Distraction by Bruce Sterling

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Society Comes Tumbling Down Bruce Sterling's latest, longest, most rigorously imagined portrait of 21st-century American life, Distraction, is now available, and that is very good news. Anyone with more than a passing interest in science fiction — anyone who appreciates fiction that illuminates the relationship between the vast, impersonal forces of social change and the increasingly beleaguered life of the individual — is advised, without reservation, to read this book.

Distraction opens during the election year of 2044 and drops us immediately into the hyperactive universe of Oscar Valparaiso, a fixer and political spin artist who has just conducted his first successful senatorial campaign and has been "rewarded" with a patronage position on the Senate Science Committee. His new job sends him to the backwaters of East Texas to investigate conditions in a federally funded research institute called the Collaboratory. Once there, he uncovers a long-standing history of kickbacks, corruption, and old-fashioned political featherbedding. Oscar's attempts to introduce an element of reform into this closed society lead directly to the two relationships that stand at the heart of the novel. One is a romantic liaison between Oscar and with Dr. Greta Penninger, a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in the increasingly prominent field of neural studies. The other is a protracted, no-holds-barred conflict with the governor of Louisiana, a classic southern demagogue named Etienne (Green Huey) Hugelet, who has his own undisclosed interests in the products of theCollaboratory'sresearch.

As in most Sterling novels, the plot is designed to support an immensely detailed vision of a near-future society that is at once familiar and deeply strange. In the America of Distraction — as in its real-world analogue, the fractured, surreal societies of post-communist Russia — the center has long since ceased to hold. The ongoing greenhouse effect has led to disastrous new weather patterns. Ocean levels are rising. Entire species are disappearing at a record rate. On the international front, the Chinese have won a decisive victory in their "economic war" with the United States by the simple expedient of publishing all proprietary American software over the Internet. In the aftermath of that defeat, chaos and fragmentation reign. Sixteen distinct political parties now exist. Emergency Committees have usurped the constitutionally created branches of government. The military can no longer pay its bills. Cities have become privately owned entities. The unemployed underclass has evolved into competing nomadic hordes that are often better organized than the government itself. The country, as one character puts it, "is up on blocks," desperately seeking its lost center; in need of a miracle capable of making "laws out of chaos, justice out of noise, and meaning out of total distraction."

No one is better than Sterling at conveying the feel of day-to-day life in a complex, heavily networked, rapidly unraveling society. In Oscar Valparaiso, genetically suspect master of a bizarre 21st-century realpolitik, he has found the perfect vehicle for interpreting and illuminating that society. Distraction is a funny, frenetic, beautifully ornamented portrait of a world in crisis, the clear product of a distinctive talent working at the top of his very considerable form.

—Bill Sheehan

From the Publisher

It's November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The government is broke, the cities are privately owned, and the military is shaking down citizens in the streets. Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A political spin doctor, Oscar has always made things look good. Now he wants to make a difference.

But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet. His only ally: Dr. Greta Penninger, a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together they're out to spread a very dangerous idea whose time has come. And so have their enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and laptop assassin in America. Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they'll put a new spin on it.

Library Journal

In Sterling's brave new world, c.2043, technology threatens humanity, and powerful interest groups (e.g., corporations, churches, privately owned cities, and HMOs) run the show. But the real trouble lies ahead when a decent, hardworking chap and his neurologist lover challenge the demagogue who serves as Louisiana's governor.

SF Site - Ernest Lilley

Distraction is Bruce Sterling's best novel yet...It's got ideas, it's got great characters: scientists, politicians, revolutionaries and lovers. Many all at the same time. And they're all well done.

Gerald Jonas

Many of Sterling's speculations...are entertaining if only because of their thought-provoking absurdity... -- The New York Times Book Review

New York Review of Science Fiction - Brian Stableford

Utterly gripping and wonderfully readable. It is a magnificently ingenious and very funny book, ceratinly the cleverest thing that Sterling has ever produced...It is a long time since I have encountered a book as ruthlessly cynical as this one, and I have never encountered one which contrived to leaven its cynicism with such blatant charm as well as sparkling wit. It is, in this way, a truly great book...

Kirkus Reviews

In 2044, following the collapse of the information economy, America is run by permanent "Emergency committees": the government is so broke it can't afford to pay people in the Armed Forces, who put up roadblocks to shake down travelers; a new Cold War is under way (against the Dutch); Anglos are a distrusted minority; privacy no longer exists (even banknotes are bugged); and cities are privately owned, outside of which nomad nation-gangs roam, building laptops out of grass. The campaign mastermind behind honest Massachusetts Senator-elect W. Alcott Bambakias, Oscar Valparaiso, has a "personal background problem": he's the adoptive son of a South American drug baron, and his laboratory-engineered genes aren't even entirely human. As a result, his body temperature runs higher than normal, and he sleeps hardly at all. Oscar's ambition is to save the US. Trading on Bambakias' connection with the Senate Science Committee, Oscar adopts a biological research center, intending to completely reorganize it, and soon embarks on a passionate affair with the center's director, neurology whiz Dr. Greta Penninger. But Oscar makes an enemy of a powerful senator, Green Huey, who, suspiciously, shows an intense interest in the lab's products. Greta and Oscar discover that Huey has tested a weird mind-altering agent on some illegal immigrants: they now have bicameral minds, and can do two things at once. Huey has dosed himself with the agent, which explains why he's so effectivenbut he's also crazy. Meanwhile, the President declares war on Holland, Bambakias goes loopy, and Oscar allies himself with a nomad gang to oust Huey. Huey gets his revenge, however, infecting Oscar and Greta with thesame agent.

Product Details

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Interviews & Essays

Bruce Sterling: Life is good! Let's try and have some fun here!

Bruce Sterling: I can't say I really dissuade that very hard. I'm very into science fiction as a subculture. I've met people in Prague, Moscow, São Paulo, Milan, Brighton, all over the world really, who will take me in, feed me, and put me on their couch just because I write science fiction. I want to encourage this activity. It's useful. I don't think many people who read my work could possibly regard it as more "fluffy" than most mainstream stuff.

Bruce Sterling: The book's different because I'm getting older. I've put a lot of words down in a row now. I'm getting to the point where I almost, practically, understand what I'm doing. This is probably something of a danger for a science fiction writer. I'm seeking out new areas of interest now so that I can keep doing new things, badly.

Bruce Sterling: I got interested in writing it because I was interested in reading it. In college I drifted into science fiction fandom circles and was soon introduced to other wannabe writers. It's not hard to start writing science fiction. It's not even hard to get an SF story accepted and published. Writing genuinely innovative and interesting science fiction is a very serious challenge, though. People who take the craft seriously end up with a major advantage over the weekend hobbyist.

Bruce Sterling: I see some very weird potentials there. DISTRACTION describes some of my more far-fetched notions of what might become of the Internet if the people who used it were really serious and really desperate. For some other musings on this subject you might want to join my Viridian Mailing List. It's a place where I'm thinking out loud about 21st century postindustrial design issues. Have a look at: http://www.bespoke.org/viridian

Bruce Sterling: I've finally written a book as embarrassing as today's headlines. This really is a very topical book. It's all about a humiliating American political crisis and it's coming out right in the middle of a humiliating American political crisis. I'm used to being about five to ten years ahead of the curve. As a novelist, this is the first time I've ever hit a trend dead-on. It's probably why I have a two-page spread in this week's Time magazine with its sepulchral Clinton impeachment cover.

Bruce Sterling: In a word, yes, this is the greenhouse effect. This summer I was out on my porch smelling Mexico on fire. The plume went up as high as Chicago. This thing is as real as dirt. But the damage we've done already is nothing compared to the damage we're getting ready to do. I wrote a greenhouse effect novel four years ago. I was a little ahead of the curve on that one. It's called HEAVY WEATHER. You can have a look; it looks a lot more convincing now than it did when it first came out.

Bruce Sterling: I think science fiction has a lot of roles. Allegory and satire are certainly two of its major modes. Personally, I dote on the kind of sheer "spearhead of cognition" science fiction that doesn't try to teach you any political or moral lessons, but just grabs you by the lapels and slams you into the wall.

Bruce Sterling: People of course always ask me that. It's a natural question, but it's like asking Allen Ginsberg what a "beatnik" was in, say, 1975. "Well see, it was me and my friends, and we had some neat ideas about some cool stuff to write, and it seemed to catch on somehow, so we wrote a lot more of it, and, uh, well, I seem to be rich and famous now." He was a very interesting guy, Ginsberg. If you ever go to Prague you'll find some people who took this weird ole beatnik poet totally seriously.

Bruce Sterling: Can you imagine describing 1998 to someone in 1958 and being way cheerful and upbeat about it? Just as a mental exercise. There would have been guys around in 1958 who were totally thrilled to hear that communism was over and we didn't have a nuclear holocaust, but most of them would just keel over dead if you described why our president's being impeached right now.

Bruce Sterling: My advice to an aspiring author would be to figure out real quick whether you are really up for it and into it or whether you are just wasting your time when you could be doing something vastly more fun and useful than sitting in an office moving your fingers up and down for most of your life. So my first advice is: Keep a journal. Try and write something in it every day. Not a narrative, just descriptions, ideas, turns of phrase, things that might be useful -- kind of a storage disk for your head. See if you can do it for a year. If you're so bored with the inside of your own head that you can't write a journal for a year, then really, literature is not your field. Try something else. Anything. (Anything except playing folk acoustic guitar and expecting us to listen to it.)

Bruce Sterling: I like J. G. Ballard. There's a RE/Search J. G. Ballard book that is probably the single best SF artifact produced in the 20th century. I like Wells, Verne, and Stapledon. I also read a lot of Lovecraft and Dunsany. After you've read SF in truly industrial quality, you tend to gravitate toward the classics.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I wrote two articles for Wired magazine about my two visits to Russia. The first piece was called "Compost of Empire" back in '93, and the second was "Art and Corruption" in '96. They are two of my best travel pieces; I always feel very inspired when I go there. The ambience is really very, very close to a William Gibson Cyberspace Trilogy novel from the mid-1980s, except that none of the gadgets work. It's truly one of the great postmodern spectacles. The thing that is shocking about them now is that they have become their own worst enemy. They are doing themselves far, far more damage than we ever managed to do to them. And given today's political climate, I think we Americans can say exactly the same thing about ourselves. They really are our "dark brother" as a country -- the Other Superpower, the alternate 20th century, the version that failed. And they failed big time. They failed so utterly and totally that it's almost impossible to describe. I don't think any journalist has ever gotten it quite right. It would take supreme literary genius to describe how screwed-up the Russians are.

Bruce Sterling: No particular reason; it was an election year, and the book involves electoral politics.

Bruce Sterling: When I started HACKER CRACKDOWN I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the big issues but didn't know enough about the details. Once I'd learned the details I realized that I had no idea about the true big picture. That's why I wrote the book from four different points of view.

Bruce Sterling: That's an excellent question. I applaud that question, but I think you should make it a matter of principle to always ask the "worst aspect" question first. "Look at the underside first." Why? Because there are tens of thousands of guys trying to sell you the upside, that's why. Hardly anyone is around who is honest about the downside. So in today's environment, take the downside first and get it squared away well before you let anybody touch your wallet. The great thing about the Internet is that it's unpoliced and all over the place, but the scary thing about the Internet is that it's all over the place and unpoliced.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah I was watching that, actually. Not that I'm an HTML guy or anything, but I take a genuine interest. I'm thinking seriously of buying a GNOME box. Just to annoy Gates and Jobs, mostly. I'm tired of paying anything for an operating system. I don't want to pay for apps either. I just want to get a box, click on Linux sites, fill it up with perfectly adequate free software and get on with my life. Welcome to the 21st century. Ha ha hah!

Bruce Sterling: Well, it was clear to me 12 years ago during the glory days of cyberpunk that it was time to do a rabble-rousing anthology. Something in the vein of DANGEROUS VISIONS by my literary mentor Harlan Ellison. Nobody else had the time or the inclination, so I did it myself. No one expected it to make any money. It's still making money 12 years later and has been in languages all over the world. It was one of the smartest things I ever did. We named it "Mirrorshades" because Lewis Shiner and I had realized that the characters in stories by friends of ours seemed to be wearing this accoutrement. Nowadays we need bifocals, but at least we can afford designer frames.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, you don't know Dr. Gibson like I do; I find the guy only too believable. I collaborate with a lot of people. I'm very interesting in other people's creative process. Bill is a left-handed guy; people who are left-handed tend to have remarkable thought processes. After working on a book with him for three years, really right down there with him at the coal face, I learned many interesting and useful things. Book is still in print, too. Even gets taught in universities. It was hard work but worth it. I often think it's the one book I've worked on that might be of real interest in fifty or a hundred years.

Bruce Sterling: I frankly think that Brin's ideas are wacky. He doesn't think like a cop or a criminal; he thinks about legal and criminal problems the way that a physicist does. The real future will be wackier than either he or I can imagine.

Bruce Sterling: I'm working on a new novel now called ZEITGEIST. But yes, I have ideas for two nonfiction books. I want to write one about media studies and one about environmental design. I think the first years of a new century are a good time to sit down and write some ambitious tracts and manifestos. People will want them. They'll have plenty of time to get all disappointed and disenchanted later.

Bruce Sterling: I could tell you that, but then I'd have to kill you.

Bruce Sterling: I enjoy being a pundit. The hours are good, the pay's not bad. I especially like other pundits. Stewart Brand, for instance; this guy is the king -- hell, stud duck -- of all punditdom. I could listen to him for years. I think I have, actually. The public pundit thing is kind of boring because they always have a well-rehearsed spiel of some kind, and a spin and a pitch and all that, but a drunk, angry pundit is a really cool and useful thing to witness. You can learn incredible things.

Bruce Sterling: I see it dropping right off the vision chart, actually. I think the digital revolution is basically over, visibly running out of steam. Computation used to be a genuine freak scene; now it's all about Gates kicking the stuffing out of the Justice Department. How exciting is that? Not very. However, technologies don't become truly influential until they are invisible. When the Internet is your wristwatch, when it's in your underwear drawer -- when you aren't excited by it, can't be bothered, and don't notice it anymore -- that is when it really and seriously changes you. As long as you can see it and go "wow," you've still got it safely at arm's length. Once it's invisible to you -- well, it's all over.

Bruce Sterling: Basically that's all I do. Everything becomes "research." I'm a research black hole. I do try to make it a personal principle not to touch a computer on Sundays. I go out with the kids, I do physical things, I try to avoid print, I try to be just a physical being. It's hard. But it's why I'm still alive and not some shriveled victim of online fever. I was trained as a journalist in college; I wouldn't call myself a world-class researcher, but for an artist I've got a pretty good skill set. I think my best advantage is that I know when I've found something interesting. I've learned how to smell it, somehow.

Bruce Sterling: Well, as I said earlier, I run lists; I do a lot of free writing on the Internet. "Fanzine work," basically, but I think it's vitally important for writers and artists to do at least some of their work gratis. Information Wants to Be Free, you see.... So if you'd like to track down some of my many, many multifaceted and multifarious rants without having to whip out your credit card, try: http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades and just go on clicking from there.

Bruce Sterling: Well, whatever you're doing in life, if it isn't fun and doesn't pay, stop it and go take a nap.

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