Bruce Sterling, Distraction **

I picked up a used copy of Distraction on the occasion of its 20th anniversary because of a fawning review on Slate.com.

"It offers a densely textured, plausible alternative reality layered on top of our own...Distraction is alarmingly predictive in the way it depicts a world in which America has gone deeply off the rails."

I did not find either of these claims to be true. On the contrary, Distraction felt to me as if it were composed by a writing workshop exquisite-corpse style. The action flows along but doesn't have a central animating logic. Sterling introduces an interesting idea, a character has some exposition about what makes it interesting, and the plot moves forward without pursuing the idea. Characters' motivations change within a single scene.

This frustrating style starts on the very first page. Our main character Oscar Valparaiso is watching video of a "riot" in which an apparently undirected crowd materializes, tears down a bank, then vanishes as mysteriously as it appeared. Oscar is obsessed with learning what happened: How was it coordinated? What was the intent? Who was behind it? How did they keep everyone silent afterward? Oscar closes his laptop on page 4 and pursues other matters; the riot is not mentioned again until page 194, and it never becomes a plot point.

The same thing happens when it appears the book is going to be about the breakdown of the U.S. federal government, or the influence of politics on science, or biogenetic manipulation of human nature, or decentralized societies run on "reputation credits" instead of money. Interesting topics all, yet they never coalesce into a coherent narrative.

Distraction drove me to distraction.