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Title: Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling ISBN: 0-553-57641-0 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 31 July, 2001 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.47 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Got Geist?
Comment: Bruce Sterling, master cyberpunk author, examines the spirit of the twentieth century in his latest novel Zeitgeist. Set in the waning weeks of 1999, Zeitgeist follows Leggy Starlitz (a two-bit American conman marketing a Spice Girls rip-off band called The G-7) as he stumbles through the post-Cold War landscape of Turkish Cyprus (with side trips to the American West and Hawaii). Leggy's questionable connections with sleazy Turkish bureaucrats and former Soviet black marketeers costs him control of the band - plus his ex-girlfriend shows up at just the wrong moment to deposit their 13-year-old daughter with him. Within the crucible of Cyprus, where East meets West and the Third World meets MTV, Sterling examines the sum total of the twentieth century, mulling over everything from Y2K to New Age mumbo-jumbo, to the fickleness of pop culture, to the dysfunctionality of the New World Order.
Sterling's writing is hip and cynical, with an eclectic array of eccentric characters (including a mysterious vagrant who speaks only in palindromes). The snappy dialogue is what we've come to expect from so-called "cyberpunk," and you'll alternately laugh and shake your head as the weirdness unfolds.
The oddest thing about this novel is that it's a Y2K novel (seemingly) published a year too late! And it's not really a science fiction novel per se; nonetheless, it's an interesting book that makes us rethink our assumptions about the last hundred years, and makes us wonder if the next hundred will be anything like we imagine.
Rating: 3
Summary: "The Spirit of the Times"
Comment: I totally have no idea that what I have in my hand is actually a sci-fi novel until I get right in the middle of it, because it was one of the rare occasions I never read the spine as it is indicated there. I also have no idea that the lead charachter Leggy Starlitz is actually the authors vehicle to several other stories of his.
The story filled with political intrigue amidst the backdrop of fictional scenarios, turned to centralize its storyline with the lead charachter when the said charachter was subjected to take care of his telekenetic daughter who appeared halfway on the book.
The novel have a thing about Princess Diana's death, a parody of the Spice Girls, mentioning Osama Bin Laden way before the 9-11 attacks... although the book may not hold your attention for all of the time while you try to read right through it - its quite an ambitious fine novel set in a sort of a parallel universe to the one where we are.
In the meantime, im still a pair of chapters short to finish it as I type away right here...
Rating: 2
Summary: Eh.
Comment: 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.
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Title: Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0380977427 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson ISBN: 0399149864 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 03 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Schismatrix Plus: Includes Schismatrix and Selected Stories from Crystal Express by Bruce Sterling ISBN: 0441003702 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: December, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan ISBN: 0345457684 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Signal to Noise by Eric S. Nylund ISBN: 0380792923 Publisher: Eos Pub. Date: 08 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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