| Publisher is Arbor House/ Morrow. Price $18.95. Found in E. Mass
at Wordsworth, Brattle Sq, Cambridge, in the hardcover new fiction
section.
FWIW, Digital Press is set to publish a book this fall describing
several popular public networks. Title: _The Matrix_. Consider
this the fact companion to Sterling's book.
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| Ace Science Fiction
Arbor House 1988, Ace edition March 1989
Laura Webster has it all - a job with responsibility and fulfillment,
a loving and playful husband, and a darling baby girl. She and her
husband David run a resort in Galveston, Texas for the use of
vacationing employees of Rizome Corporation. Rizome is an economic
democaracy - company officials are elected from the ranks, and major
decisions are voted upon. Life is pretty easy in 2020. The world is
enfolded in the Net, the web of media and telecomm that unites the
planet. National rivalries are gone, and even nuclear weapons have
been abolished.
Things are obviously too idyllic. Laura is about to brought face to
face with the realities of her world. What happened to the millions
of tons of munitions stockpiled by the 20th century? There's a
evil pressure in every bullet that demands that it be fired, and there are
billions of bullets. If information is the new currency, who are the
new thieves? What is to become of those unable or unwilling to
participate in an information economy? How can anyone maintain their
own culture against the tide of world culture?
It starts with a meeting of data pirates in her resort. Certain
renegade countries like Grenada and Singapore have refused to sign the
international treaties regarding information privacy, and so have
become havens for illicit data banks. They are islands in the Net.
Rizome hopes (rather naively) that by getting the pirates to combine
they will be so slowed by bureaucracy that they'll be easy targets
for lean, mean corps like Rizome. Instead, she and her family are
catapulted on a wild trip across the world, seeing the underside of
the info-utopia.
This is the sort of exhilarating extrapolation that SF is supposed to
specialize in, but so rarely does. Sterling will start with a simple
thing like ceramic edges on machine-tool cutters. What happens when
you can put atom-sharp, indestructible blades on mass-produced
machetes? You can kiss the rain forests good-bye, is what.
"This'll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan. The most
dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe."
You also have a street weapon that can turn a police car into confetti.
So the chief cyberpunk, the theoretician of the movement, has beaten
the old guys at their own game. Sterling has written a novel that fuses
technology and media and politics better than anyone since Bester.
He's gone beyond flashy stories about an improbable future
underclass, and turned out a solid addition to the genre. Easy
Nebula and Hugo material.
/jlr
PS Be warned - the book has a really cheesy cover. It shows a woman
in black leather showing a lot of cleavage against a green network.
I could swear I've seen the picture on an issue of Heavy Metal.
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> This is the sort of exhilarating extrapolation that SF is supposed to
WOW! is this really the same book that I read ?? (it is, believe me)
Cos I found it BORING VERY VERY BORING, far to long, no interest
generated at all
The biggest waste of cash this year
<see also 670>
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