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Alongside William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling stands at the forefront of any select band of authors whose pitch-perfect knowledge of the ethnic and methodical zeitgeist endows their works of speculative near-future fiction with uncanny verisimilitude. To learn a book by Sterling is to get a dispatch from a time traveller. Now, with The Caryatids, Sterling has written a sensational testament of trust in the energy of human intellect, ingenuity, and soul to defeat any obstacle–even the obstacles we take inside ourselves.
The world of 2060 is split into three spheres of affect, each preventing with the others over the resources of fallen nations and a host degraded almost to the point of no go back. You have the Dispensation, focused in LA, where entertainment and capitalism have fused with the best of high-tech. You have the Acquis, a Green-centered collective that uses intrusive neurological technology to make 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 any monstrous mother, and–corresponding to some–monsters themselves, will be the Caryatids: the four making it through female clones of any mad Balkan genius and required war legal now ensconced, safely beyond extradition, by using an orbiting space place. Radmila is a Dispensation superstar determined to forget her past because they build a glittering, impregnable future. Vera is an Acquis functionary dedicated to reclaiming their house, 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 his or her “mother”–and for just one another.
When research surfaces of any approaching environmental cataclysm, the Dispensation sends its greatest statesman–or salesman–John Montgomery Montalban, partner of Radmila, and fan of Vera and Sonja, to assemble the Caryatids alongside one another in an audacious plan to save the earth.
