31 January, 2002: Schismatrix
Bruce Sterling has a weakness for the picaresque. When he's got his A-game going, in his top-notch work like Holy Fire and Distraction, he can create dizzying and plausible visions of futures that are inhabited by real, fascinating, plausible people. When he's not on, as in Islands in the Net and Zeitgeist, he just creates dizzying visions of the future. He still puts out books with an immense idea-to-page ratio, but the characters recede behind the details of his fictional world; sometimes they vanish altogether. Schismatrix is a novel in the second mode, but it's about as well-executed an example as I can think of.