Too Little Testosterone
Oct. 23rd, 2005 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel08 Oct 2005
The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling - Del Rey, 2005
* *
I was over in the USA recently and as usual I took the opportunity to stock up on a few of the SF titles that are unobtainable here. This book is the first of them. It's by Bruce Sterling, a writer equally known for his SF novels and his non-fiction journalistic pieces exploring the wilder shores of techno-geekdom, and is a satirical thriller about a computer genius who is co-opted into working for the US government after 9/11. I thought it would be an interesting and thought-provoking comment on modern America. Sadly, despite some good moments, Sterling's non-fiction concerns appear to have swamped his authorial instincts and as a novel it is less than satisfying.
Its main problem is that as a thriller it simply doesn't work. Much of the first part of the novel is spent establishing the daily life of the afore-mentioned genius, Derek Vandermeer, his astrophysicist wife Dottie and their young son. Sterling was clearly trying to depict a marriage that for once in a modern novel is not on the rocks and that of course is a laudable aim, but to the reader, especially one who is in thriller mode and is waiting for the action to start, the everyday scenes (cleaning up after the kid, a little argument over an extravagant purchase) come across as supremely dull. It's not helped by the fact that Dottie is too supine. When, after 9/11, Derek's government agent friend Jeb persuades him to join a federal security team, she accedes with nary a murmur. Derek spends a lot of the rest of the book worrying about whether his new priorities will cause her to leave him, but her words and actions never make this seem a remotely plausible concern.
And the implausibilities continue. The first thing Derek does in his new position is to propose and write a totally secure distributed operating system that will run on a random collection of old PCs. In a couple of months. Now I know something about writing computer software, and this is simply impossible, even for a genius. Just writing the network drivers and protocols would take longer than that. For his next trick, he gets involved in a problem with KH-13, a malfunctioning top secret satellite (by this stage we are halfway through the book). In doing so, he meets an ex-commando called Hickock and starts to develop an unhealthy interest in the military lifestyle. This proves useful when he finally unearths the proper thriller plot about 50 pages before the end. At this point, the book does redeem itself somewhat - the maguffin itself is a clever concept that arises naturally out of the ideas earlier in the book and there is a military operation at the climax which finally provides some much needed drama.
I appreciate Sterling's attempts to avoid the usual testosterone-laden cliches of the techno-thriller genre and appeal more to female readers, but his alternatives don't really work. The overwhelming majority of the text of this book consists of rants about computer security or satirical comments on the US military-industrial complex, either expressed as discussions between the characters or as Vandermeer's thought processes. This is fine, but I found myself longing for a bit of action, or at least real emotional tension, amid all the talk (true, the same can be said of John Le Carré's novels which I also find rather dull). Sterling has been lazy; this book feels like an ill-digested version of his non-fiction interests and lacks the dramatic structure and thought-through characters that a properly planned novel should have.
The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling - Del Rey, 2005
* *
I was over in the USA recently and as usual I took the opportunity to stock up on a few of the SF titles that are unobtainable here. This book is the first of them. It's by Bruce Sterling, a writer equally known for his SF novels and his non-fiction journalistic pieces exploring the wilder shores of techno-geekdom, and is a satirical thriller about a computer genius who is co-opted into working for the US government after 9/11. I thought it would be an interesting and thought-provoking comment on modern America. Sadly, despite some good moments, Sterling's non-fiction concerns appear to have swamped his authorial instincts and as a novel it is less than satisfying.
Its main problem is that as a thriller it simply doesn't work. Much of the first part of the novel is spent establishing the daily life of the afore-mentioned genius, Derek Vandermeer, his astrophysicist wife Dottie and their young son. Sterling was clearly trying to depict a marriage that for once in a modern novel is not on the rocks and that of course is a laudable aim, but to the reader, especially one who is in thriller mode and is waiting for the action to start, the everyday scenes (cleaning up after the kid, a little argument over an extravagant purchase) come across as supremely dull. It's not helped by the fact that Dottie is too supine. When, after 9/11, Derek's government agent friend Jeb persuades him to join a federal security team, she accedes with nary a murmur. Derek spends a lot of the rest of the book worrying about whether his new priorities will cause her to leave him, but her words and actions never make this seem a remotely plausible concern.
And the implausibilities continue. The first thing Derek does in his new position is to propose and write a totally secure distributed operating system that will run on a random collection of old PCs. In a couple of months. Now I know something about writing computer software, and this is simply impossible, even for a genius. Just writing the network drivers and protocols would take longer than that. For his next trick, he gets involved in a problem with KH-13, a malfunctioning top secret satellite (by this stage we are halfway through the book). In doing so, he meets an ex-commando called Hickock and starts to develop an unhealthy interest in the military lifestyle. This proves useful when he finally unearths the proper thriller plot about 50 pages before the end. At this point, the book does redeem itself somewhat - the maguffin itself is a clever concept that arises naturally out of the ideas earlier in the book and there is a military operation at the climax which finally provides some much needed drama.
I appreciate Sterling's attempts to avoid the usual testosterone-laden cliches of the techno-thriller genre and appeal more to female readers, but his alternatives don't really work. The overwhelming majority of the text of this book consists of rants about computer security or satirical comments on the US military-industrial complex, either expressed as discussions between the characters or as Vandermeer's thought processes. This is fine, but I found myself longing for a bit of action, or at least real emotional tension, amid all the talk (true, the same can be said of John Le Carré's novels which I also find rather dull). Sterling has been lazy; this book feels like an ill-digested version of his non-fiction interests and lacks the dramatic structure and thought-through characters that a properly planned novel should have.