Bruce Sterling's plot holes

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

BRUCE STERLING, one of the sci-fi novelists responsible for the "cyberpunk" sub-genre, is something of an elder statesman of hacker culture, so it comes as no surprise that his attempt to reveal the real significance of WikiLeaks by telling the story behind the story has earned a large internet audience. Having just read the maundering essay, it does come as a surprise to see all the praise heaped upon it in my Twitter feed. I think Aaron Bady aptly captures the character of Mr Sterling's contribution when he calls it "a wonderful precis for a novel about Wikileaks; it's fun to read, and it even bears a distinct resemblance to reality (if reality were a Bruce Sterling novel)". I would differ from Mr Bady only in calling it a "rambling, tendentious, free-associative sketch of a precis of a novel about WikiLeaks."

What is this novel about? I can't hope to write an adequate precis of the precis, but the gist of the thing is that the intertwined history of the National Security Administration and the "cypherpunk movement" makes the emergence of something like WikiLeaks dialectically inevitable. But that leaves out most of Mr Sterling's abundant discursive noodling, which is where most of the action is, and what emerges from Mr Sterling's noodling is mainly how very sorry the kind-hearted Mr Sterling feels for everyone.