Novel: Distraction

Setting and premise
Distraction is set in a near-future United States fractured by economic collapse, political paralysis, and cultural fragmentation. Regions and cities have splintered into competing power centers where corporate interests, local strongmen, and technocratic cliques jockey for control. Everyday life is shot through with advanced technologies, biotech, media-engineered persuasion, and novel urban design, yet these tools coexist uneasily with institutional rot and social disillusionment. The result is a landscape that feels both hypermodern and dangerously brittle, where grand plans for reconstruction are constantly undercut by short-term incentives and human unpredictability.

Main character and narrative
Oscar Valparaiso is a consummate political operator whose career has been built on shaping images, engineering campaigns, and navigating the shadow zones between policy and spectacle. Haunted by a checkered past and an appetite for risk, Oscar becomes central to a pragmatic project: to stitch together a stable, sustainable polity out of the nation's ruins. He pursues a mix of coalitional politics, media choreography, and technological fixes, attempting to reconcile lofty goals for ecological renewal with the grubby realities of power.
The narrative follows Oscar's maneuvering as he tries to turn theory into practice, recruiting allies, outflanking rivals, and wrestling with the ethical compromises such work demands. Obstacles arrive from all sides, corporate saboteurs, rebellious localities, and the inherent brittleness of systems that depend on crafted consent. Personal loyalties, past transgressions, and the unpredictable behavior of both people and technologies keep the stakes high and the outcomes uncertain.

Technology, politics, and ecological ideas
Technology in Distraction is presented as both solution and symptom. Advanced biological tools, engineered crops, and new forms of urban planning offer pathways toward sustainability, but Sterling probes how such tools are deployed: Who controls them, on whose authority, and toward what ends? The book interrogates technocratic impulses to "fix" society from the top down and shows how interventionist designs can be undermined by media spin, market forces, and local resistance. At the same time, there is a genuine impulse toward repair, practical proposals for revamped infrastructure, ecological restoration, and resilient governance structures that feel earned rather than merely idealistic.
Sterling's treatment of media and persuasion is integral to the political plot. Information technologies and public spectacle are not incidental; they are the mechanisms through which consent is manufactured and policy enacted. The novel asks whether a society can be remade by policy and design when attention itself can be bought, curated, and diverted.

Style and tone
The prose is trenchant, economical, and often mordant, blending speculative extrapolation with sharp political satire. Sterling moves briskly through scenes of negotiation, cityscapes, and technological demonstration, keeping the reader aware of the contingent, constructed nature of political solutions. Dialogue and set pieces carry much of the novel's ironic energy, while sober passages outline the mechanics of policy and urban rebuilding with a practitioner's eye.

Themes and legacy
Distraction is concerned with authority, legitimacy, and the moral hazards of expertise. It explores the paradox that those best positioned to design long-term solutions are also those most tempted to manipulate public perception to achieve them. The novel resists easy prescriptions, insisting that sustainable change requires more than clever devices; it demands accountability, civic repair, and attention to the messy incentives that shape human behavior. Sterling's work remains resonant for its prescience about fragmentation, the dangers of technocratic overreach, and the continuing struggle to link ecological ambition with democratic practice.