Islands in the Net

By: Bruce Sterling

Narrated by: Rebecca Mozo

Length: 16 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

In a near-future new age of corporate control, hacker mercenaries, and electronic terrorism, a public relations executive on the rise finds herself caught in the violent epicenter of a data war.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the world’s nations are becoming irrelevant. Corporations are the true global powers, with information the most valuable currency, while the smaller island nations have become sanctuaries for data pirates and terrorists. A globe-trotting PR executive for the large corporate economic democracy Rizome Industries Group, Laura Webster is present when a foreign representative is assassinated on Rizome soil during a conference for offshore data havens. Dispatched immediately on an international mission of diplomacy, Laura hopes she can make a difference in a volatile, unsteady world, but instead finds herself trapped on the front lines of rapidly escalating third-world hostilities and caught up in an inescapable net of conspiracy, terrorism, post-millennial voodoo, and electronic warfare.

During the 1980s, science fiction luminary Bruce Sterling envisioned the future . . . and hit it almost dead-on. The author who, along with William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker, helped create and define the cyberpunk subgenre imagines a world of tomorrow in Islands in the Net that bears a striking - and disturbing - resemblance to our present-day information-age reality. Nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards and winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Sterling’s extraordinary novel is a gripping, eye-opening, and remarkably prescient science fiction classic.

©1988 Bruce Sterling (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“A fast-paced novel of 21st-century techno-intrigue. Recommended.” (Library Journal)

“A sophisticated near-future political thriller that asks all the hard questions but dishes out no easy answers.” (Norman Spinrad)

“In his Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling has written the high-tech Candide. . . . Good show.” (Roger Zelazny)

Bruce said this audiobook would never happen.

Having grown up in the outskirts of Galveston County, this is my favorite science fiction book of all time. I literally emailed Bruce asking him if he'd ever consider bringing this title to audible and he said it wasn't going to happen. I owe whomever convinced him to change his mind a Texas Sized T-Bone Steak! I do not think I have heard anything by Rebecca Mozo before but she did great. If you only ever buy one audio book in your entire life, buy this one!

A novel of ideas… and?

This book is full of interesting ideas and hypotheses about technology and social organization, but it lacks a really compelling story to explore those themes.

I found the main character (and all of them, really) to be strangely naive. As she is whisked from one situation to another, everything she encounters is brand new information despite the primary conceit of the book being a world that is increasingly interconnected by The Net. One reveal - arguably the most important one - is something that nobody has *ever* successfully kept secret. Laura Webster usually reacts to these discoveries with either “Aw shucks” American outrage or despair. (This may be a critique of the typical ignorant American, but I don’t know.)

Very little action occurs in the first half of the book, and the second half is a series of things that happen to poor Laura. She is a master of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is not to say that it isn’t worth reading, but reads almost more like a setting book for a roleplaying game: exotic locations, different factions, competing ideologies (Are the neoliberal globalists supposed to be the good guys?!).

As a piece of late Cold War speculative fiction it’s a very interesting document and makes as many cogent predictions as off-base ones, it’s just awkward storytelling.

The voice actor does a great job, although the word “insecticide” appears three times and each time she says “incesticide”! 😂