Zeitgeist

Rating:
Summary: bad enough to stop halfway through
Review: A science fiction novel about Y2K written after Y2K? No, i think the real mystical power of this book came into play in our post-911 world, where the reality of the "culture war" became apparent even to ignorant, self-centered Americans. Can you think of any other novels that mention Osama bin Laden by name?

Personally, i think this is Sterling's best work in years. The self-referentiality and magical realism aspects are hard for many people to grasp (judging from other reviews), but if you're familiar with French semiotics and Spanish language magical novels, it is much easier. And really, magical realism and self-referentiality is as good a lens to view our world of constant surveillance, mass marketing, and millenial change as anything anyone else has to offer in the marketplace of ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Post-911, a prophetic book
Review: A science fiction novel about Y2K written after Y2K? No, i think the real mystical power of this book came into play in our post-911 world, where the reality of the "culture war" became apparent even to ignorant, self-centered Americans. Can you think of any other novels that mention Osama bin Laden by name?

Personally, i think this is Sterling's best work in years. The self-referentiality and magical realism aspects are hard for many people to grasp (judging from other reviews), but if you're familiar with French semiotics and Spanish language magical novels, it is much easier. And really, magical realism and self-referentiality is as good a lens to view our world of constant surveillance, mass marketing, and millenial change as anything anyone else has to offer in the marketplace of ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Too hip-hype for the room
Review: Anyone who reviews this book, unfortunately, has to dig into the same kool, kultural well as Sterling does and ends up sounding as badly antedated as this book already is. So here I go shooting myself in the foot.

Leggy says the whole G7 deal has to wind up by New Year's Day of Y2K? Well, this book is using cultural references that are already atavisms in year Y2K + 1. Too hip, too noir and too self-aware for the room. I think I saw this (type of) film with John Travolta in it and that one creaked of sweat, effort and dialogue that was just a little too precocious. However I did learn a new word: "Rhizomatic". So it's not a complete waste. And it would make a pretty good junk film if the right mind got a hold of it. I think a British director would do it up right.

And it's "Alvin Toffler" not "Toppler".

Rating:
Summary: Bruce Sterling's Stylishly Hip View Of The Millenium
Review: Bruce Sterling's latest novel is perhaps his funniest. It is also the first with a contemporary setting, though some of the plot qualifies as marginal science fiction. Leggy Starlitz, the wily protagonist in several of Sterling's short stories, is the manager of a Spice Girls group. Here he is just as wily, and stylishly hip. This hilarious rollercoaster of a tale stops in Cyprus, Turkey, New Mexico, and Hawaii. Although it is still not quite as accomplished a work of fiction as his acclaimed "Schisimatrix", "Heavy Weather" and "Holy Fire", it shows him writing almost at the peak of his powers. I find it a vast improvement over his disappointing "Distraction". Long time admirers of Bruce Sterling's work won't be disappointed. And others in search of a funny tale set at the dawn of the new millenium will also be quite pleased.

Rating:
Summary: Zeitgeist - Sterling finally conquers the novel
Review: Bruce Sterling's short stories have always been his best medium. See "Our Neural Chernobyl" in _Globalhead_ as an example. With _Zeitgeist_ he has finally written a book that holds up the entire length.

Not to say it keeps the same voice throughout. The first third is typical "Leggy Starlitz" stuff. Exotic sleazy setting - the internationally unrecognized country/province of Turkish Cyprus with dirty dealings and cynical black/gray market behavior.

Then the next third, the redemption of Leggy with observations about parenting, faith to one's friends, and dealing with failure in his treatment of G-7, the girl band he abandons.

The final third he gets his licks in at post-modernism, why Leggy really is a bad person, and deus ex machina endings contained within a deus ex machina ending.

In _Heavy Weather_ Sterling had also tried this and it came off as dull and a little too precious, but by wrapping it in a shiny golden postmodern wrapper it really works.

Others may find this as dated postmodernism, but I sense Sterling is using it (in the Starlitz sense) rather than being serious. But maybe my narrative is limited and cannot jump into a post-post modernist setting.

Rating:
Summary: Zeitgeist - Sterling finally conquers the novel
Review: Bruce Sterling's short stories have always been his best medium. See "Our Neural Chernobyl" in _Globalhead_ as an example. With _Zeitgeist_ he has finally written a book that holds up the entire length.

Not to say it keeps the same voice throughout. The first third is typical "Leggy Starlitz" stuff. Exotic sleazy setting - the internationally unrecognized country/province of Turkish Cyprus with dirty dealings and cynical black/gray market behavior.

Then the next third, the redemption of Leggy with observations about parenting, faith to one's friends, and dealing with failure in his treatment of G-7, the girl band he abandons.

The final third he gets his licks in at post-modernism, why Leggy really is a bad person, and deus ex machina endings contained within a deus ex machina ending.

In _Heavy Weather_ Sterling had also tried this and it came off as dull and a little too precious, but by wrapping it in a shiny golden postmodern wrapper it really works.

Others may find this as dated postmodernism, but I sense Sterling is using it (in the Starlitz sense) rather than being serious. But maybe my narrative is limited and cannot jump into a post-post modernist setting.

Rating:
Summary: Got Geist?
Review: Bruce Sterling, master cyberpunk author, examines the spirit of the twentieth century in his latest novel Zeitgeist. Set in the waning weeks of 1999, Zeitgeist follows Leggy Starlitz (a two-bit American conman marketing a Spice Girls rip-off band called The G-7) as he stumbles through the post-Cold War landscape of Turkish Cyprus (with side trips to the American West and Hawaii). Leggy's questionable connections with sleazy Turkish bureaucrats and former Soviet black marketeers costs him control of the band - plus his ex-girlfriend shows up at just the wrong moment to deposit their 13-year-old daughter with him. Within the crucible of Cyprus, where East meets West and the Third World meets MTV, Sterling examines the sum total of the twentieth century, mulling over everything from Y2K to New Age mumbo-jumbo, to the fickleness of pop culture, to the dysfunctionality of the New World Order.

Sterling's writing is hip and cynical, with an eclectic array of eccentric characters (including a mysterious vagrant who speaks only in palindromes). The snappy dialogue is what we've come to expect from so-called "cyberpunk," and you'll alternately laugh and shake your head as the weirdness unfolds.

The oddest thing about this novel is that it's a Y2K novel (seemingly) published a year too late! And it's not really a science fiction novel per se; nonetheless, it's an interesting book that makes us rethink our assumptions about the last hundred years, and makes us wonder if the next hundred will be anything like we imagine.

Rating:
Summary: Feeling slow-witted about this one -- or is it the book?
Review: First, if this is the first time you have heard of Sterling and haven't read his other work, STOP right there. Read his short stories in Globalhead or A Good Old Fashioned Future. Then, decide if you are interested in reading more. If this were the first Sterling work you ever picked up, I doubt you would ever read anything more by him. You need a gentler introduction to Sterling.

Second, before you purchase this book, take a look at Sterling's Leggy Starlitz short stories. The three that I know of are: "Hollywood Kremlin" (in Globalhead), "Are you for 86?" (in Globalhead), and "The Littlest Jackal" (in A Good Old Fashioned Future). If you like those stories and want to know more, for sure read Zeitgeist - you will probably like it. Also, if you don't read the short stories, you will have a harder time figuring out all of the details in Zeitgeist - not 100% necessary but very helpful.

Leggy Starlitz is definitely one of those characters that you really love and "get" or one of those characters that you hate, you think is shallow, and you just don't understand. Personally, I think that I understand at least a little of who/what Starlitz is and (especially in the short stories), I really loved him. He's not a flat character and there is a lot about him that is not explained either in the short stories or in Zeitgeist.

That said, did I like Zeitgeist? "Yeah, no, maybe" sums it up pretty well. In case you don't know, the word zeitgeist is German for "the spirit of the times". That's the basic concept driving this book. The question is, what is time all about? How does time work? Does the millennium have any meaning at all or is it just another year?

I'm not going to pretend that I actually figured out answers to those questions by reading Zeitgeist, but it did make me think about them a lot. Honestly, I felt that I was a bit out of my depth reading this book. I could definitely tell that there were some super high level concepts that Sterling was trying to get across but I had a hard time understanding them. The main idea was something along the line of time being a narrative and about how events either "fit" the narrative or just don't make sense in it. If events don't belong in the narrative, then bad things tend to happen.

There is a great deal of depth to this novel beyond the high level plot about Starlitz managing a faux Spice Girls band. This is also the case with all of the Starlitz short stories - there's always more than meets the eye. Although that high level plot isn't half bad either, it's the behind the scenes action that I really like. And the tiny Princess Di subplot made me fall over laughing when I figured it all out.

As for the argument that this is a book about Y2K that was published a year to late... If you actually get to the end of the book and still think this, you have definitely missed the point.

Also, as for the argument that Sterling is mired in jargon and doesn't make sense... come on! It's Sterling for crying out loud. This should not be your first Bruce Sterling experience and if you've ever read anything by him, you know what to expect in terms of jargon and being "kool".

Basically, no guarantees that you will actually like this book if you buy it. I would not say that I liked it that much. It's not my favorite work of Sterling's - Heavy Weather and his short stories seem much better to me. In fact, on occasion, Sterling's style falls a little short - in the final section when we're getting closer to Y2K, the story seems to get a bit muddled... but that might be part of the point as well.

Not my favorite Sterling work, but DEFINITELY a book that I will want to re-read in six months or a year. To me, actually wanting to re-read a book is the best possible test of how worthwhile the book was to read.

Rating:
Summary: Anachronitic Zeitgeist
Review: For those who loved Distraction or Holy Fire, a word of advice. Avoid this book.

Zeitgeist is the work of brilliant man, and a phenomenally gifted writer, who has thought long and hard about epistemology, global capitalism, cultural cross-pollination, modernity, liminality, and moral responsiblity. These real world issues having proved too taxing for the tools of modern speculative fiction, Sterling retreats from the paradigmatic high ground of his last two novels, only to embrace stale academic orthodoxies once thought dead. The novelistic result is a painfully embarrasing, and unexpected, admission of creative defeat from science fiction proper to the world of literary respectability. Considering the source, it is at least as surprising and discomfiting as the deathbed coversions of some of the High Modernists to Mother Church.

From its crackerjack "prize" of poststructural theory (presented here as hot-off-the-press wisdom) to its threadbare vestments of magical realism - garishly accessorized with patches of literary postmodernism - Zeitgeist reads like the work of a late seventies graduate student who somehow gained access to CNN feeds. Its historical knowledge is cutting edge, detailed, sharp - its style and thematic lenses, however, were dull when they were ground thirty years ago. Think of the outfits sported by Edina Monsoon on television's Absolutely Fabulous - technically, they're au courant - Dior, Givency, etc. But the mind that has assembled them into jarring, incoherent gestalts - that mind is Carnaby street at its seventies nadir.

Just so with Zeitgeist. How else can one describe characters in a twenty-first century science fiction novel engaged in a self referential meditation on their status as narrative constructs? Given average fan reading habits, perhaps these clever tableaus will strike some as the very voice of the Now. Readers who have come to expect an incisive, original intelligence from Sterling, however, will go home empty handed. The man who once urged us to "woo the muse of the odd" has turned to wooing the muse of Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace, with disappointing results.

Rating:
Summary: "The Spirit of the Times"
Review: I totally have no idea that what I have in my hand is actually a sci-fi novel until I get right in the middle of it, because it was one of the rare occasions I never read the spine as it is indicated there. I also have no idea that the lead charachter Leggy Starlitz is actually the authors vehicle to several other stories of his.

The story filled with political intrigue amidst the backdrop of fictional scenarios, turned to centralize its storyline with the lead charachter when the said charachter was subjected to take care of his telekenetic daughter who appeared halfway on the book.
The novel have a thing about Princess Diana's death, a parody of the Spice Girls, mentioning Osama Bin Laden way before the 9-11 attacks... although the book may not hold your attention for all of the time while you try to read right through it - its quite an ambitious fine novel set in a sort of a parallel universe to the one where we are.

In the meantime, im still a pair of chapters short to finish it as I type away right here...