association-list

For all the declaim­ing of this book as bril­liant and won­der­ful and game-​​changing, I sus­pect that it isn’t really going to win Bruce a lot of new fans. It’s as strange and as spiky a book as he’s writ­ten, as packed full of weird info as Holy Fire or Schiz­ma­trix. And although I like the book, and think it com­pares to those two, which are my favorite of Sterling’s works by far, I think it suf­fers a little in com­par­i­son. All three of the books are unevenly paced and lumpy with ideas, but the Cary­atids suf­fers from the fact that there are essen­tially only two char­ac­ters that have much speak­ing time. The clones of the title are indis­tin­guish­able by voice, and the man who loves them (all of them, some­what indis­crim­i­nately) is not too far off, voice-​​wise. Their moti­va­tions also seem to be some­what gnomic, but that may be because every­one in the novel seems to be utterly psy­chotic, riven by stresses inter­nal and exter­nal. This is sen­si­ble, seeing as the world has gone very badly (although we’re pri­mar­ily treated to scenes of adap­ta­tion, rather than lin­ger­ing looks at the dev­as­ta­tion, the piles of the drowned or those killed by plagues). It’s also done very well, but the down­side is that it’s done so force­fully that the char­ac­ters seem very one note, and this is not helped by the fact that their voices are very, very sim­i­lar to the voice of, say, Bruce Sterling.

So we have a tour of the widget fac­tory of a world drowned and baked and the clever remnant’s adap­ta­tions and techno-​​fixes, lay­ered over with an inter­per­sonal nar­ra­tive that is half-​​tour guide spiel and half the speeches that you expect a life-​​extended, beex­oskele­toned Ster­ling to be giving fifty or a hun­dred years from now. It’s all very inter­est­ing, and I was already a fan, so it wasn’t a hard sell, even though the story is over-​​reliant on DEM for punc­tu­a­tion and lacks any real emo­tional impact, in the end. Here, Bruce man­ages to give us the weird and the post– of his weird post-​​humans, but he under­de­liv­ers, I think, on the human aspect. I don’t think that’s always a prob­lem, but I think that, here, unless you go in know­ing what to expect, you’re going to be more than a little lost unless you’re already largely on the right wavelength.