Islands in the Net

Islands in the Net is a science fiction novel by the American writer Bruce Sterling, published in 1988 and the winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1989.

The novel is set in an early twenty-first century that looks peaceful: the old powers have settled into a system of delocalised corporations and networks, and information is the most valuable commodity in it. Laura Webster works for a large conglomerate and is on her way up, and her career takes her into a dispute about where the edges of that system are supposed to be. What follows is a journey out of the parts of the world that are connected and into the ones that are not, including a datahaven, a city under attack and regions where the arrangements that look universal in the north simply do not reach. Sterling wrote the book around the idea that a network is also a map of the people who have been left off it.

Sterling was one of the writers associated with cyberpunk, and his novels are as interested in politics and geography as in the technology.