The Caryatids (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Greg BearCaryatids, in Greek architecture, are stone women who support massive buildings. 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. In John Brunner's 1968 masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar, excerpts from fictional author Chad C. Mulligan's The Hipcrime Vocab provide sharp, street-smart and world-wise commentary on the culture of 2010. Bruce Sterling is the closest we've come to Mulligan in the actual 21st century. His international perspective is rare in science fiction, which often suffers from Amerocentric bias. A new novel from Sterling is a guarantee of something wild and tasty, and The Caryatids amply fulfills that promise. (Mar.)Greg Bear's latest science fiction novel, City at the End of Time, was published by Del Rey in August.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Books of Big Ideas often polarize reviewers, and Bruce Sterling's latest novel is no exception. Either the best SF book of this or any other year (Cory Doctorow) or "a mess of a book about the mess of the world" (John Clute), The Caryatids, at the very least, illustrates Sterling's ability to raise voices (in praise or protest) 30 years after he laid the groundwork for the cyberpunk movement, without which contemporary SF would be a much rockier -- and much less diverse -- landscape. Sterling's complex, controversial vision of our future invites comparison to Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash) and William Gibson (Neuromancer). Love him or hate him, Bruce Sterling always has something important to say, and The Caryatids is worth a look.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; First Edition edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345460626
• ISBN-13: 978-0345460622
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #147,161 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I can't believe I read the whole thing..., March 4, 2009

By	R. WEST "Heinleiner" (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'd like that time back now...

I'm a fan of Sterling's work, and I hate to say this, but this is just very, very poor.

There's no plot. It was never at all clear what the main conflict of the book is supposed to be, and although the POV jumps around there wasn't a single character sympathetic enough for me to care about, much less consider an interesting or worthy protagonist. None of the main characters seems to have any ethical code or system at all, nor do they "grow" at all, or seem to learn anything in the story. For that matter, neither did I.

There was apparently little if any editing, and zero proof-reading... spelling was fine, but grammar in some parts was both tortured and torture to read. There were sentences which were obviously missing words- as in, verbs or subjects. Several sections were repetitious to the point of having two successive paragraphs saying the same thing with different wording, as though they had been rewritten without removing the draft version, and there were several obvious continuity mistakes, some so glaring that they made it difficult to concentrate on anything else. For instance, in one sentence a dancer is referred to as "barefoot", and in almost the next sentence she has "slippered feet"... neither condition having anything to do with the plot. Like the visible zipper on the back of a monster costume in a bad movie, these obvious mistakes give the strong impression that nobody involved really cared at all.

If that weren't bad enough, the scenario of the future is the "More Politically Correct Than Thou Standard Man-Made Environmental Cataclysm #1" complete with preachy guilt-trip lectures, and the eventual "resolution" is about as satisfying and relevant as "and then they were all run over by a truck, or maybe not, the end". By the time I reached the last 25 pages, and it was clear the story just wasn't going to redeem itself, I was rather hoping they WOULD all just die. I was ready to help personally.

The ending, such as it was, takes the form of both an epilogue AND an afterword, giving the impression that the book was really a shortish rough-draft with no ending that had one hurriedly tacked on just to get it out the door.

Sometimes an author gets to the point where those doing business with him find it's not worth trying to improve the product, on the assumption that ANYTHING with his name on it will sell... and this IS "anything".

Unfortunately, that starts the pendulum going the other direction.. and I will be reading a lot of reviews before buying Sterling's next book. It won't be an impulse buy based on just the author's name again.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not his best, March 26, 2009

By	Robert M. Baird "BerkeleyBob" (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Bruce Sterling is an excellent SF writer. Particularly enjoyed Zenith Angle and Zeitgeist. His recent effort is at best, so-so. He plays with the concepts of different approaches to climate warming/ecological disaster and is wittier than, say Kim Stanley Robinson, who becomes overly didactic. But this is not the best Sterling is capable of, confusing multiplicity of characters, abrupt transitions and a idiosyncratic use of the full colon. Sorry, can't give it a whole hearted thumbs up.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars All atmosphere, no plot, April 10, 2009

By	D. O'Dell (Prescott, Arizona) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I usually like Bruce Sterling's books but this one left me wanting. Although well-written, it was all character development and atmosphere. I kept reading and waiting for a payoff that never came.