with the strange cyberpunk standard of voodoo. It never really comes to anything, but throughout Islands In The Net there are references to the optimum personality - part voodoo trick, part astral projection, part just weird in a world of date pirates and economic democracies.

Overall Islands In The Net is far from perfect, undoubtedly not Sterling's best work. The dated technology, some character weaknesses, a certain fuzziness/long windedness to the plot, all detract. But it is still readable and enjoyable, fitting well into Sterling's back catalogue, though it seems to be out of print (at least in the UK) and I ended up picking up this edition second hand. [Unfortunately I can only find the ugly American cover, scan of not as ugly UK cover to follow.]