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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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
This author has done the impossible. He has written a piece of significant length that seems to say nothing at all.
Get us all hyped up over a book that won't be out for a month... Evil!!! :)
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Technothrillers are nice, but I'm hoping the characters are a bit more developed instead of the stereotypical caste that they seem to come from in this guys' and everyone else's 'technothrillers'. I can understand why more of the bend is on other details, but it would really enthrall me. I will however not judge this one until I've read it, but it's just food for thought.
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.
"In fact, if I was Bruce Sterling reviewing"...
And if I were the person who suggested I read "The Difference Engine" to introduce me to Sterling, I'd feel pretty dumb for suggesting this book. It would have been my very own suggestion which made me waste my time reading half of a novel.
I think I actually brought that one back to the store and demanded a refund. If he does do better work, I'm afraid this little gem will prevent me from ever reading it. If you want good, intelligent sci fi, try Phillip K Dick.
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 --
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.
After reading William Gibson's Neuromancer I wanted to read more science fiction like it. At the time there was a sort of boomlet of "cyberpunk" authors. In addition to the master, Gibson, some of them were pretty good. I liked Walter Jon Williams' book Hardwired. K.W. Jetter wrote some pretty interesting stuff. Jon Shirley wrote the Eclipse books which were a sort of cool combination of rock, drugs and cyberpunk distopia. And then there was Bruce Sterling. I've always seen Sterling as a wana-be Gibson. Unfortunately for Sterling he does not have Gibson's brilliance as a writer or Gibson's unique world view. Of the writers listed above, Sterlings has always seemed to me to be the weakest. I've found Sterling's writing in WIRED equally empty. Sterling might be viewed as a science fiction Tom Clancy (he even seems to share Tom Clancy's right wing political views).
William Gibson has written one really weak book, The Difference Engine and this was co-authored with Sterling. It is interesting to note that they have not written anything together since. Gibson must have come to realize that he is far weaker with Sterling than without.
I just finished Charles Stross' Singularity Sky (which I think was reviewed on Slashdot). I thought that it was excellent and I look forward to reading more of Stross' work. I rate Stross far higher than Sterling. Where Sterling is a techno-wana-be, Stross is the real thing. The author I would compare Stross to the most is Ken MacLeod (who I also like).
I have not had a chance to read Sterling's latest (which I think I'll get from the library). But if you're spending money, I'd spend it on Stross, Ken MacLeod, Dan Simmons (his latest book Illium is interesting). Or if you have not read Ian MacDonald, try his book Terminal Cafe which is one of the great speculations on the implications of nanotechnology.
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote it together.
Bruce Sterling has a adaptive vocabulary, and a sharp wit, but there's something beautifully barren about William Gibson's prose.
Bruce Sterling also focuses a bit more on "the big picture", while Gibson seems to be more intimately familiar with his characters. Sterling's books seem more positive, and Gibson's more dark. (I've read them all).
Overall, they're both great authors, and if you like one, you'll almost certainly like the other.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
"Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are this thrilling."
BTW, Sterling called this kind of writing "Nowpunk" at his SXSW talk last week: http://craphound.com/sterlingsxsw04.txt
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
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
I've always loved Sterling more than Gibson. Both had soem really good ideas back int eh day but things like the Shapers and Machinists, e.g. 20 Evocations, really just hit the spot with me. Especially when you could read half a dozen stories and see them all play out independantly in the same world and see the differences in world with the passage of time. Other books such as The Artifical Kid and Holy Fire were similarly really fun to read with ideas that I just enjoyed. In comparison, Gibson just seems to drift further and further from my intrests and enjoyablity. It took me four attempts to get through Pattern Recognition, although it was still a good book it just never grabbed me. Still, Sterling, Gibson, Stephenson, etc. all seem to be tryign to get away from Sci Fi and neat ideas and bring their stuff closer to the persent day. I don't know if they're trying to break into "respectable writing" or what but I don't like it. I finished Cryptonomicon and felt like I'd just read the latest Crichton or Clansey. If I wanted to read Crichton or Clansey, I'd be reading them. I want Sci Fi. I want fantastic worlds and technology. Want neat ideas in what might be. If I wanted technothrillers, i'd be reading techno thrillers to begin with. It was sad enough for Stephenson to put out uninspired stuff, but now that Sterling is joining him, there's no longer any authors for me to eagerly await books from (except for Rudy Rucker).
Look at it this way. No one gets paid to reveiw books for slashdot. So really the only reason to write a book reveiw is that you like the book so much that you want to share it, or that its such a steaming load you wish to warn the world to steer clear of it. How many books in the latter category have you read completely enough to give a thorough rational reveiw?
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Maybe it would help to define the trailing edge first:
* Stories about interstellar empires that look and smell like the British or Roman empires.
* Yet another Civil War alternate history story.
* Any SF future which doesn't fully take into account scientific fact and technical innovation.
* . . . and other SF that seems more like comfort food than brain food.
Whether a piece of fiction is "cutting edge" or not doesn't determine whether it's well written or entertaining.
I've read plenty of really well written comfort food SF, and plenty of cutting edge stuff that just did nothing for me.
Stefan
Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" got released a bit back as a free e-text. Copyright's in the header, and it's a great read, so go get it :).
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
...But if Charlie Stross makes the time to write a review for us (and if Cory Doctorow takes the time to chip in) I think it's deserving of a little less cynicism on our behalf. (While Stross (and Doctorow, perhaps) *might* have received some kind of reimbursment for writing the dustjacket blurb, I think it's safe to assume he is/they are not working on a sales commission...)
The comparison being made between Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson are interesting to me.
I agree with those who don't rate The Difference Engine very highly. It's clear to me that both Stephenson and Sterling are deeply interested in the social history of technology, but their partnership on this novel didn't work (for me) because while the book was bulging with details and ideas, there was no story. A lot of detail, a lot of people and places, but nothing resembling a plot, character development, thesis, or anything else that keeps me turning the pages until the end. In my imagined reality I see the two of them furiously exhanging emails and drafts, the signal inexorably swamped by the noise of two people who have a lot to say, but who can't agree on a way to say it.
I don't agree with those who follow the "if you like X you'll love Y" formula with Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. But... if I could assemble an author with Sterling's understanding of our world, Stephenson's interest in how we got here, and Gibson's talent for metaphor and wordplay, *then* we'd have a novelist who would either change the world or cause it to implode.
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
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
It always amazes me how people go on and on about the "mainstream" authors (presumably applying "what's-good-for-the-masses-is-good-for-me" logic). Now I'm not trying to dis Sterling's work - mainly because I don't recall having read any of it. What I am aiming at though are the Gibson followers. I've read Mona Lisa Overdrive and Johnny Mneumonic (which was much better than the film) and didn't find that they made any sizeable dent on my mental landscape. All of the stuff I've read that was written by Greg Egan however, left virtual craters in my mind. How often is it that you get an (Australian) sci-fi author who is also a hard core computer programmer, is into philosophy, mathematics, chemistry and biology and writes beginner's guides to quantum mechanics just for kicks? Google his home page to download some stupendously inspiring short stories. As far as Pat Cardigan is concerned, her two books called "Fools" and "Sinners" make The Matrix look like a childs game and leave you spinning after the last page. Unfortuantely both of them seem to be out of print and the only current stuff you'll find written by her is a guide to the Lost in Space movie.