As we have come to expect from Sterling, the book is so thick with ideas that lesser writers could make whole careers out of stealing them. But we're used to Sterling being more intelligent and creative than anybody else writing today. The story is terrific action-adventure science fiction. People that we care deeply about are in grave danger. They make choices that change their lives and the world.
Sterling understands how tentative power is, how fragile communities are.
He also doesn't stack the deck by giving all the good ideas to one ideological group. There is some truth and goodness in almost every movement, as well as some weakness or corruption or self-deception. There is never a clear-cut victory, never a defeat from which there is no hope of recovery. In short, his book feels like true history, something I have never found in any other near-future science fiction. Islands in the Net is also brilliant romance, both in the love-story sense and in the sense of a mythically true story.