Share for friends:

Read The Zenith Angle (2005)

The Zenith Angle (2005)

Online Book

Genre
Rating
3.25 of 5 Votes: 4
Your rating
ISBN
0345468651 (ISBN13: 9780345468659)
Language
English
Publisher
del rey books

The Zenith Angle (2005) - Plot & Excerpts

Brusce Sterling is preoccupied in this book with the transformations Cybersociety went through as a result of the September 11 terror attacks and of the dotcom and telecoms busts. To be honest the characters and events weren't quite as interesting to me as was the ambient commentary on events in technological development from 2000 to around 2007.The confrontation between the main character as a cybersecurity worker and a government-recruited ex-hacker is informative and well-imagined, and the frustration of the main character when he is trying to implement a fix for important military satellite tech but cannot get past the Space Force bureaucracy - this had real resonance and authenticity to it.But I was a bit disturbed to find that Sterling seemed to be diagnosing the decline of companies like Enron as being caused by nothing more than stock market ignorance and panic, and he seems to lament the passing of people like Ken Lay as if they were genuine innovators swallowed up in adverse events. In fact, Lay was a crook and Enron was a scam, in my opinion.But my economic differences of opinion from the author and my lack of emotional engagement with his characters did not prevent me from appreciating his sometimes lively writing, vivid humour and sharp developmental and institutional analysis.

Bruce Sterling is one of the few writers whose work I will buy, new, in hardcover when I see it on the shelves. I generally find his work fresh and interesting, and it is always intelligent and accessible. Sterling's name is usually mentioned in conjunction with William Gibson as the leading authors of the "cyber punk" genre. I prefer Sterling's style over Gibson's.Sadly, I think this is one of Sterling's weakest books to date. The technology described was sound, as expected with a Sterling novel, but trying to follow the main character's leaps of logic were difficult, and the relationships between the characters (which took up a major portion of the story) were muddy.If I had read only the last 50 pages I would not have missed out on much of the back story, would have caught all the action/excitement contained in the book, and wouldn't have been any more or less confused as to who the people were and what their associations with each other might be.If you've never read a Bruce Sterling book, don't let this be your first, or it'll likely be your last as well.

What do You think about The Zenith Angle (2005)?

So maaaaaybe this is operating at some high level of irony. I can sort of see it in hindsight: Van's overwrought behavior and speechifying and take-so-seriously business at what is barely a first world problem of "cyberwar" and so forth. And I can see angles where the book peels away the veneer of Government work to show the overcomplicated bureaucracy, all politically-driven and working-at-cross-purposes.And I can see messages about ideal technical solutions and situations--the Ivory Tower--being sullied by quotidian battles and give-and-take politics and hucksterism.And even the irony of making a big name for yourself by screwing up.But the thing is: the characters, especially Van, are completely odious, and this book fails to give me anything to think about. It's criminal that this is a Bruce Sterling novel and there's nothing particularly visionary about it.It's a story about the grunge of computer security, filtered through Tom Clancy. Or am I missing something here?
—Derek

The book is about a computer scientist that does a lot of angsty thinking about how his precious interwebs are all under attack from cyber terrorists - and only one "intruder" was mentioned after 200 pages. The story does pick up quite a bit towards the end, but the ending felt goofy - as if the author realized, "Oh dang...I need to make this story come together now." I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to feel unfulfilled after reading it. Or, to anyone that liked "The DaVinci Code".
—Lee

Now that escalated quickly.. About 40 minutes before I finished the book I formulated in my head "good writing, but it seems to lack a bigger story arc" I couldn't have been wrong more. In the last chapters the author manages to tie it all together, add a twist and make sense of it all. Well done. So why am I only giving 4 out of 5 stars? Mostly because some of the minor details don't make sense, like that gag about using spam for the laser, or shooting someone with a hot glue gun. In some way it seems that Mr. Sterling added those small wrong details as some hidden "funnies", something that I found rather annoying in an otherwise great book. One more thing: a hacker who works in cyber warfare for any government is not a white hat. Granted he was described as such before he did so on the book, and not after, but.. It kinda feels like it needs saying. Doing secret government work in warfare is mutually exclusive to following hacker ethics.
—Peter Petermann

Write Review

(Review will shown on site after approval)

Read books by author Bruce Sterling

Read books in category Fiction