Don’t you just hate it when either 1) the plot of the book you are currently reading goes completely off the rails and says, “Screw you!” to conventional narrative structure, possibly with a rude ethnic gesture, or 2) the characters decide to start acting like they’re Ph.D.’s and everything they say evolves into a great debate about the sociopolitical factors of yadda yadda yadda and they all suddenly lack the capacity to speak in anything but pages-long speeches?
Me, too.
I just had both happen to me about half way through Distraction. I stuck with it, just out of curiousity to see where Sterling would go with it. Plus, I was still picking up interesting tidbits of future history. But hell, all that sociology talk wears you down after a while. And Sterling finished the book with a completely different plot that he started with. One the one hand, the guy needs to learn to pack more explication into less dialogue. But on the other hand, he’s great because he managed to get me completely in the dark about what was going to happen next. (This is turning into a Tevye-like monologue. Tcha.)
In the end…I enjoyed it, but it’s not a great book. I can see where Sterling could have run with his ideas a bit more. Plus, a lot of the dialogue in the second have really needed to be distilled down. If you’re going to write a political treatise, fine, but it really bogs down the storyline when you use the characters as your mouthpieces.