Islands in the Net

Bruce Sterling is the colorful rhetorician behind science fiction's new New Wave, the "cyberpunk" movement. His 1985 novel Schismatrix was a Nebula Award nominee, and his editing of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology drew notice for this new mode of SF expression from Rolling Stone magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The New York Times, and MTV. The Wall Street Journal said, "These so-called Cyberpunks thrive in a niche where high tech and high literature interface. They write hard-edged macrofiction that is ripe with ideas, gracefully written and appropriate to this age of global communication."

Now, in Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling pushes at the boundaries of this new form, diving deep into the holes punched out of the global communications network. One vulnerable family, "associates" of the multinational Rizome corporation, explore the netherworld of data pirates and bootleg biogeneticists. In these deregulated havens from the net, all sorts of marvels—and terrors—are being created. But the real terrorists, their identities unknown, plan to unleash horrors on the world that are all too familiar.

Eventually only one member of this family is willing to continue the search: Laura Webster, convinced that she can save the net and strengthen the New Order, undergoes a solitary odyssey of fear and wonder that sheds light on the secrets hidden in this other world—and, also, on the truth of her own humanity.

Islands in the Net is an intense and detailed panorama of life in the high-tech world of the twenty-first century, a science fiction extravaganza that takes its place with William Gibson's Neuromancer in the front rank of the new SF.