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.
11:23 pm 
6 December, 2001: Blue Champagne
John Varley's best work is reminiscent of middle-period Heinlein: tightly paced and eminently readable, adventure stories wrapped around a core of a single interesting idea. But his short story collection Blue Champagne, lacks one of my favorite Varley stories, "The Barbie Murders", is padded out with two stories that aren't really stories (one of which, "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)", I rather like), and features prize-winning stories that aren't that impressive. The Hugo-winning "Press Enter", could have been a Robin Cook plot treatment; comparing it to Neuromancer, which won the best novel Hugo the same year, shows how dated it is. The equally dated "Options" picked up a Tiptree Award for explorations of gender issues; one of the core ideas of Varley's Nine Worlds future histories is that one day changing sexes will be as easy and understated as getting a haircut, but Varley has done more interesting variations on the theme. Varley's Nine World works are spottily great, but the Nine Worlds stories in this collection are largely at the earlier and less interesting end of his timeline, before or immediately after the aliens arrive and wipe human civilization off the face of the Earth. Although "Foxtrot Romeo and Tango Charlie" is a great story, one of the best that Varley has written, newcomers to his work are probably better off picking up Steel Beach (and avoiding his "Gaean Trilogy" like the plague).
11:35 pm