Customer Reviews

The Caryatids

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A pretty good book. Suffers in relative quality in reminding me of The Windup Girl (multiple morally ambiguous viewpoints set among an environmentally devastated planet) while not being anywhere near as good. Still, there's a lot of interesting stuff here, pulled together in an effective story. It's over infatuated with the device of cloning as a perspective device and the beginning is very slow, but it was quite engaging by the end. Solidly in the category of a good and worthwhile SF book, it's short of great I believe mostly in that 1) it goes with a type of shallow satire for a long section, rather than committing to a future dystopian or doomsday premise and 2) having one major character who just bugged, especially her implausible motivation (blow everything up!).

Opening well after the main devastation, the book doesn't spend much time tracing the changes that have doomed old norms, instead it engages with the different new organizations that have adapted to thrive. The Acquis, the Dispensation and China form the main powerblocks, with one viewpoint character assigned to each.

The first two are each interesting, primarily for the contrast. The Acquis are a type of mildly transhuman adaptation in the direction of Green collectivism. Easily the most benign, yet with enough creepy, coercive and austere elements to not feel too idealized. The main interest I found in this angle was the negotiations they were forced into, having to balance their intentions with their relatively weak power. A community that had succeeded at immense odds in reclaiming a bit of the globe against collapse--and now finds that they still have issues to deal with, that their success attracts attention, that in order to work with a broader humanity they have to cut deals with a group that doesn't share their principles, and finally that their very success might have been gained through a heavy ethical cost precisely because of their form of principles. It's a very nice scenario, and while the negotiation scene early in the novel is rather drawn out, it has enough ambiguity to be compelling.

The Dispensation is interesting for contrast, but is less compelling in its own right. A type of disaster-capitalism that now strikes me as having parallels with the portrayal in Market Forces, they focus on hype, entertainment, ultra-adaptation. What's most interesting about the Dispensation is that they don't appear as center stage of their own setting--a lot of authors using this would have made them the center of a dystopia that needed to be challenge. Instead, while there's a lot to obviously condemn about the way they operate, it's shown as an understandable and eminently human structure. Still, this plot strand tens the most to shallow satire over more substantive world-building, and despite some nice character growth is the weakest part of the book.

Finally there's China, the only nation that's maintained it's identity and power, albeit at a pretty staggering cost. The best part of the book is here, partly from the setting, but as well in the protagonist's involvement with this society. The whole atmosphere of navigating through 'the last nation-state', and the confident reasons given in-universe for why of course it was China that did this, are quite intriguing. The very ending makes for a neat connection and plot movement amongst the arcs, but also spoils some of the ambiguity in the China section, making me a bit ambivalent on it. Nevertheless, I'd recommend this work.

Similar to and better than: Stephen Baxter's Titan
Similar to and worse than: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl

I bought this based on a recommendation by one of the editors at boingboing. Maybe I'm just irritable, but the prose is so much like a teenager trying really, really hard to write like a proper author. Example:

"Her helmeted head rang with a sudden buzz of seismic sensors, as if her graceless filter suit were filled with bees."

Every sentence is like that - always some simile or metaphor, and a lot of unnecessary adjectives. Fluff. Filler. I'd settle for "Her head rang." Especially considering that it is never explained why her head suddenly rang. It just did. Like bees. Or something.

"Tautly braced within their shrouds and bonewear, the miners studied the tortured rock through their helmet faceplates. They muttered helpful advice to each other."

These two sentences follow directly the one above. I'd have settled for, "The miners studied the rock while muttering advice to each other." - or a complete omission of what the miners were doing (wtf else WOULD they be doing?)

It seems that the author has stuffed this book with inconsequential descriptions of inconsequential objects and people. He might as well be writing paragraphs describing how and why a certain cloud - excuse me, a certain wispy, ethereal cloudlet - looks like this or that farm animal. Not relevant to the story. Don't care.

So i have no clue what the plot of this thing is, or even if there is one buried inside this mound of literary masturbation. It's painful to read, like awkward amateur poetry that tries too hard to be superbly articulate, but only succeeds in being a discordant cacophony of ill fitting metaphor.

I enjoyed the experience of reading this book and getting to play around in Sterling's headspace for a while, but I have to confess that it doesn't really hold together.

There are so many ideas presented here that a single novel doesn't seem to be able to contain them all. Each chapter could easily have been a book unto itself. I'd really like to see Sterling expand upon this universe a bit more, perhaps with further novels and short stories a la his Shaper/Mechanist world.

Author Bruce Sterling has an utterly ambitious idea for his variation on the iconic novel, 1984; a world divided in three spheres, with the characters and the "architecture" of each setting the means to propel the plot.

The spheres are an imperial state, an "infotainment" culture and a green ideology that has a hefty dosage of Orwellian-styled mind control. These dysfunctional pieces that are staggering to a global collapse are juxtaposed with dysfunctional clone sisters who are trying to find their way in the world that has literally gone mad.

But the plot becomes bogged down due to Sterling's attempt to pack so much action within the 304 pages. Sterling deserves major props for the undertaking, but - ultimately - there are not enough strong props in the right places for him to turn his Sc-Fi tale into an instant classic.

I enjoy Bruce's books however Carytids was pretty disappointing.
Characters were developed (not too convincingly) and then abandoned, with pretty implausible linking plots. I don't think Bruce does female characters that well in general, which was a problem in this book which had many.

I am baffled at why The Caryatids has received so many negative reviews on here. I am in so much puzzlement over how people could honestly write these things that I wouldn't be surprised if a rival publishing house has paid people to pan the books of its competition. I suspect, however, that Bookmarks Magazine summed up the reason when they said that "Books of big ideas often polarize reviewers, and Bruce Sterling's latest novel is no exception."

This is a book of ideas for people who like to think and be mentally stimulated. There are so many wondrous new technologies and concepts described in The Caryatids that people in our media saturated society who are already suffering from information overload may be turned off by it. If you're the type of person who wants simplicity from their reading, and thinks that the latest Star Trek or Warhammer 40,000K novel is an example of great science fiction, then The Caryatids probably isn't going to be your cup of tea.

I've also noticed that whenever a novel's protagonists don't have a traditional morality it tends to be polarizing. As the "most helpful" negative review states "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". I've seen several people cite amorality of protagonists as their main reason for disliking two other great works of fiction, Jack Vance's Cugel novels (arguably the best novels Vance ever wrote) and Hugh Cook's The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness decalogy. It seems absurd and childish to me, but apparently a lot of people can't get into a novel unless the main character thinks and acts in a way that conforms to their own values. Why should it matter that a character has an "ethical system" or is "sympathetic" or is "worthy of being cared about"? I don't see how this has anything to do with whether the book is good or not.

I've been a long time science fiction reader, I grew up reading Clarke, Gibson, Cherryh, Stephenson, Shirley, Asimov, Delany, Walter Jon Williams, and countless other authors. I do believe Sterling's The Caryatids is among the best science fiction novels I've ever read, and definitely the best I've read all year. It's so intellectually stimulating, relevant, and exciting, my only disappointment was that it wasn't longer. Don't be misled by the negative reviews on here, my advice is to pay more attention to the professional reviews in magazines like Publishers Weekly and Locus, which from what I've seen are more likely to recognize the worth of The Caryatids and give it the praise it deserves.

Caryatids ranks up there as one of the worst books I've read in awhile -- no plot, no story, no strong characters, weak writing. This book reads as notes from a possible future, yet with no real meat. A complete waste of time and money. If you're interested in spending your time reading good books, then skip this one.