EDITOR Alex Wright alex@agwright.com
www.ryanjahn.com | Empathylab
Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids is a masterful, though at times haphazard, collection of egos, high-tech devices, and immersive environments that paint a terrifying picture of the future for anyone familiar with the potential of technology. Sterling takes on a massive scope, depicting a world nearing apocalypse by pollution, a supervolcano, and solar flares (pick your poison), plus all the sloppy politics, pop culture, environmental work, and “business think” that comes with it. Sterling’s delivery is descriptive and chaotic—you’d better keep up.
It is bittersweet entertainment when the fate of the world is in the hands of four women driven by hatred. I don’t mind putting my salvation in the hands of a Will Smith or a Lara Croft when apocalypse draws near, but instead, in 2065, the world is stuck with the relentlessly frustrating shells of women with no aim or direction, united only by contempt for their mother and for each other. Their impulsive behavior becomes truly unsettling when Sterling illustrates how the personal dilemmas of individuals with power can so easily change the course of history. They’re the type of characters you will love to hate. Eventually, I severed my sympathy for these wandering souls and was struck with the sobering realization that there is nothing romantic about a dying Earth. It’s the kind of world you can imagine, but don’t want to, because it’s horrifying.
Clone copies of their war criminal “mother,” the surviving Mihajlovic sisters—the Caryatids—each serve as a figurehead for a particular sociocultur-al corner of the Earth. Vera is an environmentalist workaholic bent on saving her childhood homeland, the Croatian island of Mljet, from toxic pollution. Vera’s group, the Acquis, is a controversial environmental refugee camp that has completely integrated Mljet with “sensorweb,” an interface that mediates human interaction with the physical world by projecting informational tags onto almost everything. Each cadre is given a pair of “spex” in order to see this mediation interface.
The book opens with Vera strapped in “boneware”
(a body suit reminiscent of Obidiah Stanes’s “Iron
Monger” armor from the Iron Man series) working to pump toxic ooze from the Earth. She also wears a “neural helmet,” which reveals the emotional states of individuals in order to build transparent community and monitor collective emotions. This type of work is a daily activity on Mljet. Radmila, a second clone sister, is a powerful Hollywood pop icon propped up on stardom and scandals. She is the head of the Family-Firm, a Western organization of socialites that use their prestige and power to control California and the American economic market. Not much detail is offered around this group of individuals save that they spend lots of money and act absurdly. Sonja is a medical expert and rogue war hero in China, the only superpower nation-state left in the world. Biserka is a villainous force of vengeance, who appears to be a Luddite, roaming the “blackspots”—areas void of sensorweb. It’s a futuristic version of today’s cell phone dead zones. The story culminates when Radmila’s husband, a highly networked global mastermind named John Montgomery-Montalban,
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