Seven clones for slaughtered lands, or something like that.

A nearish future novel with a bunch of superwomen exiled, and fair chunks of the Earth with a lot of environmental problems.

People still have some cool tech gear, though.

Surveillace has also increased towards the fascist end of the spectrum. Sort of only dealt with in passing, as the three main characters and two main groups come into conflict.

It started interestingly, but then gets pretty tedious a sit fails to balance whether it wants to follow the whacky people around, or talk about the general situation.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2009/08... ( )

Absent from mention of Publisher's Weekly review by Greg Bear is the ubiquity of poverty, death and despair throughout all areas of the world that acts as a constant background noise in contrast with the glamour and privilege of the protagonists. Moreover, the dual-edged sword of ubiquity of computers/computing and its resulting surveillance and lack of privacy is examined (but not solved); through the three main characters, Sterling paints a triptych of what the near future might be were our world, our bodies, our minds to become networked and assisted by computers. I found the most enjoyment from reading about the far-out technologies being tried (and many proven) to desperately combat challenges on an Earth in profound ruin from the results of global climate change.

The narrative, characteristic of this author, runs fast, with new ideas and words to trip you up along the way...it's a fun, tech-heavy, bouncy ride, but when it's all over you are left sitting, a bit bored, in the roller coaster car, wondering when the carny's coming back to let you out.

I recommend this book if you love ideas and tech and can enjoy reading it for ideas and tech alone. If you find you like it, definitely read [Holy Fire] too. ( )

From Publisher's Weekly:The Caryatids of Bruce Sterling's shimmering new novel—Vera, Radmila and Sonja—support the weight of a near-future world. They are the last of seven clone sisters created by a mother accused of Balkan war crimes, now exiled in orbit. We're 50-some years into the future, and the planet is split into an international, symbiotic competition between the hypernetworked Acquis, who train distressed, abandoned children into tight-knit cadres of activists, and the Dispensation, more sedate, mannered and cosmo-business in its orientation.Vera works with an Acquis team remediating the Croatian island of Mljet, laid waste by toxic dumping and the rising waters of global warming. The Acquis technology is extreme but humanly adapted: the users wear bonewear (amplified skeletal suits that allow tremendous feats of speed and strength) and spex (laser-equipped eyeshades that hook their wearers into a postencyclopedic wonderworld of information. In a beautifully realized and Huxleyan Los Angeles, Radmila has fit too snugly into a Dispensation Family, but California is being squeezed between a geological devil and the surging deep blue sea. The Family sees these changes in terms of economic potential, and they track real estate values by the second: Norwalk is glamorous; beach property is cheap.Sonja, dotted with the shrapnel of her own self-destructive past, performs medical and social work in the middle of a constantly rebirthing China. Due to female infanticide, there are far more men than women in China—the reverse of Russia, where men die young—and Sonja hooks up with a Gobi jihadist who indulges both her sexual appetites and her political ambitions. Sterling's language is kaleidoscopic. We swim into a chapter, and his ideas and language flash and dance like sunlight off the Adriatic, then coalesce in a moment of plot; the effect is unsettling, but suited to the world he reveals spark by hammered spark. Dispersed around the world, the sisters mirror Earth's difficulties: traumatized by their origin, they hate each other. Their solutions may be Earth's solutions as well.

I didn't like this nearly as much as the reviewer. ( )