Islands in the Net
Bruce Sterling
 The action takes place in 2023–2025 on Galveston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Grenada, an island in the north east coast of South America; Singapore and Africa. Protagonist Laura Webster, a mother of three-month-old Loretta, works as a public relations employee for global corporation of economic democrats Rizome. Together with her husband David they run the Lodge, a resort for Rizome workers on the island of Galveston. The action sets off when Rizome organizes a conference between itself and three data havens - EFT Commerzbank of Luxembourg, The Young Soo Chim Islamic Bank and Grenada United Bank - in the Lodge. After the first day of the conference, the representative of Grenada, Winston Stubbs, is assassinated. The organization which admits to killing him calls itself "F.A.C.T." (Free Army of Counter-Terrorism). Rizome decides to send Laura with her husband and baby to Grenada on a diplomatic mission to prove that Rizome had nothing to do with the murder. While in Grenada, Laura and David learn about its tragic history and the advanced technology flourishing on the island thanks to “mad-doctors” like the American Brian Prentis. Grenada is ruled by one party, the New Millennium Movement, with Prime Minister Eric Louison who uses voodoo tradition as means of keeping order in the country. Food is plentiful and cheaply produced on one of the huge tankers adapted for factories and housing. Drugs, in the form of a pure synthetic THC, are also cheap and widely accessible. Laura and David manage to escape Grenada after Singapore attacks it. They return to Atlanta and separate. David takes the baby to one of Rizome’s Retreats and Laura sets off to Singapore to continue her mission to improve the world. In Singapore, Laura witnesses the launching of the first Singaporean space rocket, celebrated by a speech from Singapore’s prime minister and leader of People’s Innovation Party, Kim Sue Lok. The celebration ends in chaos as the prime minister spits fire and explodes, as it turns out he was a victim of Grenada’s pseudo-voodoo tricks. This event triggers national panic and riots. Grenada invades Singapore in reaction to Singapore’s previous attack. In addition, Singapore’s opposition party, the Anti-Labour Party with Razak as a leader, tries to use the situation to get into power. The last group to invade Singapore is the Red Cross. Laura is cut off from the Net and cannot contact her husband or Rizome’s headquarters. Together with other Rizome’s workers in Singapore she decides to get herself arrested and wait in prison for the end of war. Unfortunately, Laura gets separated from her companions and ends up on the roof of The Young Soo Chim Islamic Bank. From there a chopper takes her, together with other survivors from the riots, to a cargo ship somewhere in the middle of a sea. The ship is bombed by F.A.C.T. and Laura is taken to one of F.A.C.T.’s submarines. There she learns more about the organization. Laura is then taken by a plane and transported to one of the prisons in Bamako, the capital of Mali. F.A.C.T. took over this country's government in order to have a base for the organization. After a conversation with the Inspector of Prisons she finds out that she poses a threat to the organization because they think she knows they have an atomic bomb which they keep on board of Thermopylae, the submarine she has been kept on. She spends two years in the prison. When a South African country supported by European authority of the Vienna convention attacks Mali, she is taken in a convoy to the atomic site to be shot on camera as a hostage. She is miraculously freed when the convoy is attacked by a group of Inadin Cultural Revolutionists. Their leader is Jonathan Gresham, an American journalist and radical, who helps Inadin people, also called Tuaregs the nomadic tribes of Sahara, fight against any forms of outside interference in their traditional way of life. Gresham takes Laura to an Azanian relief camp in order to save the life of her convoy companion, Azanian doctor Katje Selous, wounded in the action. Outside of the relief camp Gresham records Laura’s statement on all that happened to her and sends in on the Net. Laura and Gresham get romantically involved but this feeling has no future as she has to go back to the States and Gresham will continue to help Inadins. Next when we meet Laura she arrives at Galveston and takes part in an official Rizome party organized for her. Her husband David lost hope that she was alive and got involved with Laura’s closest friend, Emily Donato. Loretta, Laura and David’s daughter, is raised by Laura’s mother Margaret. Laura continues to work for Rizome and tries to improve the world by doing so. The last scene in the novel describes Hiroshima being bombed by F.A.C.T. Fortunately, this time the bomb did not explode. In the fictional world of Islands there exists a book titled The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency by Colonel Jonathan Gresham. It is banned by Vienna and widely read in the political underground. It draws on the example of T. E. Lawrence who during the First World War helped the Arabs fight the Ottoman Turks. Instead of fighting the Ottoman Turks, Lawrence convinced Arabs to block their expansion by destroying their communication lines, which at the time were railway tracks and telegraphs. Although Arabs were successful in fighting Turks they became dependent on the British Empire to provide them with industrial products such as explosives and canned food. Gresham calls the First World War “a proto-Net civil war”. The Arabs defeated their Ottoman overlords by destroying their communication network, namely the railway and telegraph lines. In Sterling's 21st century, for the Tuaregs the enemy is the Net. However, the Arabs were colonized by the British with industrial products and manufactures such as guns, cotton, dynamite and canned food. For Sterling's Tuaregs the necessary products of the Networld are solar power, plastique, and single-cell protein. Gresham’s book shows a pessimistic view of globalization and its mechanisms. It takes the view that it is impossible for small and economically weaker nations to stay completely independent; global influence will always be present with its positive and negative aspects. In the world of the novel the USA and the Soviet Union are still the world powers. The international political order, which is guarded by the Vienna Convention and uses censorship as a means of keeping the world order, is weak and divided, and to avoid world panic protects the terrorists from F.A.C.T. Countries that grow in power are Grenada, Singapore and Luxemburg, the so-called data havens where data piracy is legitimate. Organizations that feel threatened by the growing influence of havens are Rizome Industries Group, an economic democracy global corporation which suffers losses because of the data piracy and wants to negotiate with the pirates, and the Free Army of Counter-Terrorism (F.A.C.T.) which calls itself “the real world police” and plans to deal with any signs of attacks on “doctrines of national sovereignty”. This is the main reason why F.A.C.T. assassinates Winston Stubbs and bombs the ship on which Laura was sailing with Singaporean pirates. The novel shows a new phenomenon emerging in the political world. The global organizations start realizing that they no longer need governments to successfully run their affairs; “Let us cut out the middleman,” says one of Kymera Corporation workers. The F.A.C.T. seems to be fighting signs of such thinking, while at the same time it is a global corporation which chose one of African countries, Mali, and took over its government in order to have its own military base. Africa is still “a mess”. The only problem which has been solved is famine, thanks to "the scop", a single-cell protein. The countries still suffer from poverty and political instability. People die from retroviruses and have no perspectives and developed countries are not interested in what is going on there.