This is a pretty highly regarded sf book, althou I am not entirely sure why. I like Sterling's editing (he edited the fine anthology "Mirrorshades") but am not a big fan of his writing. He exemplifies both the strong and weak points of the genre. My main complaint is one that I have about other SF novels: the ideas are engaging, the future world he posits is thought-provoking, but the characters are shallow, and there is very little real insight or feeling. SF too often ignores good prose and ch...

This is definitely the best cyberpunk book I've ever read: Vurt trilogy by Jeff Noon & "Tea from an empty cup" by Pat Cadigan, William Gibson's trilogies or some works of Philip K. Dick (say "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" or "A scanner darkly") just didn't have the right (or expected if you will) accents, that's why none of those immersed me much. Noon's or Cadigan's vision of cyberpunk was too heavily focused on psychedelic virtual worlds while Dick's novels were rather dystopian than a...

I grew up knowing that this was supposed to be a great cyberpunk novel right in the heart of the genre as it was a few years after Neuromancer, and I did eventually get around to reading his novel with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, which was pretty much a steampunk novel.Other than that, I kept berating myself that I'd never gone back and read what should have been a staple of the genre.So what did I think?He was well ahead of the curve when it came to predicting the future, pretty much...

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...

This book is so 1988. I mean, not really: it's set in 2023, focusing on the global/political/economic impact of the internet, denuclearization after the Cold War, the rise of businesses as powerful as nations, the crime conglomerates that sell private data, and the dangers of ignoring parts of the world while developing others. So in some ways, it's very modern--but always with that fun, knowing smile you get when you realize someone predicted a lot of things right and a is still part of their t...

Damn you Bruce Sterling! You reminded me of the potential of the net, and how we have squandered it.For those of use who were on the internets in the late 1980s (like Bruce, and me), this book perfectly captures the hopes that we had for the new technological future. Well, Bruce was always a much more cynical bastard than the rest of us, so we had the Utopian ideals, and he saw how human beings would fuck them up.Except, he didn't. Bruce fell for the optimism, juust a little bit, in that he thou...

This book predicts a lot (data havens, digital currency, smart watches) with a forgettable plot.I'm sure I read this in the 90s, but barely remember any of it. A great description I read elsewhere is "cyberpunk from the corporate side", and that seems a good fit. Sterling spends a lot of pages describing various near-future tech, though this tech often fails to advance the plot in any way. Just over half way through it becomes a suspenseful thriller, and finishes with observations on government....

People seemed to miss the boat on this one. Badly in need of a reissue, ditch the atrocious cover and update the text a little bit and this would be cutting edge or at least comfortably contemporary. Like Brunner or Moorcock’s Cornelius stories(and peer/co-conspirator Gibson) this takes a sci-fi lens to contemporary culture and stretches into plausible shapes. Sterling pretty much nails it(yes he gets some wrong but not enough to discredit the rest), with Globalism, the rise of the third world i...

For all the predictions Sterling makes about the future the most eerily prescient is post-millennials in 2020 hitting synthetic THC and calling anyone who lived through the Cold War a boomer

Storyline: 1/5Characters: 2/5Writing Style: 2/5World: 3/5Islands in the Net puts one in the unusual, albeit not unheard of, position of an accidental, distant spectator. It is full of spectacles: a roller coaster with its crests and troughs, strings of colored lights, random and bizarre embellishments. There’s a veritable carnival going on in this cyberpunk political thriller, but somehow the planner forgot to include an on-ramp for access. One reads along as the presumably exciting events happe...

Like other reviewers here (and I'm pleased to see there are many of them), Islands surprised me by turning out to be a very different book from what I had been expecting it to be in the twenty plus years it's been sitting on my shelf. The atrocious cover on the old paperback edition seems even worse now in retrospect. Far from a book taking place in a dated vision of cyberspace, this is a globetrotting, political, techno-thriller with a relevance to today that borders on astonishing. Sterling's

Visionary.Okay, we don't have personal watch-phones. We have personal phone-watches instead. Big deal. The trajectory of this book, the whiff of cynicism, menace, strangeness, and internationalism -- it's basic arguments about the future of power, all of them are still relevant and still have the power to explain parts of the world. You can hear Sterling's prose learning from the textural techniques of William Gibson, and benefitting from them, but the raw intellectual content of this book outst...

Has not aged as well as Gibson's work. I'm not certain what's more jarring, Sterling's enthusiasm for both nanotech and fax machines, or Star Trek's matter/energy conversion but inability to heal a spine.

I was craving a science fiction read outside of my usual realm of authors. I picked up Islands in the Net for a few reasons;1) It's an early cyberpunk novel (I love me some cyberpunk)2) It's by Bruce Sterling (and I have only been exposed to William Gibson primarily)3) It was $2.00 at my favorite local book storePicking this thing up, wow, holy crap. You would think this book was written maybe a few years ago if it weren't for the dated frizzy tangle of 80's hair on the front cover. To think tha...

The theme here is how island developing nations might choose to become homes for illegal and quasi-legal information technologies and services, hence the title. The story deals with a particular type of dystopia that accurately mirrors the real world of island nations like Nauru, home of long-distance telephone scams, and Romanian PayPal scam artists operating out the the London suburbs. A similar theme is developed in Neal Stephenson's Economicon.

Reading Islands in the Net now, it may take a minute to figure out why it's a cyberpunk classic. There is very little VR, and what is there is not described in detail. Most of the book is off the grid (but then again, much of Neuromancer is, too). The heroine isn't a hack, programmer, or counterculture sympathizer, in fact, she's a corporate worker.But read further in and you'll see that it's about the essential cyberpunk issues. Corporations consolidating power and those who don't get any. The

I had this book on my Cyberpunk reading list for quite a while. As I have started reading, it reminded me some of the ideas of the "Cryptonomicon "by Neal Stephenson with its Data havens and financial concepts. As it went on I was hoping to see some first eye action as in "Koko takes a vacation" by Kieran Shea, but unfortunately our protagonist her peers wander through the plot and manage to barely tilt the balance in their favor by sheer luck rather than design. I am not saying it does not fit

I started out thinking this book would be a two-star read, or maybe even as poor as a one-star (but probably not). I did not particularly like the protagonist. In fact, while there was a gradual increase of my appreciation for the protagonist, it was slow, and apart from a section close to the end I never really got above the level of not caring too much about her. During that short part, where she lost herself more fully in the ethos and personal factors of a pseudo-opposing group and took a pr...

If you read this book, say, right now, just bear in mind it was written 25 years ago. Of course the actual world is not what Sterling described then but you gotta admit that what seemed pure fantasy in 1989 tends to be way more credible now.Apart from that, this is a great book, with a real clever geopolitical plot (as opposed to Gibson's techie/social stories, of which I am a huge fan, mind you) with an awesome strong female lead character. If you wanna know what cyberpunk is, there are 2 books...