Islands in the Net is a 1988 science fiction novel by American writer Bruce Sterling. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1989, and was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards that same year.

  • End of the Cold War - though how it ended in the novel is quite different than how it ended in reality.
  • Wearable, personal computers (the watchphone).
  • Assassination by drone.
  • "Drugs, in the form of a pure synthetic THC, are also cheap and widely accessible."
  • The end of apartheid in South Africa, which achieves Black majority rule.

Failed predictions

  • Islands anticipates that the Soviet Union will still be in existence in 2023 - in reality, the USSR was officially dissolved on December 8, 1991, just three years after the book was published.
  • In Islands, communication on the Network relies on one-way messaging: pre-recorded video messages and telex. It misses both the interactive nature of the WWW and effects of Moore's Law on prices. Excerpt, p 16-17: "The Lodge did most of its business as telex, straight print sent by wire ... it was cheapest and simplest... Fax was good for graphics and still photos; the fax machine was essentially a Xerox with a phone ... Rizome favored one-way prerecorded calls because they were more efficient. There was less chance of expensive screwup in a one-way recorded call... Teleconferencing was the expensive borderland where phones blurred into television."
  • South Africa having its name changed to Azania after the fall of apartheid and expanding greatly in size northward.

References

Source material

  • Islands in the Net at Worlds Without End