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The Caryatids: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Bruce Sterling (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.6 53 ratings

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Alongside William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling stands at the forefront of a select group of writers whose pitch-perfect grasp of the cultural and scientific zeitgeist endows their works of speculative near-future fiction with uncanny verisimilitude. To read a novel by Sterling is to receive a dispatch from a time traveler. Now, with The Caryatids, Sterling has written a stunning testament of faith in the power of human intellect, creativity, and spirit to overcome any obstacle–even the obstacles we carry inside ourselves.

The world of 2060 is divided into three spheres of influence, each fighting with the others over the resources of fallen nations and an environment degraded almost to the point of no return. There is the Dispensation, centered in Los Angeles, where entertainment and capitalism have fused with the highest of high-tech. There is the Acquis, a Green-centered collective that uses invasive neurological technology to create a networked utopia. And there is China, the sole surviving nation-state, a dinosaur that has prospered only by pitilessly pruning its own population. Products of this monstrous world, the daughters of a monstrous mother, and–according to some–monsters themselves, are the Caryatids: the four surviving female clones of a mad Balkan genius and wanted war criminal now ensconced, safely beyond extradition, on an orbiting space station. Radmila is a Dispensation star determined to forget her past by building a glittering, impregnable future. Vera is an Acquis functionary dedicated to reclaiming their home, the Croatian island of Mljet, from catastrophic pollution. Sonja is a medical specialist in China renowned for selflessly risking herself to help others. And Biserka is a one-woman terrorist network. The four “sisters” are united only by their hatred for their “mother”–and for one another.

When evidence surfaces of a coming environmental cataclysm, the Dispensation sends its greatest statesman–or salesman–John Montgomery Montalban, husband of Radmila, and lover of Vera and Sonja, to gather the Caryatids together in an audacious plan to save the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Greg BearCaryatids, in Greek architecture, are stone women who support massive buildings. The Caryatids of Bruce Sterling's shimmering new novel—Vera, Radmila and Sonja—support the weight of a near-future world. They are the last of seven clone sisters created by a mother accused of Balkan war crimes, now exiled in orbit. We're 50-some years into the future, and the planet is split into an international, symbiotic competition between the hypernetworked Acquis, who train distressed, abandoned children into tight-knit cadres of activists, and the Dispensation, more sedate, mannered and cosmo-business in its orientation.Vera works with an Acquis team remediating the Croatian island of Mljet, laid waste by toxic dumping and the rising waters of global warming. The Acquis technology is extreme but humanly adapted: the users wear bonewear (amplified skeletal suits that allow tremendous feats of speed and strength) and spex (laser-equipped eyeshades that hook their wearers into a postencyclopedic wonderworld of information. In a beautifully realized and Huxleyan Los Angeles, Radmila has fit too snugly into a Dispensation Family, but California is being squeezed between a geological devil and the surging deep blue sea. The Family sees these changes in terms of economic potential, and they track real estate values by the second: Norwalk is glamorous; beach property is cheap.Sonja, dotted with the shrapnel of her own self-destructive past, performs medical and social work in the middle of a constantly rebirthing China. Due to female infanticide, there are far more men than women in China—the reverse of Russia, where men die young—and Sonja hooks up with a Gobi jihadist who indulges both her sexual appetites and her political ambitions. Sterling's language is kaleidoscopic. We swim into a chapter, and his ideas and language flash and dance like sunlight off the Adriatic, then coalesce in a moment of plot; the effect is unsettling, but suited to the world he reveals spark by hammered spark. Dispersed around the world, the sisters mirror Earth's difficulties: traumatized by their origin, they hate each other. Their solutions may be Earth's solutions as well. In John Brunner's 1968 masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar, excerpts from fictional author Chad C. Mulligan's The Hipcrime Vocab provide sharp, street-smart and world-wise commentary on the culture of 2010. Bruce Sterling is the closest we've come to Mulligan in the actual 21st century. His international perspective is rare in science fiction, which often suffers from Amerocentric bias. A new novel from Sterling is a guarantee of something wild and tasty, and The Caryatids amply fulfills that promise. (Mar.)Greg Bear's latest science fiction novel, City at the End of Time, was published by Del Rey in August.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Books of Big Ideas often polarize reviewers, and Bruce Sterling's latest novel is no exception. Either the best SF book of this or any other year (Cory Doctorow) or "a mess of a book about the mess of the world" (John Clute), The Caryatids, at the very least, illustrates Sterling's ability to raise voices (in praise or protest) 30 years after he laid the groundwork for the cyberpunk movement, without which contemporary SF would be a much rockier -- and much less diverse -- landscape. Sterling's complex, controversial vision of our future invites comparison to Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash) and William Gibson (Neuromancer). Love him or hate him, Bruce Sterling always has something important to say, and The Caryatids is worth a look.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Review

“Sterling proves again that he understands technology’s present and future better than anyone in the field—and that he’s able to spin a gripping, compelling, mind-opening yarn whose sweep and majesty encompass all that humanity has to fear and hope for in the coming century. This isn’t just a novel, it’s a road map to humanity’s peaceful reconciliation with our mad, out-of-control technology.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother

“Atour de force . . . Of all the horde of SF novels about clones written since that trope was pulled mewling from its artificial womb,The Caryatids is the first one that nails it.”—Benjamin Rosenbaum, author ofThe Ant King and Other Stories

Praise for The Zenith Angle
“Gleeful, shrewd, speculative, cynical, closely observed . . . The Zenith Angle offers wisdom and solace, thrills and laughter.”—Washington Post

“A comedic thriller for the Homeland Security era.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Not so much ripped straight from the headlines as it is an effort to process the blood, guts and greed of the new millennium . . . The entire novel is a setup for an extraordinary rant that reads as if the author had just taken over the podium at a hackers’ conference, fueled with tequila, frothing from ever pore.”—Salon

From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Bruce Sterling is the author of ten novels, three of which were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Difference Engine, co-written with William Gibson, was a national bestseller. He has also published four short-story collections and four nonfiction books. He has written for many magazines, including Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Technology Review, and Wired, where he has been a contributing editor since its inception. He has won two Hugo Awards for his short fiction. Sterling lives in Austin, Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Poisons, pumped down here at enormous pressure, had oozed deep into the water table. The seamy stone was warped and twisted. All around her, toxin miners scuttled like crabs.

The toxin miners pried the poisoned rock apart, slurped up toxins with busy hoses, then deftly reassembled the stifling walls in a jigsaw mess of glue. In their exoskeletons and filter suits, the miners looked like construction cranes wrapped in trash bags.

The miners were used to their work and superbly good at it. They measured their progress in meters per day. They were subterranean bricklayers. Cracking blocks and stacking blocks: that was their very being.

Vera thought longingly of glorious light and air at the island’s sunny surface, which, from the cramped and filthy depths of this mine, seemed as distant as the surface of Mars. Vera had made it a matter of personal principle to know every kind of labor on the island: forestry, reef restoration, the census of species . . .

These miners had the foulest, vilest redemption work she’d ever seen. The workers were a gang of grimy, knobby ghosts, recycling sewage inside a locked stone closet.

Her helmeted head rang with a sudden buzz of seismic sensors, as if her graceless filter suit were filled with bees. Tautly braced within their shrouds and boneware, the miners studied the tortured rock through their helmet faceplates. They muttered helpful advice at each other.

Vera loaded the mine’s graphic server. She tapped into the augment that the miners were sharing.

Instantly, the dark wet rock of the mine burst into planes of brilliant color-coding: cherry red, amber yellow, veins of emerald green . . . A dazzling graphic front end for this hellhole.

Using their gauntlets, the miners drilled thumb-sized pits into the dirty rock. They plucked color-coded blasting caps from damp-stained satchels at their waists. They tamped in charges. Within a minute came the blast. Vera, sealed within her suit and padded helmet, felt her teeth clack in her head.

With a groan and squeak of their boneware, the miners wrestled out a cracked slab the size of a coffin.

A stew of effluent gushed forth. The bowels of the Earth oozed false-color gushes of scarlet and maroon.

“You can help me now,” Karen beckoned.

Vera chased the software from her faceplate with a shake of her head. Vera’s sensorweb offered sturdy tech support to anyone who might redeem the island, but the mediation down this mine was in a terrible state. These miners were plumbing the island’s bowels with bombs and picks, but when it came to running their everyware, they never synchronized the applications, they never optimized the servers, they never once emptied the caches of the client engines. Why were people like that?

Badly encumbered by her filter shroud, Vera clambered to Karen’s side through a cobweb of safety supports. The carbon-fiber safety webs looked as useless as dirty gossamer. Strain monitors glowed all over them, a spectral host of underground glowworms.

Vera found her voice. “What do you need me to do?”

“Put both your hands up.

Here. And over there. Right. Hold all that up.” Vera stood obediently. Her exoskeleton locked her body tight against the ceiling.

Karen’s boneware creaked as she hefted her power drill. She studied the rock’s warping grain through the mediation of her faceplate, whistling a little through her teeth. Then she probed at a dripping seam. “This part’s nasty,” she warned.

Her drill spewed a tornado of noise. Vera’s guts, lungs, and muscles shook with the racket. It got much worse as Karen dug, jammed, and twisted. Within her boneware, Vera’s flesh turned to jelly.

Karen handled her massive drill with a dainty attention to detail, as if its long whirring bit were a chopstick.

Gouts of flying rock dust pattered off Vera’s helmet. She twisted her neck and felt the helmet’s cranial sensors dig into her scalp.

Two miners slogged past her as she stood there locked in place, hauling their hoses and power cables, as if they were trailing spilled guts. They never seemed to tire.

Stuck in her posture of cramped martyrdom to duty, Vera sourly enjoyed a long, dark spell of self-contemplation.

Like an utter idiot, she had allowed herself to be crammed into this black, evil place . . . No, in a bold gust of crusading passion, she had grabbed her sensor kit and charged headlong down into this mine to tackle the island’s worst depths. Why? To win some glow of deeper professional glory, or maybe one word of praise from her boss?

How could she have been that stupid, that naive? Herbert was never coming down here into a toxin mine. Herbert was a professional. Herbert had big plans to fulfill.

Herbert was a career Acquis environmental engineer, with twenty years of service to his credit. Vera also wore the Acquis uniform, but, as a career Acquis officer, Vera was her own worst enemy. When would she learn to stop poking in her beak like a magpie, trying to weave her sensor-webbing over the whole Earth? Any engineer who ran a sensorweb always thought she was the tech support for everything and everybody. “Ubiquitous, pervasive, and ambient”—all those fine words just meant that she would never be able to leave anything alone.

No amount of everyware and mediation could disguise the fact that this mine was a madhouse. The ugly darkness here, the grit, the banging, grinding, and blasting, the sullen heat, the seething damp: and the whole place was literally full of poison! She was breathing through micropored plastic, one filmy layer away from tainted suffocation.

Stuck in her rigid posture of support, Vera gazed angrily through the rounded corners of her helmet faceplate. Nobody else down in this mine seemed at all bothered by the deadly hazards surrounding them.

Was she living an entirely private nightmare, was she insane? Maybe she had been crazy since childhood. Anyone who learned about her childhood always thought as much.

Or maybe her perspectives were higher and broader and finer, maybe she simply understood life better than these dirty morons. Stinging sweat dripped over Vera’s eyebrows. Yes, this ugly mayhem was the stuff of life for the tunnel rats. They had followed their bliss down here. This hell was their homeland. Fresh air, fresh water, golden sunlight, these were alien concepts for them. These cavemen were going to settle down here permanently, burrowing into the poisonous wet and stink like bony salamanders. They would have children, born without eyes. . .

“Stay alert,” Karen warned her. Vera tried, without success, to shrug in her locked exoskeleton. “Work faster, then.”

“Don’t you hustle me,” said Karen merrily. “I’m an artist.” “Let’s get this over with.”

“This is not the kind of work you can hurry,” said Karen. “Besides, I love my drill, but they built it kinda girly and underpowered.”

“Then let me do the drilling. You can hold this roof up.”

“Vera, I know what I’m doing.” With a toss of her head, Karen lit up her bodyware. A halo of glory appeared around her, a mediated golden glow.

This won her the debate. Karen was the expert, for she was very glorious down here. Karen was glorious because she worked so hard and knew so much, and she was so beloved for that. The other miners in this pit, those five grumbling and inarticulate cavemen banging their rocks and trailing their long hoses—they adored Karen’s company. Karen’s presence down here gave their mine a warm emotional sunlight. Karen was their glorious, golden little star.

There was something deeply loathsome about Karen’s cheery affection for her labor and her coworkers. Sagging within her locked boneware, Vera blinked and gaze-tracked her way through a nest of menu options.

Look at that: Karen had abused the mine’s mediation. She had tagged the rocky cave walls with virtual wisecracks and graffiti, plus a tacky host of cute icons and stencils. Could anything be more hateful? ]

A shuddering moan came from the rock overhead. Black ooze cascaded out and splashed the shrouds around their legs.

Karen cut the drill. Vera’s stricken ribs and spine finally stopped shaking.

“That happens down here sometimes,” Karen told her, her voice giddy in the limpid trickling of poisoned water. “Don’t be scared.

” Vera was petrified. “Scared of what? What happens down here?”

“Just keep your hands braced on that big vein of dolomite,” Karen told her, the lucid voice of good sense and reason.

“We’ve got plenty of safety sensors. This whole mine is crawling with smart dust.”

“Are you telling me that this stupid rock is moving?”

“Yeah. It moves a little. Because we’re draining it. It has to subside.”

“What if it falls right on top of us?”

“You’re holding it up,” Karen pointed out. She wiped her helmet’s exterior faceplate with a dainty little sponge on a stick. “I just hit a good nasty wet spot! I can practically smell that!”

“But what if this whole mine falls in on us? That would smash us like bugs!”

Karen sneezed. All cross-eyed, she looked sadly at the spray across the bottom of her faceplate. “Well, that won’t happen.”

“How do you know that?”

“It won’t happen. It’s a judgment call.” This was not an answer Vera wanted to hear. The whole point of installing and running a sensorweb was to avoid human “judgment calls.” Only idiots used guesswork when a sensorweb was available.

For instance, pumping toxins down here in the first place: that was some idiot’s “judgment call.”

Some fool had judged that it was much easier to hide an environmental crime than it was to pay to be clean. Then the Acquis had arrived with their sensorweb and their mediation, so everybody knew everything about the woe and horror on this island. The hidden criminality was part of the public record, suddenly. They were mining the crime. There was crime all around them.

A nasty fit of nerves gathered steam within Vera. She hadn’t had one of these fits of nerves in months. She had thought she was well and truly over her fits of nerves. She’d been sure she would never have a fit of nerves while wearing an Acquis neural helmet.

“Let me use the drill,” Vera pleaded. “This drill needs a special touch.”

“Let me do it.”

“You volunteered for mine work,” said Karen. “That doesn’t make you good at it. Not yet.”

‘We learn by doing,’ ” Vera quoted stiffly, and that was a very correct, Acquis-style thing to say. So Karen shrugged and splashed out of the way. Karen braced herself against the stony roof.

Vera wrapped her arms around the rugged contours of the drill. Her boneware shifted at the hips and knees as she raised the drill’s tip overhead. She pressed the trigger.

The drill whirled wildly in her arms and jammed. All the lights in the mine went out.

Vera’s exoskeleton, instantly, locked tight around her flesh. She was stuck to the drill as if nailed to it.

“I’m stuck,” she announced. “And it’s dark.”

“Yeah, we’re all stuck here now,” said Karen, in the sullen blackness. Toxic water dripped musically.

“I can’t move! I can’t see my own hands. I can’t even see my mediation!”

“That’s because you just blew out the power, Vera. Freezing the system is a safety procedure.

” An angry, muffled shout came from another miner. “Okay, what idiot pulled that stunt?” Vera heard the miner sloshing toward them through the darkness.

“I did that!” Vera shouted. In the Acquis, it was always best to take responsibility at once. “That was my fault! I’ll do better.”

“Oh. So it was you? You, the newbie?”

Karen was indignant. “Gregor, don’t you dare call Vera a ‘newbie.’ This is Vera Mihajlovic! Compared to her, you’re the newbie.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I still have charge left in my capacitors.”

Karen sighed aloud in the wet darkness. “Just go and reboot us, Gregor. We’ve all got a schedule to meet.”

“Please help me,” Vera begged him. “I’m stuck here, I can’t move!”

“You’ll have to wait for a miracle, stupid,” said Gregor, and he left them there, rigid in the darkness.

“You made Gregor angry,” Karen assessed. “Gregor’s our very best rock man, but he’s not exactly a people person.”

Vera heaved uselessly against the silent pads and straps of her dead exoskeleton. Her boneware, which gave her such strength, grace, lightness, power, had become her intimate prison.

“Who designed all this?” she shrieked. “We should have power backups! We should have fuel cells!”

“Be glad that we can still hear each other talking.” Karen’s voice sounded flat and muffled though her helmet and shroud. “It’s too hot down here to run any fuel cells. Gregor will reboot us. He can do it, he’s good. You just wait and see.

” A long, evil moment passed. Panic rose and clutched the dry lining of Vera’s throat. “This is horrible!”

“Yes,” said Karen mournfully, “I guess it is, pretty much.”

“I can’t stand it!”

“Well, we just have to stand it, Vera. We can’t do anything but stand here.

” Claustrophobic terror washed through Vera’s beating heart.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t bear any more.”

“I’m not scared,” Karen told her. “I used to be very scared every time I came down here. But emotion is a neural state. A neural state can’t touch you. I’m never afraid like I used to be. Sometimes I have fear-thoughts, but my fear-thoughts are not me.”

“I’ll scream!”

Karen’s voice was full of limpid sympathy. “You can scream, then. Do it. I’m here for you.”

Seen from the airy hilltop, Mljet was a tattered flag, all bays, peninsulas, and scattered islets. The island’s scalloped shores held stains in their nooks and corners: the algae blooms.

The rising Adriatic, carrying salt, had killed a dry brown skirt-fringe of the island’s trees.

The island’s blanket of pines and oaks was torn by clear-cut logging, scarred black with forest fires.

And if the golden shore of this beautiful place had suffered, the island’s interior was worse. Mljet’s angry creeks had collapsed the island’s bridges as if they’d been kneecapped with pistols. Up in the rocky hills, small, abandoned villages silently flaked their paint.

Year by year, leaning walls and rust-red roofs were torn apart by towering houseplants gone feral. The island’s rotting vineyards were alive with buzzing flies and beetles, clouded with crows.

A host of flowers had always adorned this sunny place. There were far more flowers in these years of the climate crisis. Harsh, neck-high thickets of rotting flowers, feeding scary, billowing clouds of angry bees.

Such was her home. From the peak of the island, where she stood, throat raw, flesh trembling, mind in a whirl, she could see that the island was transforming. She could hear that, smell it, taste it in the wind. She was changing it.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001NLKV1I
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Del Rey (February 10, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 10, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 942 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 306 pages

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- #1,356 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
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3.6 53 ratings

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Bruce Sterling

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Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic,

was born in 1954. Best known for his ten science fiction

novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews,

design criticism, opinion columns, and introductions

for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne.

His nonfiction works include THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:

LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (1992),

TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2003),

and SHAPING THINGS (2005).

He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine

and writes a weblog. During 2005,

he was the "Visionary in Residence" at Art Center

College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he

was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival

of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy,

and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg

Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2011 he returned to

Art Center as "Visionary in Residence" to run

a special project on Augmented Reality.

He has appeared in ABC's Nightline, BBC's The Late Show,

CBC's Morningside, on MTV and TechTV, and in Time,

Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,

Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review,

Der Spiegel, La Stampa, La Repubblica, and many other venues.

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Jerry M. Haws Jr.

post-clonial goodness

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2009

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Bruce always seems to be able to see just over the horizon line of the future. It's like neopolitan futurist ice cream, three flavors of "WTF how did this world happen?" Human cloning? No big deal, just another scandal, minor compared to the rivers that don't flow anymore. I've been reading this dude since his first book, and he belongs in this list of names: Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Ken Macleod, Iain M Banks, Neal Asher. Maybe the future doesn't have to have a unifying narrative, because it's like what they say about China - it's so big, that everything you've heard is all true.

7 people found this helpful

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Autonomeus

Typically inventive Sterling, set in a world after ecological disaster

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2020

I had low expectations for this 2009 novel, and it is not as good as "Schismatrix," but it is well worth reading if you are a Bruce Sterling fan. It is set in the 2060s after catastrophic climate change has begun.

The three long sections each feature a strong, central woman character. Each is set in the one of the three power centers of the world. And each features ingenious new technologies. The three women are clones -- they are genetically identical, though very different as they have developed.

Vera is an engineer on an island off the coast of Croatia which is run by the Acqui, one of two "global civil societies" which has emerged as a major power in the world. The highly collectivist workers use "bonewear," exoskeletons which give the wearer superhuman strength. They are connected via body sensors and a computer network which link them emotionally.

Radmila is a star entertainer in Los Angeles, part of the Family Firm which is a dominant force in the entertainment complex. This was the section of the book I found the least compelling -- far too much like reading about the Kardashians. The family is part of the Dispensation, the competing "global civil society." It is a sort of hyper-techno-capitalism -- libertarianism. The Acqui/Dispensation competition is reminiscent of previous Sterling concepts -- it echoes for instance the Shapers and Mechanists of "Schismatrix." An interesting new technology used in L.A. is entertainers mobilizing mobs of unemployed youth to demolish buildings for illegal urban renewal.

Sonja is a messianic warrior/healer in China, which is the last remaining powerful nation-state in the 2060s. China has developed new cities which are entirely self-contained, in which everything is recycled. China and India have suffered the most in the climate devastation. One of the plot elements which makes the least sense is that China has used H-bombs on the Himalayas to try to produce ice, and thus water, since the glaciers have all melted. This doesn't work, and I have no idea for the life of me why anyone would think it would. Sonja joins a group of Mongolian nomads roaming outside the new cities.

An excellent twist introduced by Sterling is the idea that in this anarchic world with no central authority, a major problem is the development of dangerous new technologies. So "relinquishment" becomes an urgent task -- making sure these technologies do not come into use. The author has it both ways, featuring some new technologies, but stressing the importance of stopping others. (I just ran across a version of this idea in another book by two German sociologists -- they call it "exnovation," the opposition of innovation, and use it to refer to the complex of fossil fuel-based technologies that we will have to give up in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.)

In another twist that will be lost on anyone not familiar with cyberpunk, and Gibson's "Neuromancer" in particular, the "ubiquitous computing" that features in the first part of the book is considered obsolete, a strange relic, by the end of the book decades further in the future.

I was disappointed that Sterling did not explore the effects of climate catastrophe in a more thorough and convincing way. But I found "The Caryatids" to be fascinating and compelling with the caveats noted above. I have avoided any plot spoilers. I hope that my review makes the structure and content more clear than you might gather reading about it elsewhere.

(verified purchase from the Cosmic Book Emporium)

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Colin Inglewood

Brilliant Mess

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2013

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Bruce Sterling is a very smart and highly educated writer. He is generally accepted as one of the founders of cyberpunk, which in its time was an influential branch within science fiction. Unfortunately The Caryatids is not one of his best books. I always thought his short stories, some of which have been reprinted in many anthologies, are better than his novels. In The Caryatids Sterling touches on a number of fascinating subjects related to the future of the planet and humans: cloning, global warming, natural catastrophes, politics, space travel. I wish he had addressed them in an essay rather than a novel. The Caryatids as a novel is somewhat incoherent. It consists of three independent but very loosely linked novellas telling the story of four cloned sisters. None of the three stories really go anywhere, and none of the main characters are particularly likable. The novel could be described on a certain level as a narrative of human pathology. On another level it is an interesting description of the destruction of the Earth by a combination of global warming plus international politics plus human stupidity. But overall the whole thing is some kind of a mess. A brilliant mess, perhaps, but a mess nonetheless.

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R. Duncan

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2009

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Bruce Sterling has written some of the greatest SF books ever. But this one is boring, confusing, and pointless.

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Jacobszoon

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

Reviewed in Germany on January 20, 2019

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Heden, 20-01-2019 is het boek nog steeds NIET geleverd.
Ondanks de ruime levertermijn gaat het waarschijnlijk NIET lukken
om het boek aangeleverd te krijgen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Paula

Amazing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2015

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An amazing book-very creative thought process involved in conceiving of such a world-love it

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