The Zenith Angle

In the wake of 9-11 a computer science genius leaves a lucrative job to become part of an agency responsible for fixing computer security and finds himself plunged into the chaotic world of a government in the grip of the War On Terror, with security agencies churning and poitics red in tooth and claw. After setting up a secure grendel system, he tries to sort out a boondoggle super-satellite depsite being warned off by a friend and slams into a brick wall. But there's more going on there than meets the eye, even the super-secret eyes-only eyes.

This is a cyber-thriller as written by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, a contemporary one, but mostly it's a novel with a satirical tone about computers and security and intelligence agencies, and show more the naive young genius who gets chewed up by the system only to find himself an actual cyber-warrior on the frontlines of cyber war. It's great! I dont suppose reading it close to when 9-11 happened and it was all too real and invasions were happening was much fun, bit from a remove it works brilliantly as a look at a major global cultural and technological and political shift via the lens of Sterling's utterly merciless tech-critic sensibilities was much fun or comfort, but now it seems almost reassuring, even if only we can at least say, well that's all behind us, and though nobody in their right mind would look back with fondness and nostalgia at that time, from the perspective of of 2022, holy crap, the century kicked off with a bang, and hasn't stopped kicking since. show less

I keep wanting to really like Bruce Sterling, but then just - not. The Zenith Angle, is, reportedly, a techno-thriller about computer/Internet security. Sadly, unless you are the Special Adviser for Cyberspace Security to the Bush Administration (who wrote a glowing blurb for this book), Internet Security is just not that thrilling.
In this novel, the main character, Van, leaves his corporate job as a computer geek to go work for the government. He finds himself underpaid and broke, trying to convince people that Internet Security really is important, Meanwhile, his wife is doing well, working as an astronomer on land owned by a chacter whom Ted Turner would not be pleased by. This gets tied in to a malfunctioning spy satellite that Van show more is asked to fix. Of course, Foreigners are Out To Get Us. Which would be OK, if it was interesting or exciting. Maybe it could have been, in the hands of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. Here, it's not. show less

The Zenith Angle was disappointing. I ignored other reviews that said as much because I'm a fan of Bruce Sterling's work. Ah, well.

The ingredients of a good Sterling novel are here, but he over-seasoned the dish. Perhaps in an attempt at satire, he essentially turned his novel into a long rant on the state of security (specifically cyber-security) in the post-September 11th world. And it gets tiresome.

You follow his hero, Derek Vandeveer, on his odyssey from the world of the dot-com into the world of bureaucracy. The plot, when it emerges, seems to come from nowhere. There's nothing organic about the transition from cyber-warfare to space-warfare.

Worse than that, his characters are not believable, and his dialogue--which is usually show more serviceable--is terrible.

What more can I say? I'm hoping the next one will be better. The Caryatids is already queued up for Kindle download. show less

This is a disappointing book. The author has always had the knack of channeling the future and this power does not desert him here. Set in the fall out of the dot.com boom, Derek 'Van' Vandevere and his long-suffering, long-distance wife Dottie are both geeks. Dottie is an astronomer while Van is an all round technical genius, inventing the concept of the secure network at one point and later in the novel he solves all the technical problems plaguing the latest American spy satellite. Just about every paragraph raises a smile with a punchline of a technical in-joke. The bureaucrats, business tycoons and military men are all seen as power-hungry buffoons. The humour/satire is what makes this book.

What unmakes it are two other elements. show more One is a minor secondary thriller theme about a revolutionary rifle, which one of the dunderhead hardmen Van encounters gets involved with. This seems superfluous. The second is that the novel opens with the fall of the towers on 7/11. Humour and horror simply do not work together here. What tries to be a Catch 22 for techies is fatally blighted by an atrocity carried out using nothing more sophisticated than wire cutters. show less

Like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling writes science fiction that's not so much about technology as it's about the people who invent and use it. The Zenith Angle updates the themes of Sterling's nonfiction The Hacker Crackdown; but we can hope that this tale of a geek mixed up in the truly fantastic world of post-911 politics and law enforcement is "only" fiction. Despite a somewhat unsatisfying ending, it's a great read with a plot that zips along and makes it difficult to put down. [2005-10-23]

Okay but not great, which is more annoying than it should be because I actually had to buy this book twice. I lost it about two-thirds of the way through and was sufficiently intrigued to buy another copy to see how it ended, and in the end it was a bit of a letdown. Sterling tends to be hit or miss with me anyway – this one is his take on post-9/11 Homeland Security, and while it’s got some interesting ideas, it’s hard to sympathize with characters who are pro-Bush.

Really a poorly written book. The plot just kind of wandered -- it couldn't decide if it wanted to be an corporate sci-fi thriller, hard-core geek / tech or about father/som and wife/husband relationships. In the end it did very little of any of the above.