It's the year 2044, and America has gone to hell. A disenfranchised U.S. Air Force base has turned to highway robbery in order to pay the bills. Vast chunks of the population live nomadic lives fueled by cheap transportation and even cheaper computer power. Warfare has shifted from the battlefield to the global networks, and China holds the information edge over all comers. Global warming is raising sea level, which in turn is drowning coastal cities. And the U.S. government has become nearly meaningless. This is the world that Oscar Valparaiso would have been born into, if he'd actually been born instead of being grown in vitro by black market baby dealers. Oscar's bizarre genetic history (even he's not sure how much of him is actually human) hasn't prevented him from running one of the most successful senatorial races in history, getting his man elected by a whopping majority. But Oscar has put himself out of a job, since he'd only be a liability to his boss in Washington due to his problematic background. Instead, Oscar finds himself shuffled off to the Collaboratory, a Big Science pork barrel project that's run half by corruption and half by scientific breakthroughs. At first it seems to be a lose-lose proposition for Oscar, but soon he has his "krewe" whipped into shape and ready to take control of events. Now if only he can straighten out his love life and solve a worldwide crisis that no one else knows exists. --Craig E. Engler


From Publishers Weekly
It's 2044 A.D. and America has gone to the dogs. The federal government is broke and, with 16 political parties fighting for power, things aren't likely to improve soon. The Air Force, short on funding, is setting up roadblocks to shake down citizens and disguising its tactics as a bake sale. The governor of Louisiana, Green Huey, is engaging in illegal genetic research and has set up his own private biker army. The newly elected president of the U.S., Leonard Two Feathers, is considering a declaration of war against the Netherlands, a country that finds itself half under water due to global warming. Trying desperately to hold things together is Oscar Valparaiso, political consultant and spin doctor extraordinaire, who has just engineered the election of a new liberal senator for the state of Massachusetts, only to discover that his boss suffers from severe bipolar disorder. Looking for a new challenge, Oscar takes a job with the U.S. Senate Science Committee. His first assignment is to investigate the scandal-ridden Collaboratory, a gigantic, spaceshiplike federal lab in East Texas. Oscar, himself the result of an illegal Colombian cloning experiment, immediately falls head over heels for a gawky but brilliant young Nobel laureate, with whom he sets out to save both the lab and the nation from Green Huey. In his latest novel (after Holy Fire), Sterling once again proves himself the reigning master of near-future political SF. This is a powerful and, at times, very funny novel that should add significantly to Sterling's already considerable reputation. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
After managing a successful senatorial campaign, spin doctor Oscar Valparaiso finds himself with time on his hands and a new agenda: to use his image-making talents to effect a radical change in the faltering American way of life. Teaming up with talented but underrated neurologist Greta Penninger, Valparaiso takes on the biggest challenge of his career. The latest novel by one of cyberpunk's most innovative authors (Holy Fire, LJ 9/15/96) opens a disturbing yet all too plausible window into the near-future, filtering his dystopic vision through the lens of dark comedy. Sterling's gift for creating sympathetic yet fallible characters adds a vital personal dimension to this cautionary parable of the fall of the American way of life. Highly recommended.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
In 2044, following the collapse of the information economy, America is run by permanent ``Emergency committees'': the government is so broke it can't afford to pay people in the Armed Forces, who put up road blocks in order to shake down travelers; a new Cold War is under way (against the Dutch); Anglos are a distrusted minority; privacy no longer exists (even banknotes are bugged); and cities are privately owned, outside of which nomad nation-gangs roam, building laptops out of grass. The campaign mastermind behind honest Massachusetts Senator-elect W. Alcott Bambakias, Oscar Valparaiso, has a ``personal background problem'': he's the adoptive son of a South American drug baron, and his laboratory-engineered genes aren't even entirely human. As a result, his body temperature runs higher than normal, and he sleeps hardly at all. Oscar's ambition is to save the US. Trading on Bambakias's connection with the Senate Science Committee, Oscar adopts a biological research center, intending to completely reorganize it, and soon embarks on a passionate affair with the center's director, neurology whiz Dr. Greta Penninger. But Oscar makes an enemy of a powerful senator, Green Huey, who, suspiciously, shows an intense interest in the lab's products. Greta and Oscar discover that Huey has tested a weird mind-altering agent on some illegal immigrants: they now have bicameral minds, and can do two things at once. Huey has dosed himself with the agent, which explains why he's so effectivebut he's also crazy. Meanwhile, the President declares war on Holland, Bambakias goes loopy, and Oscar allies himself with a nomad gang to oust Huey. Huey gets his revenge, however, infecting Oscar and Greta with the same agent. After his ponderous Holy Fire (1996), Sterling, our former cyberpunk Svengali, is back with a bang with this uproarious, provocative, thoughtful, often hilarious, sometimes inspired medium-future deconstruction of politics, science, economics, and the American Dream. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Analog, Tom Easton
Distraction is Sterling's best novel to date.


Review
"Perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today."
--Time

"Classic Sterling."
--The Washington Post

"Distraction is more than a futuristic political thriller; it is Sterling's persuasive vision of a social revolution that is as much biotechnological as philosophical in scope....He reserves a killer blow for the most familiar thing of all: the way we think."
--The Village Voice

"[Sterling] is back with a bang with this uproarious, provocative, thoughtful, often hilarious, sometimes inspired medium-future deconstruction of politics, science, economics, and the American dream."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliantly realized...provocative and intelligent...[Sterling's] funniest novel to date and one of his most topical."
--Locus


Review
"Perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today."
--Time

"Classic Sterling."
--The Washington Post

"Distraction is more than a futuristic political thriller; it is Sterling's persuasive vision of a social revolution that is as much biotechnological as philosophical in scope....He reserves a killer blow for the most familiar thing of all: the way we think."
--The Village Voice

"[Sterling] is back with a bang with this uproarious, provocative, thoughtful, often hilarious, sometimes inspired medium-future deconstruction of politics, science, economics, and the American dream."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliantly realized...provocative and intelligent...[Sterling's] funniest novel to date and one of his most topical."
--Locus

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Society Comes Tumbling Down Bruce Sterling's latest, longest, most rigorously imagined portrait of 21st-century American life, Distraction, is now available, and that is very good news. Anyone with more than a passing interest in science fiction — anyone who appreciates fiction that illuminates the relationship between the vast, impersonal forces of social change and the increasingly beleaguered life of the individual — is advised, without reservation, to read this book.

Distraction opens during the election year of 2044 and drops us immediately into the hyperactive universe of Oscar Valparaiso, a fixer and political spin artist who has just conducted his first successful senatorial campaign and has been "rewarded" with a patronage position on the Senate Science Committee. His new job sends him to the backwaters of East Texas to investigate conditions in a federally funded research institute called the Collaboratory. Once there, he uncovers a long-standing history of kickbacks, corruption, and old-fashioned political featherbedding. Oscar's attempts to introduce an element of reform into this closed society lead directly to the two relationships that stand at the heart of the novel. One is a romantic liaison between Oscar and with Dr. Greta Penninger, a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in the increasingly prominent field of neural studies. The other is a protracted, no-holds-barred conflict with the governor of Louisiana, a classic southern demagogue named Etienne (Green Huey) Hugelet, who has his own undisclosed interests in the products of theCollaboratory'sresearch.

As in most Sterling novels, the plot is designed to support an immensely detailed vision of a near-future society that is at once familiar and deeply strange. In the America of Distraction — as in its real-world analogue, the fractured, surreal societies of post-communist Russia — the center has long since ceased to hold. The ongoing greenhouse effect has led to disastrous new weather patterns. Ocean levels are rising. Entire species are disappearing at a record rate. On the international front, the Chinese have won a decisive victory in their "economic war" with the United States by the simple expedient of publishing all proprietary American software over the Internet. In the aftermath of that defeat, chaos and fragmentation reign. Sixteen distinct political parties now exist. Emergency Committees have usurped the constitutionally created branches of government. The military can no longer pay its bills. Cities have become privately owned entities. The unemployed underclass has evolved into competing nomadic hordes that are often better organized than the government itself. The country, as one character puts it, "is up on blocks," desperately seeking its lost center; in need of a miracle capable of making "laws out of chaos, justice out of noise, and meaning out of total distraction."

No one is better than Sterling at conveying the feel of day-to-day life in a complex, heavily networked, rapidly unraveling society. In Oscar Valparaiso, genetically suspect master of a bizarre 21st-century realpolitik, he has found the perfect vehicle for interpreting and illuminating that society. Distraction is a funny, frenetic, beautifully ornamented portrait of a world in crisis, the clear product of a distinctive talent working at the top of his very considerable form.

—Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It's November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The federal government is broke, cities are privately owned, the military is shaking down citizens in the streets, and Wyoming is on fire. The last place anyone expects to find an answer is the nation's capital. Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A master political spin doctor, Oscar has been in the background for years, doing his best to put the proper spin on anything that comes up. Now he wants to do something quite unusual in politics. He wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet: a grotesque and unspeakable scandal that haunts his personal life. He has one unexpected ally: Dr. Greta Penninger. She is a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together Oscar and Greta know the human mind inside and out. And they are about to use that knowledge to spread a very powerful message: that it's a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's an idea whose time has come ... again. And once again so have its enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and reactionary laptop assassin in America. Like all revolutionaries, Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they're determined to put a new spin on it.

SYNOPSIS

Hot on the heels of his Hugo-nominated Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling serves up Distraction, one of the most rigorously imagined portraits of 21st-century American life ever put to paper. Anyone with more than a passing interest in science fiction -- anyone who appreciates fiction that illuminates the relationship between the vast, impersonal forces of social change and the increasingly beleaguered life of the individual -- is advised, without reservation, to read this book.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

In Sterling's brave new world, c.2043, technology threatens humanity, and powerful interest groups (e.g., corporations, churches, privately owned cities, and HMOs) run the show. But the real trouble lies ahead when a decent, hardworking chap and his neurologist lover challenge the demagogue who serves as Louisiana's governor.

Ernest Lilley - SF Site

Distraction is Bruce Sterling's best novel yet...It's got ideas, it's got great characters: scientists, politicians, revolutionaries and lovers. Many all at the same time. And they're all well done.

Gerald Jonas

Many of Sterling's speculations...are entertaining if only because of their thought-provoking absurdity... -- The New York Times Book Review

Brian Stableford - New York Review of Science Fiction

Utterly gripping and wonderfully readable. It is a magnificently ingenious and very funny book, ceratinly the cleverest thing that Sterling has ever produced...It is a long time since I have encountered a book as ruthlessly cynical as this one, and I have never encountered one which contrived to leaven its cynicism with such blatant charm as well as sparkling wit. It is, in this way, a truly great book...

Kirkus Reviews

In 2044, following the collapse of the information economy, America is run by permanent "Emergency committees": the government is so broke it can't afford to pay people in the Armed Forces, who put up roadblocks to shake down travelers; a new Cold War is under way (against the Dutch); Anglos are a distrusted minority; privacy no longer exists (even banknotes are bugged); and cities are privately owned, outside of which nomad nation-gangs roam, building laptops out of grass. The campaign mastermind behind honest Massachusetts Senator-elect W. Alcott Bambakias, Oscar Valparaiso, has a "personal background problem": he's the adoptive son of a South American drug baron, and his laboratory-engineered genes aren't even entirely human. As a result, his body temperature runs higher than normal, and he sleeps hardly at all. Oscar's ambition is to save the US. Trading on Bambakias' connection with the Senate Science Committee, Oscar adopts a biological research center, intending to completely reorganize it, and soon embarks on a passionate affair with the center's director, neurology whiz Dr. Greta Penninger. But Oscar makes an enemy of a powerful senator, Green Huey, who, suspiciously, shows an intense interest in the lab's products. Greta and Oscar discover that Huey has tested a weird mind-altering agent on some illegal immigrants: they now have bicameral minds, and can do two things at once. Huey has dosed himself with the agent, which explains why he's so effectivenbut he's also crazy. Meanwhile, the President declares war on Holland, Bambakias goes loopy, and Oscar allies himself with a nomad gang to oust Huey. Huey gets his revenge, however, infecting Oscar and Greta with thesame agent.