Slashdot Mirror
The Zenith Angle
Full disclosure forces me to mention that the publisher sent me an advance copy in the hope that I'd write a cover blurb it -- and I did. I'm really impressed. To sum it up in a single sentence suitable for a dustjacket slot, Bruce has written a Catch-22 for the Slashdot generation: a wry, cynical, informed peek at the paranoid world of the post-9/11 cyberspookerati that shines a bright light on the hidden arsenal of infowar.
So what's it all about?
Meet Derek Vandeveer: your typical shy, retiring, brilliant computer scientist working for an internet startup, married to an equally shy and retiring astronomer. And his former college roommate, Tony Carew: your typical dot-com boardroom monkey, a slick, extroverted hustler with a bizjet and a girlfriend from Bollywood. 9/11 happens, and their worlds are never going to be the same again. One of them is going to betray everything he holds precious, the other is going to dive head-first into the twilight world of internet-era espionage, and when they meet again the consequences will be explosive.
The plot romps along with ironic, discursive energy, from the Rocky Mountain hideaway of an increasingly eccentric billionaire industrialist to the bolt-hole basement where America's guardians wait out the long watch for an act of atomic terrorism -- but we're in safe hands here, because we've got Sterling for a guide. This is the future. This is now.
At this point in a normal review I'd start comparing the product to other novels. In fact, if I was Bruce Sterling reviewing this book and it was written by somebody else, I'd say something like: "this is a book that stands proudly in the tradition of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon [if Cryptonomicon was, like, a normal-length novel instead of a trilogy in a corset] and Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies"[but hang on, Secrets and Lies isn't even fiction -- where am I saying, here?] ..."
But I'm not Bruce (and I don't have the chutzpah to put words into his mouth because he's a better reviewer than I am). So let's just say, my take on affairs is that The Zenith Angle doesn't really stand in any kind of tradition at all (even though it does read better if you also dig Schneier and Stephenson). It's one of a kind. What we've got is one of the godfathers of cyberpunk taking a long, hard look at where we've come to. And it's a frightening place indeed. He's been tracking this territory in WIRED for several years now: from the frontiers of hacking (which he documented in 1994's The Hacker Crackdown ) to the weirdly convoluted secret history of the military-industrial complex.
By inclination and occupation Sterling is one-half journalist, one-half futurist, and one-half gonzo cyberpunk novelist -- and he somehow crams it all into this book, a 150% full-on technothriller with science fictional sensibilities, or an SF novel about a future that has imploded into the present. This is good, excellent, stuff. Trust me, you'll like it. Pre-order it from Amazon or buy it next month when it comes out -- but read it anyway. It's seminal and it's scary.
Besides Amazon, you can pre-order The Zenith Angle from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Get us all hyped up over a book that won't be out for a month... Evil!!! :)
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Well, as Timothy already mentioned, the name of the book that I read was The Zenith Angle. It's about these ... angles. Angles ... with computer programmers ... and ... plots that romp on ... and Bollywood ... Did I mention this book was written by a guy named Bruce Sterling? And published by the good people at Del Rey. So, in conclusion, on the Slashdot scale of eight to ten, ten being the highest, eight being the lowest, and nine being average, I give this book ... a ten. Any questions? Nope? Then I'll just sit down.
For those of us who don't want to use Barnes and Nobel for ethical reasons, use this Amazon link:
The Zenit Angle
I'm amazed Slashdot doesn't add this by default.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
There's a lot of overlap in their subject matter (near future to distant future, high-tech worlds full of mindboggling creatures and machines you can see slowly gathering on the current horizon), but ...
:) Gibson seemingly has more fun, though much of his work is anything but lighthearted. I have (somewhere) the unabridged audio version of "Neuromancer," and Gibson's voice (he's the narrator, unusual and good for audio books) has a cynical, nasal sound that makes me want to go place the world's most serious, biting, unbelievably bitter and pessimistic fast-food order. It took me a little while to stop being weirded out by his voice, and now I will (no great stretch) submit his is the perfect voice for the story. It is, well, *his* voice and his story, so it's not like I can object very well ;)
Sterling's style is more "serious" (IMO) and therefore easier to parody
"Do your fries have genetically engineered crypto-organisms put there by the military industrial complex on them just to spy on my ultradrug mind-enhancement? No? I don't believe you, but make it a large."
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Cory,
If you want to unload this book before you move, you know so you have one less thing to take across the pond with you, I would be happy to take it off your hands. You know, just offering the services I can provide.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
Let's start with the tag line in Stross' review: "Bruce Sterling has been writing on the cutting edge of SF for close to thirty years now."
Wrong.
Tragically, Bruce Sterling's latest novel sags like a falsie on an aging Las Vegas chorus girl. Still scribbled in the same antique cyberpunk vein he pounded out 30 years ago, Sterling's prose has gotten so cobwebbed you have to blow the dust off before you can read it.
Just as Distractions offered a mediocre rewrite of 1949's All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren with superfluous cyberpunk elements thrown in, The Zenith Angle offers a fifth-rate rewrite of 1994's The Great Hacker Crackdown with unnecessary 9/11 cyberspookery tossed on...in the manner of croutons dumped on a wilting salad.
Even sadder? How far Cory Doctorow has gotten by french-kissing Sterling's bunghole. Doctorow types creatively enough, but Doctorow's own efforts ("0wnz0red") recap the already tired territory of 80s cyberpunk with a sixth-rate rehash of Greg Benford's "Blood Music" (a vastly superior story). Yet Doctorow's stunningly mediocre story made it to the Nebula Awards finals...a brutal indictment of the current bankrupt state of science fiction.
Bruce Sterling excels, all right...but not as a novelist.
His speciality? The chautauqua. A hallelujah-I-done-found-Jesus William Jennings Bryan old-fashioned rabble-rousing speech. Sterling does great chautauqua. His rip-roaring rodomontade "A Contrarian View Of Open Source" remains by orders of magnitude the best piece of persiflage Sterling ever wrote:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/ 05/sterling.html
Unfortunately, Sterling plots books a la Chip Delaney -- he throws 'em up in the air and takes whatever lands as the end. That usually fails badly, as in Distractions, Schismatrix, Islands In the Net and most of Sterling's other botched novel-shaped abortions. (In fairness, Holy Fire actually worked -- a rarity for Sterling's oeuvre.)
As mentioned, Sterling's short fiction far excels his novels, and his essays and lectures vastly outshine his short fiction.
Like Sterling, Doctorow writes better essays and puff pieces for the unwise common wisdom than fiction. This week, GPL licenses and open-source-everything. (Everyone genuflect! The answer has arrived! Open source! Never mind asking how musicians or writers or artists will earn a living... Hey, works great for operating systems, so why not try it with everything?) Next week, who knows? Coal tar health elixirs? The magnificent amphicar? How about megadoses of Vitamin C?
Though he poses as a member of the technorati, Sterling lacks basic technical knowledge of the kind of slashdotters take for granted. And Sterling's appalling misinformation oft catches up with him, as in Doctorow's aforementioned transcript of Sterling's SXSW talk.
Viz.: Sterling calls doubts about global warming "Lysenkoism," a claim which squarely contradicts the facts. Compare this article from the Christian Science Monitor on global warming:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0318/p13s01-sten.h tml
I despise Dubya more than Doctorow or Sterling put together, but the evidence just fails to support sweeping claims of the kind Sterling makes -- especially his absurd charge of Lysenkosim.
Bottom line: climatologists have no real idea why the Little Ice Age occurred, and the current warming trend appears to have begun circa 4000 BCE... Which makes it hard to blame on CFCs.
I digress, but with purpose: Bruce Sterling slings around this kind of rampant misinformation willy-nilly, and his credibility suffers for it. A "cutting edge" cyberpunk would check his facts. Try google, B