Rating: 
Summary: bad enough to stop halfway through
Review: I'm a voracious reader, and that equates to about a book a week for me. I am a lover of all sci fi, and plenty of other fiction, too.This book was as fingernails on slate by the time I was half through so I stopped. It is self-consciously clever- so much so I blushed with embarassment for the author. A 10 year old girl demonstrated a working familiarity with scholarly writings on existentialism and feminist politics to her estranged-but-loveable dad. He didn't comment on this absurd precosity. That's when I gave up. As much as I read books and these reviews which often guide my purchases, I rarely post anything, myself. Here I make the effort to save you -stranger- from a distinctly unpleasant dose of forced
and insincere mirth.
Rating: 
Summary: Another cultural con man, this one for Y2K
Review: Leggy Starlitz has a lucrative plan for the G-7 girls, and the only number one rule is that they stop before the year 2000. But when the mother of his only child blows into town, daughter in tow, he needs to take a family visit to Mexico and abandon the act to the tender mercies of a Turkish spy/manager. Sure enough, while he's communing with his father, the French One of the G7 girls becomes the first Dead One, and Starlitz is forced to return before his cheap & fake rock band becomes the first shot in a very real culture war. If you've read Sterling before, Zeitgeist is going to be vastly entertaining. Playing with issues of culture, temporality, and celebrity, it romps across the end of the 20th century. This said, it's thinner than some of his other novels, and I don't think it's the place for a Sterling newbie. I liked it, however.
Rating:
Summary: A very good "What is Reality?" book
Review: Not necessarily one of my favorite books, this one has enough "alien elements" to it to, as another reviewer said, to join the sci-fi ranks, such as the Old Masters who gave us "Rendezvous with Rama", "Childhood's End", "I,Robot", "Ringworld", "Foundation", as well as cyberpunk books like "Mona Lisa Overdrive", "Neuromancer", "Snow Crash", "Cryptonomicon", and "Cyber Hunter".
Rating:
Summary: A very good "What is Reality?" book
Review: Not necessarily one of my favorite books, this one has enough "alien elements" to it to, as another reviewer said, to join the sci-fi ranks, such as the Old Masters who gave us "Rendezvous with Rama", "Childhood's End", "I,Robot", "Ringworld", "Foundation", as well as cyberpunk books like "Mona Lisa Overdrive", "Neuromancer", "Snow Crash", "Cryptonomicon", and "Cyber Hunter".
Rating:
Summary: Eh.
Review: Sterling has become a complete pop culture junkie. This isn't a bad thing as he's done some excellent journalism on cultural trends but I have the feeling that his days as a novelist are at an end. I picked up Zeitgeist expecting a novel and got the feeling that he's largely using the main character as a vehicle to make his own observations about media and culture at the turn of the century. It just dosen't hold together as fiction as well. I enjoyed Holy Fire and Distraction a great deal but I think unless he removes himself from his immediate time frame with his fiction, his storylines loose their cohesion. I'm still an avid fan, I just think he should have dropped the pretense of fiction and just wrote an extended essay.
Rating:
Summary: Eh.
Review: Sterling has become a complete pop culture junkie. This isn't a bad thing as he's done some excellent journalism on cultural trends but I have the feeling that his days as a novelist are at an end. I picked up Zeitgeist expecting a novel and got the feeling that he's largely using the main character as a vehicle to make his own observations about media and culture at the turn of the century. It just dosen't hold together as fiction as well. I enjoyed Holy Fire and Distraction a great deal but I think unless he removes himself from his immediate time frame with his fiction, his storylines loose their cohesion. I'm still an avid fan, I just think he should have dropped the pretense of fiction and just wrote an extended essay.
Rating: 
Summary: A Contemporary Science Fiction Thriller
Review: Sterling manages to take us magically to what seems like another planet [Turkey], reveals things about manners and morals of today that might seem decades away, darts from the glitz to the gutters, introduces us to truly unique characters, and generally dazzles us with each twist and turn of the story. This story would make a great movie.
Rating:
Summary: Enter a Narrative Black Hole
Review: The author of ZEITGEIST sketched out the world as seen through the brain of a pop music magnate, Starlitz, who has a very peculiar world view-where the "deeper reality is made out of language." In this story, as in all stories, the characters must follow the narrative-stay in that world created by their language. The raconteur, Starlitz, tells the reader: "in a world made out of language nothing else is even possible." This peculiar world that the characters exist in is an alien habitat, possibly the only element that qualifies this story as science fiction. Following Phil Dick's obsession of "what is reality?" Sterling invites the reader into a world so distorted by language as to imprison the characters. On P 152 he tells us, "There is no way out of a world that is made of language." Starlitz warns his daughter to never go to the place that Wittgenstein called an "empty space where things can't be said, can't be spoken, can't even be thought. ...You can never come out of there. It's a Black Hole." The plot was interesting. Starlitz is peddling stupid pop music and trashy G7 gals with zero talent from the worlds richest countries to the some of the world's poorest. At stories end, in contrast to the G7 girls whose tour ended in monetary disaster, Starlitz likes the idea of next trying the tour with seven very talented gals from seven obscure countries singing the best music with the ambition of making no money at all. Their success could support Sterling's idea that reality depends entirely on the words used-the narrative.
Rating:
Summary: post-modern fantasy
Review: The power of narrative to define reality is a common theme in much of fantasy fiction. (Silverlock by John Myers Myers is a good place to start if you're looking for that theme, but it's all through fantasy, where prophecy and other narrative-based magic abounds.) Zeitgeist updates this to 1999 and a superficially global perspective, as well as adding a lot of humor. Those who think this novel is science fiction and then complain about its lack of realism have missed what for me is the point of the novel. It's as much a fantasy set in contemporary times as American Gods (by Neil Gaiman) or most of Charles De Lint's work, except Zeitgeist is about current or recent myths instead of the traditional ones about gods or elves. It's a millennial fantasy -- Y2K was supposed to be the end of the world, don't you remember? It fizzled as an apocalypse, but many people seriously believed in it. That is one of the main themes of the book, how the stories of a cultural belief can shape reality. How exactly do people think something is science fiction where characters vomit money and bullets, children levitate, and the main character summons the spirit of his father through a ritual though unseasonal celebration of Christmas? Zeitgeist isn't about the future, it's a mythologization of the most recent past -- a very entertaining one.
Rating:
Summary: Too good to be mere gonzo
Review: This book has a heart of surrealistic mysticism in the mode of Like Water For Chocolate or One Hundred Years Of Solitude. But the book's brain is almost hyper-realistic in its knowledge of the contemporary world. There are other SF writers, good writers, who dabble in surrealism but no others are so relentlessly informed.
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