Distraction [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Sterling's technological and political speculations are interesting and plausible, and his plot moves right along, propelled by informal but evocative language and a lot of humor. The best part of the book, though, is its protagonist, Oscar Valparasio, who combines the genius and audacity of Lois Bujold's character Miles Vorkosigan with a personal reserve and opacity that makes us even more interested in finding out what he's really like. Sterling actually manages to keep Oscar mysterious even though we're seeing through his eyes throughout the book.

Distraction is mostly about the ride -- like another of my favorite Sterling books, Heavy Weather, it has little pretension to epic scope or deep literary meaning -- but it has enough depth to make it a worthwhile read. My chief complaint is that it drowns in cynicism towards the end, leaving us with a downbeat and overlong ending and nothing much in the way of climax. A classic character like Oscar deserved a better sendoff.

In "Distraction", Sterling carries this a step too far. While the future world is interesting and full of wild and fascinating characters and phenomena, virtually all the cool stuff happens far off-camera, and we're sentenced to following around a fast-talking but basically rather clueless and shallow political operative, Oscar Valparaiso, as he wanders in and out of various artificial situations for no particular reason.

The frustrations caused by this are numerous. One glaring example: Oscar's main love interest is Greta, a top cognition scientist working in (and sometimes running) a cool government research center inside a big glass dome. At one point in the book, we discover that a neat strange cool cognitive technology has been developed. Sounds like it should all fit together? No, as it turns out the technology was developed sometime before the book started, in some other state, by scientists who used to work at Greta's lab but quit.

The only thing the tech has to do with Oscar and Greta is that it's used on them, as passive victims, near the end of the book, when Sterling seems to be grasping for enough new plot to fill out the page count. Tsk! Greta's character, and the title of the book, suggest that Sterling may have started out with some tighter idea about the technology and function of human attention and distraction; but if so the idea got abandoned somewhere along the way.

I'd love to read a book set in this world, from the viewpoint of one of the proles who travel the country in gangs living off harvested roadside weeds, or one of the people trying to put out Wyoming (which is on fire), or someone in Holland (with which the US is conducting a Cold War). Stuck with Oscar Valparaiso, I could only writhe in frustration.

Sterling fans will want to read this; I don't particularly recommend it to anyone else. Read "Schismatrix", read "Crystal Express", read "Islands in the Net", read "The Artificial Kid". If you've read all those and are dying for more Sterling, read this, but don't set your expectations for it too high...