After reading Bruce Sterling's last bookI was wondering whether it a great one or just one of the clancy-like novel you read in the hall of a railway station. I have always been a great fan of sterling's work but this book is a bit different. First because sterling does not tell us a story about the future (well, that's notmuch of a problem for me) and second because of the plot. I really appreciated Distraction his previous novel, in which the plot was fuzzy. Here it's a even fuzzier, you get it at the end (which I found cool). I liked the book, especially because:

the caricature of the american administration is OK and funny for a european. Besides, he's criticizing the Bush administration in a better way than others.
the mise en scène of the terror bubble is interesting. The terror bubble is what replaced the dot-com bubble after the dot-com crash and september 11.
theambiance is really compelling (maybe because I am in the academic world)
Sterling took the risk to shift a bit from his previous novel
I like Sterling's funny sentences (like "he wore his pants way above his waist", it's dumb I like it)
hum it's silly but at the end, derek's pal call him from geneva to ask him to come work there and it's just few blocks of my appartment...just found it funny.

This review is a bit of a mess