Islands in the Net

Islands in the Net (1988) is a near-future political thriller by Bruce Sterling, one of the central figures of the cyberpunk movement and editor of the landmark anthology Mirrorshades. Set in the early 21st century, the novel imagines a post-Cold War world transformed by the Net, a global information system that has begun to reshape traditional political and economic power. Laura Webster works for Rizome Industries Group, a multinational "economic democracy" whose employees share in corporate decision-making. When a meeting at Rizome's Galveston headquarters brings Laura into contact with representatives of the data havens, small sovereign states that exploit gaps in international law to traffic in information and unregulated technology, she is drawn into a widening conflict that takes her from Grenada to Singapore and eventually war-torn Africa. Sterling's future is not a conventional totalitarian dystopia. Instead, it is a world in which governments increasingly compete with corporations and other organizations for control, while information itself has become both a valuable commodity and a powerful weapon. The result is a fragmented and unstable vision of the networked future that, in several respects, has proved remarkably prescient.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Arbor House, 1988. John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner (1989). ISBN: 0877959528. #11473.
Fine in fine dust jacket.