It's a collection of short stories, mostly written on spec for magazines. Some of them are okay. Most of them are not.

It's not news when an older man runs away with a kid from another country. It's not a story when a cute technology turns out to have unanticipated consequences. And it's not particularly interesting when pop culture references are dropped into the middle of a story, except that it dates the story. There are drop-in references to Friendster, for God's sake.

This is the first time I've been disappointed in Sterling as a writer, and it's easy to see where and when he's phoning it in -- it's superficially clever and it's fun... but it's froth.