12 December, 2001: Zeitgeist
This wasn't so much a novel as a series of extended riffs, and Sterling's used most of them before. It doesn't help that Zeitgeist is the first novel Bruce Sterling has written about Leggy Starlitz, a schlemiel criminal type who has figured in a number of previous stories, doing the sorts of zany late capitalism sorts of things Sterling finds amusing: smuggling RU-486 into the U.S., managing an all-girl Japanese band, dealing arms to the Russian Mafia, helping a notorious terrorist plan his takeover of a Finnish island. I like the stories, but they are necessarily verging on parody and the supporting characters are necessarily about six inches short of caricature; getting the breezy tone right forces Sterling to ensure that we just don't take any of it too seriously, so when we get a book length version, it just feels effervescent. The bits about Cyprus seem recycled from a Wired article on same; the bits about the dueling spirits of the century are entertaining, but don't seem suited to the tone of the story (although the idea of being crushed under the weight of twentieth century history was amusing as all hell). I'd rather see Sterling hit these themes in his non-fiction; as it is, I just wanted to read Holy Fire or Schismatrix again.