Cyberpunk Spinmeister

By Michael Krantz/Austin

It's 2044, and Oscar Valparaiso has a lot on his plate. No sooner did the young political operative put his boss in the Senate than the guy went nuts, leaving Oscar to sink or swim in a world where pretty much everything has gone wrong. Oceans warmed by climate change have risen so fast that the Dutch are waging Cold War II against Uncle Sam. The devaluation of software to zero (the Chinese post it all free on the Net) snapped the economy like a dry twig. Air Force squads shake down drivers on the highways. Roving "radical proles" terrorize the dwindling bourgeoisie. Oscar's base of operations, a beleaguered Texas biotech lab, faces a funding cutoff and a Governor wielding biological weapons. And some Net robot keeps spamming lists of madmen, urging them to knock Oscar off. How's he going to reshape the government in time to save America? Especially since Oscar is (arguably) in love...

So it goes in Distraction (Bantam; $23.95), the latest novel from Bruce Sterling, one of America's best-known science-fiction writers and perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre.

How is it, then, that the leafy tranquillity of Sterling's well-appointed Austin, Texas, home is shattered only by his two-year-old daughter Laura's careening through the living room like a stray electron? (Dad prefers "like a misrouted Internet packet.") "I like starting with a set of initial conditions and just extrapolating," he says. In this case, the initial conditions came courtesy of Mother Russia, whose meltdown Sterling covered for Wired back in 1993. "I was watching a huge 20th century superpower fall apart at the seams," he says. Extrapolating from Moscow to the U.S. was a simple matter of wondering, like any good science-fiction writer, What if?

The result is a darkly comic vision of the future impact of a high-tech revolution that Sterling's earlier work helped create. He grew up in a Texas refinery town, the son of a petroleum engineer and grandson of a cattle rancher. While studying journalism at the University of Texas in the late '70s, he fell in with a group of budding writers that included William Gibson, John Shirley and Greg Bear. The cyberpunks, as they called themselves, were obsessed with all things digital, and in the '80s managed somehow to reverse pop culture's aesthetic field, turning slouching, sullen '60s youth who hated the system and thought technology was evil into slouching, sullen '90s youth who hate the system and think technology will bring it down.

O.K., the Walkman, the Mac, MTV and Nintendo helped too, but the cyberpunk novels--most notably Gibson's cyberspace epic Neuromancer--were clearly a formative influence on today's Gen X Silicon Valley sensibility. Sterling himself edited the seminal 1986 anthology Mirrorshades; his prologue became the de facto cyberpunk manifesto and remains, he ruefully admits, his most widely known work to date.

That may change. After an early career that mixed such successes as Islands in the Net (1988) with several quickly remaindered efforts, Sterling hit his stride with Heavy Weather (1994), a novel about tornado freaks published two years pre-Twister, and Holy Fire (1996), a haunting meditation on life-extension technology.

Distraction is a new high-water mark. Oscar Valparaiso is a marvelous take on the '90s spin doctor: whip-smart, icy-veined and two steps ahead of the rest of the room. He's tomorrow's man: a wired multitasker with a gift for filtering infinite streams of data to his own strategic benefit. But we wonder whether this guy has a soul.

Now, perhaps that's merely an artifact of Oscar's embarrassing "personal background problem." Or maybe his jaded 21st century self just offends our tender 20th century sensibilities. Consider this lovely beach scene: "Oscar strolled past a glittering shoal of smashed aluminum," Sterling writes in impeccable gleaming-chrome cyberpunk form. "The plethora of drift junk filled him with a pleasant melancholy. Every beach he'd ever known had boasted its share of ruined bicycles, waterlogged couches, picturesque sand-etched medical waste. In his opinion, zealots like the Dutch complained far too much about the inconveniences of rising seas. Like all Europeans, the Dutch were stuck in the past, unable to come to pragmatic, workable terms with new global realities."

Hey, who isn't? Oscar is on that beach awaiting his great spiritual test in the form of Greta Penninger, a dowdy genius whom our antihero is hot for, though he can't decide whether to sleep with her, run her for office or both. "Greta had real promise," Oscar muses. "There was basically nothing wrong with the woman that couldn't be set straight with a total makeover, power dressing, improved debate skills, an issue, an agenda, some talking points, and a clever set of offstage handlers."

Ah, to be young and in love. Greta and Oscar provide the novel's twin moral poles: industrial-age truth vs. information-age spin. The American sickness, to Sterling, derives from the way the same science that built our world threatens to decouple us from our own tenuous humanity. The idea has been around since, say, Frankenstein, but Sterling's take on it achieves a fierce, satirical clarity that recalls the genre's masterwork, Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985). Distraction is catnip for smart people.

In person, the author comes off like first-draft Oscar. Interviewing him is like watching a frog hopscotch across a lily-padded pond and wondering when he'll land in the water. He doesn't answer questions so much as wield them, like any good pol, in furtherance of his own idiosyncratic conversational agenda, launching into highly literate, if often ill-focused, disquisitions on, you know, whatever. "Catalytic cracking units" give way to "mechaniculture fanzines." "Headless decentralized autonomous research groups" derive from "involuntary wildlife refuges" and that venerable biotech standby, "wet goo."

Well, Bruce, you keep writing good books, and we'll keep letting you ramble into our microcassette recorder. At 44, Sterling is a married and prosperous father of two, but he wears his hair as long as the boomer teen he remains at heart and sets it off with the jeans and logoed black T that was the cyberpunk uniform way back when. Examining his life as a middle-aged iconoclast, he cackles with glee at his own half-cracked ideas. Which are manifold. His next novel is a "fantasy technothriller" featuring terrorists and assassins. He contributes to Wired and the Australian magazine World Art and spends loving hours maintaining busy e-mail lists on "dead media," foreign-language science-fiction and postindustrial design. And though he's a proper punk skeptic when it comes to politics--"My job is to play with nutty ideas, not grapple with serious issues"--he is truly obsessed with global warming, which this year's brutal Southwestern drought brought a bit too close to home. "Why am I living in a world where I walk onto my porch on a summer afternoon and smell the Mexican jungle on fire?" he asks, um, heatedly. "I mean, that's it--you can't talk me down from that! I'm going to kick and fuss for the next 20 years!"

Then he pauses for a rare breath and breaks into a down-home Texas grin. "And I'm going to enjoy every minute of it."