In a near-future new age of corporate control, hacker mercenaries, and
electronic terrorism, a public relations executive on the rise finds
herself caught in the violent epicenter of a data war.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, the world's nations are
becoming irrelevant. Corporations are the true global powers, with
information the most valuable currency, while the smaller island nations
have become sanctuaries for data pirates and terrorists. A
globe-trotting PR executive for the large corporate economic democracy
Rizome Industries Group, Laura Webster is present when a foreign
representative is assassinated on Rizome soil during a conference for
offshore data havens. Dispatched immediately on an international mission
of diplomacy, Laura hopes she can make a difference in a volatile,
unsteady world, but instead finds herself trapped on the front lines of
rapidly escalating third-world hostilities and caught up in an
inescapable net of conspiracy, terrorism, post-millennial voodoo, and
electronic warfare.
During the 1980s, science fiction luminary Bruce Sterling envisioned the
future . . . and hit it almost dead-on. The author who, along with
William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker, helped create and
define the cyberpunk subgenre imagines a world of tomorrow in Islands
in the Net that bears a striking--and disturbing--resemblance to our
present-day information-age reality. Nominated for the Hugo and Locus
Awards and winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Sterling's
extraordinary novel is a gripping, eye-opening, and remarkably prescient
science fiction classic.
