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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.
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.
"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