Bogus review, grotesquely overrated author
on
The Zenith Angle
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· Score: 2, Funny
The undeserved adulation of Bruce Sterling exemplifies what has gone so terribly wrong with the publishing industry over the past 20 years.
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:
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:
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
Slashdot Mirror
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