Name: Islands in the Net
Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)

Bruce Sterling

In the high-tech twenty-first century, a family of "corporate associates" descends into an underworld of data pirates and bootleg biogenetics to discover the identity of new-order terrorists

Islands in the Net

Information is power, and even in the peaceful post-millenial age, power corrupts. Data pirates, new-age mercenaries, high-tech shamans, and murder stalk a brutal netherworld of deregulated havens in the Global Communications Network. A war between data pirates involves a young woman and her husband in a desperate search for a new kind of international terrorist. The book explores the gulf between the high-tech haves and have-nots in 21st-century techno-intrigue.

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A seminal work helping to establish the cyberpunk genre, this dystopian sci-fi story has one foot in a near-future (2023-25) from today (2018) where nation state power has receded and transnationals have filled the vacuum, and yet the work has the other foot firmly stuck in the mindset of the Cold War.


Sterling has misread the future, in his world data pirates are the biggest threat to privacy, stealing data and selling it to corporations who can profit from it; a sad inversion to today's reality where transnational tech-giants legally capture and monetize our private data while hackers try to set that data free.


In this book Sterling makes some interesting predictions that have recently come true:

* Autonomous electric vehicles
* Automated attack drones
* VR and augmented reality glasses
* Failed African states
* Climate change and its impact on populations
* Corporate warfare via mercenary armies
* Allegiance to corporations over states
* Media blackouts
* Mass produced food replacements like Soylent, called "Scop"
* The rise of a neoliberal hypercapitalist Singapore
* The failure of global governance like the UN


Other speculative descriptions are more shortsighted:

* Continued ubiquity of faxes and hard copy printouts
* The continuation of the USSR


This book defines the paradigm example of a strong female lead, waaay before the era of strong female leads. Laura is the prototype for the strong lean-in badass mother, and unfortunately the world Sterling created end up tearing her life apart. She stands up and stoically works through it, despite the seemingly bleak pointlessness of the postmodern condition she and the other citizens of this world continue to live through.

In a near-future new age of corporate control, hacker mercenaries, and electronic terrorism, a public relations executive on the rise finds herself caught in the violent epicenter of a data war Two decades into the twenty-first century, the world’s nations are becoming irrelevant. Corporations are the true global powers, with information the most valuable currency, while the smaller island nations have become sanctuaries for data pirates and terrorists. A globe-trotting PR executive for the large corporate economic democracy Rizome Industries Group, Laura Webster is present when a foreign representative is assassinated on Rizome soil during a conference for offshore data havens. Dispatched immediately on an international mission of diplomacy, Laura hopes she can make a difference in a volatile, unsteady world, but instead finds herself trapped on the front lines of rapidly escalating third-world hostilities and caught up in an inescapable net of conspiracy, terrorism, post-millennial voodoo, and electronic warfare. During the 1980s, science fiction luminary Bruce Sterling envisioned the future . . . and hit it almost dead-on. The author who, along with William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker, helped create and define the cyberpunk subgenre imagines a world of tomorrow in Islands in the Net that bears a striking—and disturbing—resemblance to our present-day information-age reality. Nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards and winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Sterling’s extraordinary novel is a gripping, eye-opening, and remarkably prescient science fiction classic.

Islands in the Net

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