Zeitgeist is exceptional, particularly in this sense: it's one of the very few near-future thrillers that has tumbled into the recent past almost unscathed, without becoming stale and irrelevant. Yet, anyway.Sterling's novel came out during The Year 2000, and it captures the jittery sense that many felt in the pre-Y2K West, that the end of the 20th Century would bring with it irreversible changes, and that most of them would be unpleasant. He hasn't exactly been proven wrong. Sterling was undoubtedly prescient (or at least au courant) in many specific respects, from his confident description of the demise of the Iridium satellite phone network, which had just recently been announced when the book came out, to the looming significance of Osama Bin Laden as organizer of international terrorists (even if Sterling did get the country wrong). At that level, Zeitgeist is a realistic thriller, full of political intrigue, global economics, black market deals and pop-cultural references and even a little occasional mourning for the things we're discarding in our mad rush to the future.But Zeitgeist is also a magical book. Its protagonist, Lekhi (Leggy) Starlitz, is a showman and a charlatan, who runs a "band" of nearly talent-free clothes horses called G-7 that's more about selling outfits and accessories than it is about putting out music, and who puts together a hippie-fleecing New Age sideshow almost single-handedly... but there are times when Starlitz almost seems to have a handle on a fundamental hook of nature, a way to redefine reality using a ceaseless flow of words (something Leggy is good at), changing the narrative until the real world follows along.This view of the world as defined by the Word (Logos, though that term is never used) makes this book to my mind a work of magical realism, regardless of its mundane, techno-thriller and science-fictional trappings.What Zeitgeist is, though, what it always is, is interesting... it seems that Bruce Sterling can't help but be a pyrotechnic artist who shoots off more ideas-per-page than most novelists manage in entire books, and as a result this book, as an artifact of its time, remains interesting and relevant even today.
I just had to share this almost 'noir' flavored description of Istanbul, Turkey:[Quote:]Worn out from repeated jet flights, Starlitz stared murkily out his curtained window.So it was back to Istanbul, finally. He'd never meant to spend so much time here. The place had a fatal attraction for him. It had been so much stronger than he was, so far beyond his ability to help. The city was neck deep, chin deep, nose deep, in the darkest sumps of history. Istanbul was the unspoken capital of many submerged empires: it had called itself Byzantium, Vizant, Novi Roma, Anthusa, Tsargrad, Constantinople....Stuck in dense Turkish traffic, their driver clicked on his radio and began to curse a soccer game. The variant districts of Galata, Pera, Beshiktas, and Ortakoy inched beyond the bumpers. It was the Moslem London, the Islamic New York, crammed neighborhoods of millions with as much regional variety as Bloomsbury or The Bronx.Istanbul. Crumbling ivy-grown Byzantine aqueducts with Turkish NO PARKING signs. Smog-breathing streetside vendors with ring-shaped breadrolls on sticks. Rubber-tired yellow bulldozers parked under the carved stone eaves of mosques.Tourist-trap nightclubs featuring potbellied Ukrainian dancers. Vast sunshine-yellow billboards imploring bored Turkish housewives to learn English. Cash-card bank machines in prefab kiosks, built to mimic minarets. Pudding shops. Chestnut trees. Spotted wild dogs of premedieval lineage on their timeless garbage patrol.Istanbul had more vitality than Sofia, or Belgrade, or Baghdad. Despite its best efforts, the twentieth century had not been able to beat the place down. Istanbul had lost its capitalship, but Istanbul had always walked on its own sore feet. It had not been crushed, conquered, and carpet bombed, it had never been forced to exist at the sufferance of others.[Unquote.].
What do You think about Zeitgeist (2001)?
Bruce Sterling has a sawed-off idea shotgun and you're about to get it in the face with this messy book. He has a new idea for every page, and some of them are interesting but none of them are focused; it feels indulgent, like he thinks he's too smart to need rigor.Pretty smart he is: this is one of the foremost authors in the cyberpunk subgenre, and the guy who invented the clever though self-defeating term "slipstream", for books that meld genres. Here he's using what we might as well call magical realism, and a friend calls it "applied postmodernism", that is, taking postmodernism's tics literally. Unfortunately Kurt Vonnegut already did that, and did it better. And William Gibson already did cyberpunk about as well as anyone needs to.What we're left with isn't pioneering, and it's a little too helter-skelter to fully engage. It's pleasant but you wish he'd chosen a story to tell and then stuck with it. You find yourself wiping flecks of ideas off your shirt hours later.
—Alex
Whenever I read anything by Bruce Stirling it takes a little longer than normal to complete than another novel of approximate page/word length. Not because it is difficult to read, yet his stories make me stop and reconsider my personal beliefs in a manner that fine tunes the perceptions I may have long held. His characters challenge each other and in turn may challenge the reader, and as you sift through the pages you may find by the end of the story your conscious has passed through a sieve making you a product that is not quite the same.
—Jon
