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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.
I've never read anything by Stirling, and I was going to skip the review until I saw who wrote the review. There's something oddly ironic about reading a review just because it was written by one of your favorite authors.
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William Gibson has been doing the same thing; also a sci-fi writer, his latest novel Pattern Recognition is set in the present just like The Zenith Angle.
Personally I'm a big fan of Gibson, but have read very little by Sterling. Can anyone who's read both comment on similarities and differences between the two?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Not being picky about spelling; there's an SF author Stirling who writes very different stuff.
Suggestion: Start with bruces' short fiction. There are a couple of collections out there. Globalhead is uneven, but the good stuff ("Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Shores of Bohemia") is really, really good.
A Good Old Fashioned Future has more consistently good stories, including a doozy ("Maneki Neko") about a network-enabled gift economy.
Stefan
Funnily enough, I didn't get paid to write that. All you get if you're asked to blurb a novel is the advance copy of a book that isn't published yet -- and the opportunity to say "sorry" if it doesn't push your buttons.
Globalhead is uneven, but the good stuff ("Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Shores of Bohemia") is really, really good.
... and man, you are there, you become an American, an Arab, a Russian.
Agreed -- not all of the Globalhead stories make the grade -- but don't miss "We See Things Differently" -- my God, that's a great story!
Sterling has an amazing gift for writing political fiction -- he writes American characters, Arab characters, Russian characters
Also not to be missed: "Red Star, Winter Orbit" -- short story, collaboration with William Gibson, appears in Gibson's "Burning Chrome" collection.
-kgj
-kgj