By: Bruce Sterling Publisher: Spectra Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Spectra Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 288 Publication Date: July 31, 2001 Release Date: July 31, 2001
Product Description: It’s 1999, and in the Turkish half of Cyprus, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted — pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the G-7 girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl rock group ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex.
His market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7’s massive merchandising campaign — and to wildly anticipate music the band will never release.
Leggy’s brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world’s most dangerous people. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, he must act quickly and decisively. Y2K is just around the corner — and the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000.
But Leggy’s G-7 Zeitgeist is in serious jeopardy, for in Istanbul his former partners are getting restless — and the G-7 girls are beginning to die....
Amazon.com Review: "Like Tom Clancy on PCP." That's how Bruce Sterling describes his fin-de-siècle head trip, Zeitgeist, a typically Sterling spectacle packed with verbal flash and digerati wit, along with the expected rail-gun-steady stream of well-thought-out ideas and references. His self-appraisal, as it turns out, is right on. This is a guy widely considered "another, hipper Alvin Toppler" (in the words of cyberpunk godfather John Shirley), an effortlessly intelligent master of both style and substance.
Fans will recognize Zeitgeist's antihero protagonist Leggy Starlitz from Sterling stories "Hollywood Kremlin," "Are You for 86?" and "The Littlest Jackal." The well-connected, world-class fixer is part mystic, part sleaze--sort of Uncle Enzo meets Templeton "Faceman" Peck--and his latest hustle is plying the Third World with merchandise from his all-fake, all-girl band, G-7. (Its seven talentless, Wonderbra-wearing members are known simply as the American One, the French One, the German One, etc.)
Starlitz makes use of a shady, flamboyantly weird network of state officials, bodyguards, photographers, and other assorted players to push the merchandise--action figures, lip gloss, shoes, you name it--on what one of G-7's savvier members calls the "Moslem hillbillies." But things get surreal as G-7 girls start dying, characters start explicitly referring to their purpose in the narrative, and one of Leggy's associates conspires to break G-7's most sacred rule: that the whole enterprise must end by Y2K. --Paul Hughes
humorous sci fi... It has this crazy half-superman anti-hero. Sterling is good at throwing out literary names and facts I've never heard of. Examples: 1) Pelevin ( Russian author) wrote Omon Ra and The Yellow Arrow 2) Turkish cabaret music 3) America is basically nine different cultural regions The book is humorous but somehow too negative. It is basically a satire on made for pop groups. Bruce Sterling is sort of a cyberpunk James Barrie. I think it it is his lack of integrity that bothers me most?
My personal favorite Bruce book - not your best intro to him tho For anyone new to Bruce, you should know that many readers, myself included, think most highly of Bruce's short stories, at least as much as the full novels. I myself couldn't have had a better introduction to him than "Hollywood Kremlin," where Bruce first began the misadventures of modern-day picaroon, Leggy Starlitz.
This late novel, "Zeitgeist," is a continuation of the series of short stories which began with "Hollywood Kremlin," and developed through 3 or 4 others now found in the collections, "Crystal Express," "Globalhead," and "A Good Old-Fashioned Future," in that order. And so if you are new to Bruce Sterling, those are the books I would recommend, rather than this one. Bruce has displayed an extremely sharp wit over the years I have been reading him, and his short stories demonstrate this best, perhaps. You also need to read the earlier Leggy Starlitz episodes to be able to get your bearings in this novel. Me, I would love to see all the Leggy stories gathered together in one publication.
Among many clever, outrageous remarks Bruce has made over the years, I remember reading that nobody has anything useful to contribute after they are 40 (rough paraphrase, sorry.) If I remember correctly, Bruce turned 40 right around this book's publication. So as well as all that everybody else has said, I might add that the book appears to be about Bruce. There has always been a little of himself in Leggy Starlitz.
Bruce is seeking his own transformation as well as that of the world around him. He has reached the age he predicted he will no longer be relevant, yet now approaches the age where a writer should be "coming into his own." Where now? That is the question Bruce is faced with -- or the "People" magazine version of the question: Is there life after 40, Bruce? The end of this story puts me in the mind of the "Schismatrix" story or stories, in a number of ways. The characters all seek to transcend their own limitations and mortality, and one presumes become better people as well. But does "better" mean the same thing to a butterfly as it does to a caterpillar?
I believe the final transformation of Leggy in the end, this represents the challenge we are faced with as modern, post-modern, whatever ... human beings. Can we open our minds and our hearts, or do we continue on with the shallow 20th Century agenda? Or will the question be answered for us soon anyway? Me, I'm putting my ZZ Topp records up for sale right now!
On a side note, several of the reviewers here outdo themselves in demonstrating how far they excel beyond Bruce in semiotics, epistimology, structuralism this and that. Bruce has always attracted such wannabees, and probably always will. He is not so different from them, after all. For me, to say that the writing is no longer intellectual cutting-edge has little to do with whether what Bruce has to say is valid, or more to the point, entertaining. Some reviewers seem to differ on that point.
So if you want Good Bruce Sterling and are unfamiliar with his writing, look elsewhere; my recommendation: "Crystal Express." But I doubt anybody that has read a book of his wouldn't find a laugh or two here. But prerequisite are "Hollywood Kremlin," "Are you for 86?" and "The Littlest Jackal," available in short story collections elsewhere.
Less of a story, more of an essay Zeitgeist is an absolutely fascinating book. But let's face it, Sterling doesn't have half as much interest in the plot as he does in making observations of the modern world. This is pop culture, mass consumerism and culture war wrapped up in a brilliant package, but it seems a lot less like a novel than it does a series of modernistic philisophical conversations.
A very good "What is Reality?" book Not necessarily one of my favorite books, this one has enough "alien elements" to it to, as another reviewer said, to join the sci-fi ranks, such as the Old Masters who gave us "Rendezvous with Rama", "Childhood's End", "I,Robot", "Ringworld", "Foundation", as well as cyberpunk books like "Mona Lisa Overdrive", "Neuromancer", "Snow Crash", "Cryptonomicon", and "Cyber Hunter".
"The Spirit of the Times" 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...
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