Book Review: Islands in the Net

Bruce Sterling
1988
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ – – – –

Some cyberpunk novels have riveting, twisty-turny plots that hold your interest throughout the course of the book. Some have complex, interesting characters that are fascinating to follow (whether they are likeable or not). Some have future tech that is both original and well-founded, so that even if you can’t exactly follow its specifics, you can get the gist of it enough to understand its purpose and to realize how imaginative the author has been in creating it.

This is not one of any of these kinds of novels.
In Islands in the Net, Laura and David Webster, a married couple, run a lodge in Galveston, Texas on the Caribbean coast. They both work for Rizome, one of the small number of enormous international corporations that essentially run the world in this year of 2023.

Rizome has chosen the Websters’ lodge as the site for a secret gathering of data pirates, who are from data havens in Grenada, Luxembourg, and Singapore. The data havens are deeply distrustful of each other, but they are all being blackmailed by the same person or organization and want to work together to figure out who it is. For some reason they have chosen Rizome to act as mediator, even though they resent Rizome and everything it stands for.

One night, one of the Grenadian conference participants is shot dead by an aerial drone. The shadowy Free Army of Counter Terrorism (F.A.C.T.) takes credit for the assassination, saying it is part of their effort to eliminate all drug runners and data pirates.

Laura, who witnessed the shooting, is called to Grenada to testify and to prove Rizome didn’t send the drone. This begins a mostly pointless whirlwind series of adventures for her in which she travels from exotic location to exotic location across the globe, and in each place she is the center point of some kind of attack or incident that starts a bloody country-wide riot or revolution from which she (sometimes with her husband and baby) has to escape. There are also numerous chances for men to ogle her breasts.

First she goes to Grenada, where the residents bridle at all governments and corporations curtailing their freedom. They believe everything should be legal and free to all, including data, pot, and food, the last of which is grown in vast quantities on huge offshore tanker ships. After giving her testimony to the board of the Grenadian data haven, her house and all of the floating food factories are bombed by Singapore.
   
Laura, David, and their baby are rescued from the Grenadian carnage by representatives of Kymera, a Singaporean bank. David and the baby are flown home, while Laura is flown to Kymera’s headquarters in Singapore to tell them what she knows about Grenada. But while she is there, the Singaporean Prime Minister is drugged by terrorists (maybe from Grenada; maybe from F.A.C.T.) and made to babble Grenadian libertarian rhetoric on national television, causing a countrywide riot. Laura huddles on the roof of a Rizome building with some co-workers until she is rescued by what is supposedly the Viennese world police, but turns out to be, in fact, F.A.C.T.; they think she knows they have an atomic bomb, so they take her to their headquarters in Mali and throw her in prison for more than a year.

Laura escapes from the prison when it is attacked by a band of rogue Tuareg rebels, led by an American journalist who has gone native. The Tuaregs drive her across the desert to their camp, where she sleeps with the journalist (who has been ogling her). He then films her talking about all her adventures and exposing all the secrets she has learned about Grenada, Singapore, the Viennese world police, and F.A.C.T., and broadcasts it across the world. All the bad banks and pirate consortia then collapse and the world is made safe again for democracy.

The main problem with this book is that it is just plain tedious. I can overlook a whole lot of awkwardness, offensiveness, and silliness if the plot is enjoyable. But in Islands in the Net, the conversations are insipid, the characters are neither interesting nor likeable, the plot is plodding, motives are unclear, mob scenes and battles are strangely boring, and suspense is nonexistent.

Laura also has an inconsistent personality: she is sometimes demure and deferential, sometimes professional and commanding, sometimes spouting an angry stream of obscenities with little warning.

Some sections occasionally held my attention, such as portions of Laura’s time in the Mali prison and her escape in the Tuareg trucks. But most of the time I would read for a few minutes and then find myself staring off into space, not caring about what was happening. About two-thirds of the way through the book I started skipping sentences, and then whole paragraphs.
   
There are other reasons this book was disappointing, however. One is the absence of truly innovative future technology, even by 1988 standards. The spyware that Laura and David are given by Rizome when they go to Grenada and Singapore is clunky: obvious earpieces and large, dark video-equipped sunglasses that they have to wear even at night and indoors. They both wear big “watchphones” that don’t seem to do much more than tell the time and remind them of appointments. And most of the video equipment—whether for entertaining, gaming, or communicating—is based on the VCR.

Laura’s politics are also internally inconsistent and at times hypocritical. She is a firm believer in the ideals of Rizome, her employer, which is supposedly a completely democratic, egalitarian, non-hierarchical corporation. (There are no bosses or underlings; everyone is called an “associate.”) And yet neither Laura nor Rizome can tolerate a third world country running free food farms to feed its people. She is also appalled by the Tuaregs, who are fighting for their independence and sometimes have to resort to semi-terrorist tactics because they have no other avenues left. And she is stridently opposed to data havens and data pirates, never seeing that they may be offering truly equalizing power to everyday people in a world of corporate tyranny and censorship.
   
And she and David themselves actively maintain a hierarchical mini-economy with the staff of Hispanic servants working at their lodge. Although Laura says that they are all equals, it is very clear who are the bosses and who are the servants—especially when she and her husband go gallivanting off overseas whenever they want to, and the kitchen and cleaning staff have to be available to maintain the lodge and watch the baby and prepare food for guests at a moment’s notice.

And, last but not least, this book handles the intimate relationships and sexuality of its female main character so very badly. Almost all of the males that Laura encounters—Grenadians, Singaporeans, Malian jailers, and Tuareg rebels alike—are introduced to us by whether they look at her body or not, and how. And Laura actually feels more comfortable with them when they are ogling. She consciously becomes more relaxed with her Grenadian guide, for example, when he stops looking at her without interest and begins looking at her “as a man looks at a woman.”
   
Laura’s relationship with her husband is also a bit problematic. When she remembers wistfully the early days of sex with David, she describes them fondly as “scary,” “out of control,” “not entirely pleasurable,” and “too close to pain, too strange.” And when the two of them fight about whether or not she should go to Singapore, she is strident and self-assured, confident in her reasons about why she should go. But after she wins the argument, she apologizes and tries to make him feel better by explaining that she was being so strident because she was “on the rag.”

There are few books I have been happier to have in my rear view mirror.