There were a ton of great big ideas in this book, but the story wrapped around them was hard to follow. Each section was difficult to get invested in, and then it switched perspective to a new character. I was never quite sold on any of the characters by the time their section was done, and even with the book completely finished I still have a lot of unanswered questions. I feel like I could really love a TV or film adaptation, but as it stands I feel ambivalent about this one.
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http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2016/04/review-of-caryatids-by-bruce-sterling.h... ( )

A major disappointment. Pointless and jerky plot. ( )

With the world undergoing disastrous disintegration from man-made causes, who better to bring together the man-made solutions than three female clones as damaged and traumatised and dysfunctional as the world they're supposed to save? Most of their sisters are dead, their mother/sister is out of reach from the forces of law and order in orbit and the four surviving clones are scattered over the world, engaged in various morally dubious projects of reclamation, amelioration, sterilisation and terrorism. One man sets out to bring them together and hopes by doing so to mend the ideological divisions hampering the task of global salvation.

Well, I liked it. Sterling is too optimistic to let the world die screaming, but too much of a realist to make survival easy pr cost free. The clones are like a fractured human psyche, half-mad and self-hating, to the extent that getting anything useful other than tragedy and heartbreak out of them seems impossible. Whether they succeed, and whether Sterling succeeds, is for the reader to decide. ( )

The strongest characters in a Sterling novel since Distraction. He sometimes has trouble maintaining strong characterization while getting his ideas across. The ideas are interesting as always. ( )