Rating: 
Summary: Pay attention to the glue gun scenes.
Review: Anybody who reads a lot of science fiction should have recognized that "The Zenith Angle" is a very well put together book. Whatever Sterling is doing is done on purpose, especially the glue gun scenes which are a dead giveaway that Sterling is up to something.
This is fiction, remember? The techno-babble was well done and parallels the UNiX world.
Rating: 
Summary: Shockingly Bad - By Far, Bruce Sterling's Worst Book
Review: Bruce Sterling was my favorite writer in all the world. I've read every novel Bruce has ever written. I've loved his great characters, great stories and great technology. His writing has gotten continually better throughout the years. But shockingly, all the progress he's made has now been lost. One won't find even a hint of Sterling's former greatness in Zenith Angle. And from looking at other reviews here, I'm not alone in this opinion.
I've recommended Bruce's books to most of my friends and will continue to recommend his great works like Distraction. In fact, Bruce is one of the only authors I was still buying in hardcover. This will be the last hardcover I buy of Bruce's for a long while.
I wonder what Bruce was thinking when he wrote this? I can only guess he woke up the morning after September 11th in a patriotic rage. Because this book is clearly Bruce's attempt to do some Tom Clancy. Unfortunately, it's the worst Clancy-esque work I have ever read. Clancy knows how to do his thing. Clancy knows the motivations behind his jingoistic, militaristic, overtly patriotic characters. But it's clear Sterling doesn't understand the mentality of these people at all. As the fundamental failure of Zenith Angle is that Sterling tries to shoe-horn an uber patriot Clancy-protagonist into a computer nerd. The results are simply dreadful.
And it's not just that the characters are poorly developed and flat, there's not a sympathetic person in the book. In the finale, the protagonist performs actions so far out of character and so disgraceful to make one wonder if another person has occupied his body. The plot? What there is of it isn't at all interesting. There is no hook, and the "high-technology" described was dated before the book hit the press. This is just a post 9/11 diatribe with a lot of ra, ra patriotism.
Zenith Angle is actually so bad, had it not been written by Sterling I wouldn't have even finished it. As I turned every page, I continually wondered if someone else had written this. In all seriousness, I suggest Bruce bury this thing and not even let the publisher release it to paper back. If I were him, I'd be truly embarrassed over this.
Do yourself a favor, if you haven't read Sterling's Distraction or Heavy Weather, read those, they're really great books. But even if you receive a copy for free, Zenith Angle isn't worth your time. In fact Zenith Angle is the worst book I have read in the past 5 years. And believe me, I never thought I would be saying that about a work penned by Bruce Sterling, my (no longer) favorite author.
Rating: 
Summary: compelling cerebral science fiction
Review: Derek Vandeveer is the vice president of research and development at Mondiale in Merwinster News Jersey making a fabulous salary, living in a mini mansion most people would envy and married to an astrophysicist who is his intellectual equal. Van is a very contented person, but that all changes on Sept 11, 2001 when he realizes his priorities need to change. The Federal government recruits him to work as an expert in cyber security enabling him to take an active role in the war on terrorism. He creates Grendel, a hack-proof system that is a big success for the agency he is working for but what really interests him is the KH-13 satellite. If working properly, it can pick up images of weapons going off anywhere in the world. However, it is not working the way it is supposed to and Van thinks he has a way of firing it up even though he doesn't know the cause of the failure. Unfortunately he can't get anybody to listen to him but his time with the Feds has turned the computer nerd into a warrior, one willing to confront a traitor ready to sell out his country. Readers who have some background in the sciences and information technology will appreciate THE ZENITH ANGLE better than those people in the audience who have limited understanding of either subject as this tale is highly complex and technical. The protagonist evolves and changes through the course of the exciting story line as he (and the readers) likes the person he becomes. Bruce Sterling has written a compelling work that shows the effects of 9/11 on one computer geek turned cyber warrior. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Kinda brilliant book....I think many people missed the point
Review: Having read all the reader reviews posted here, I have to say that, if one takes what Sterling is on about in this book at face value, it's pretty bad. However, being substantially familiar with both his fiction and nonfiction writings throughout his long career, I have a little bit more faith. Besides, if you've been paying attention the last few years to what's going on in our fair nation, and you're willing to allow that the author might actually trust the critical intelligence of his readership, it's hard to imagine you taking this book as straight-faced fiction.
Granted, Sterling doesn't telegraph it--at the end of the day it's up to the reader to decide whether it's satire or not. But Sterling's usually pretty dead-on with the stuff he puts out, and if you look at this novel as satire, it's just something like letter-perfect.
The whole point here, I think, is that it's a rather savage send-up of a lot of the profound (and dangerous) idiocy surrounding the intersection of the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the fallout from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the sad spectacle of Bush administration bureaucrats trying to do the technobabble shuffle when, at the end of the day, they're adherents of what is essentially a cowboy culture, the simplistic political ideology that's been driving our foreign policy for the last four years.
Van, the protagonist, is a computer security geek, and if you accept the initial characterization, a pretty good one. Additionally, he's one who managed to make a name for himself that hadn't yet been destroyed by the dot-com debacle by the time the planes hit the towers. He gets enlisted, for patriotic reasons that many of us who lived through the aftermath of September 11 can empathize with, to stop being a corporate geek and start being a government spook. Sadly, however, the government in question has done nothing more than memorize the buzzwords, so he quickly finds himself in an untenable position, because he actually has a sense of what needs to be done and his employers genuinely do not. A number of reviewers have gone on and on about the misuse of acronyms, the erroneous allusions to current security tech, etc....this is kind of the point, I think. Most of the people our hero has to work with are morons, or players, or bureaucrats whose agenda is far different than what the job description actually says. And as for the horrifying/implausible/what have you character development that Van undergoes, I say again: it makes near perfect sense, as satire; as straight fiction, not so much.
I could go on and on about this, but I'll bring it to a head with the point in the novel where I finally got the joke (I, too, was wondering whether Bruce had finally flipped up to that point). Van's doing his damnedest to do his job, to the best of his ability, to the best of his understanding of what he's signed on for, for the first half of the book. For it, he gets marginalized, stymied and frustrated by the bureaucracy that surrounds him. Ultimately, he walks into his apartment in DC and finds it being burgled by the agents of an overlapping government security agency. He's a geek, he's a techie guy, until that moment. Then he snaps. He hauls off and stops trying to be rational; he kicks the burglar's ass. All of a sudden, he's a hero to the entire cybersecurity infrastructure, not because he's solved the problems he was nominally hired to deal with, but because he punched somebody out. That's why the Indian programmer drops to his knees later (as another reviewer mentioned as an offensive characterization). He's a superstar, he's James Bond, all of a sudden, because he beat the crap out of some guy. In short, he finally starts to be listened to not because he knows what he's talking about, but because he makes the transition from geek to cowboy. Yee hah!
At the end of the day, this is a satire of US government security bureaucracy, and the thrust of it is to send up how little clue our government has when it comes to the skill sets (and political compromises) actually needed for an effective "cybersecurity" policy. The comic-book understanding of cyberwarfare is the whole problem here; that's not Sterling's authorial misunderstanding, it's his diagnosis of the bedrock flaw of how our government understands and approaches this issue. The point of Sterling depicting it the way that he does is to demonstrate how our government actually conceives of these threats, and as such it's kind of the opposite of a failure of characterization--and if one judges by the resignations we've seen in the last year or two of Bush's cybersecurity czar and others, as well as the blather that continues to come out of the White House on this topic, I think Sterling's pretty much hit the bull's-eye.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad writing
Review: He writes like he's trying to write paragraphs for an ADHD 12-year old. I gave up about 30 pages in, because the writing just mocks the reader's intelligence.
Rating:
Summary: Emabarrassed with itself
Review: How did Bruce Sterling of all people write a novel about 9/11 that's boring, trivial, and pointless? My guess is that he had a literary agent and a publisher pushing him to go for the mass market and a patronizing concept of what this meant. So we get a novel that's low on ideas, scared to take a stand, and written in short sentences. The book doesn't even work as a techno thriller - the "surprise" villain is obvious from early on, his plot is pathetic, and the hero's greatest moment of danager is during a fist fight with a colleague: this book reads like it was written by a man not so much uninterested with what he was trying to do - make money in Clancy-land - as positively embarrassed. If you want the book this should have been - a novel that takes apart the reality of the post 9/11 world with Sterling's usual ruthless imagination and insight - read his previous novel, Zeitegeist - even though it was written before 9/11. Or read Stephenson's books Interface and Cobweb to see the technothriller re-written with real intelligence and an SF sensibility.
Rating:
Summary: Not stuck in the mud
Review: I am a big fan of Bruce's. He sends me random e mails as we share a Bollywood Jones. If this book was as bad as many of the other reviewers are saying, I wouldn't hesitate to agree. He's got big shoulders.
That isn't the case. This is a solid story with the usual clever Bruce twists. Yes, smart people often show their political beliefs. What a concept!
Is it Clancyesque? A bit, although it's closer to early Tom than the mass produced pulp of late. It has some character feel of "Red Storm Rising".
I read "The Zenith Angle" once, in record time, then waited a week and read it again. There are the usual multiple layers to his work and it takes a bit of thought to bring them out.
Many of the reviewers expect him to continually rewrite the same book. It works for King but Sterling likes to experiment. His foray into current techno-thrillers is far better than anything else that is on the shelves right now. A very good read while in transit.
Bruce has his Range Rover in 4WD and is slogging into the future, not stuck in the mud.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Infowar Satire on the aftermath of 9/11
Review: I was hoping Bruce Sterling would write something as riveting as his "Hacker Crackdown" or "Holy Fire", and yet to his credit, "The Zenith Angle" is a thoughtful, entertaining satire on the state of American infowar defense in the wake of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. He brilliantly captures the primordial state of mind of many Federal bureaucrats in the Department of Homeland Security, and especially, Department of Defense. One hopes that Sterling's satirical commentary is merely that, and not an uncanny fictionalized version of the truth. Sterling's protagonist Van is among his most intriguing, a high tech geek from a failing Dot.com communications giant (think Verizon or Bell Labs, maybe) who is "drafted" into the Federal intelligence bureaucracy soon after 9/11/01. Without a doubt, this is Sterling's best near-future/contemporary techno thriller, and one which deserves a wide audience for its timely subject. But I do miss the lyrical prose of "Heavy Weather" and "Holy Fire", so those who have enjoyed these novels and many of Sterling's earlier works - short stories as well as novels - may be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A short book that took forever
Review: I wook in the technical industry and watch a lot of Alias. When I heard that this book was about spies and IT, I went out and bought it. It is somewhat technical and he does become a "spy". But, I just kept waiting for it to get real interesting. It is the type of book you can get from the public library later on in life.
Rating:
Summary: Will make it to the best-seller lists!
Review: I've long been a fan of Bruce Sterling; I've read 'The Difference Engine,' 'The Hacker Crackdown,' 'Distraction,' and 'Globalhead.' I'm not sure the average reader 'gets him.' I put each of Sterling's works down looking with anticipation towards his next great story. I believe that this latest work will make it to the best-seller lists. Cyberspookerati, conspiracies, men in black, cover-ups, bureaucratic hand washing, political agendas and incompetence, are all mixed up in this intricate and fast moving plot. I give him four stars for character development and five for the plot and accurate facts on our industry and governments workings. I worked for the DoD for 20 years and had a TS Clearance, so I can attest that things really do work like Sterling portrays them in 'The Zenith Angle.' Frustrating, mind boggling, and idiotic all, but nevertheless true. I was constantly reminded of two other best-selling books I've read in the last 3 years, 'Alien Rapture' and 'Sleeping With the Devil.' Think this novel reads like a TRUE CONSPIRACY, then check out these books on REAL CONSPIRACIES: 'Alien Rapture,' 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail,' The Christ Conspiracy,' 'Alien Agenda,' 'Unconventional Flying Objects - by Dr. Hill,' The Puzzle Palace,' and 'Sleeping With the Devil.' NASA tried to ban 'Unconventional Flying Objects' in court. 'Alien Agenda' is by Marrs, (best-selling author of 'Crossfire') which is the definitive book on the JFK assassination and best reading of them all. "Alien Rapture' is written by a Black Programs Insider, and along with Hill's book (Unconventional Flying Objects) are the two most important books on the UFO cover-up. Check them out.
|
