Zeitgeist - Softcover

Bruce Sterling

3.66

1,225 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553576410 ISBN 13: 9780553576412

Publisher: Spectra, 2001

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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....

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Review:

"Like Tom Clancy on PCP." That's how Bruce Sterling describes his fin-de-si�cle 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

From the Back Cover:

“Brilliant!”
— The Washington Post

“A gem.”
— Chicago Sun-Times

“Turn-of-the-millennium spectacular ... Y2K’s Catch 22!”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The book’s preliminaries showcase Sterling’s erudition about back-page global politics, [but] they’re upstaged by his coolest trick: He can write about pop.”
— City Pages (Minneapolis)
Also by Bruce Sterling:

Novels:
The Artificial Kid
The Difference Engine (with William Gibson)
Distraction
Heavy Weather
Holy Fire
Involution Ocean
Islands In the Net
Schismatrix

Stories:
Crystal Express
Globalhead
A Good Old-Fashioned Future

Nonfiction:
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Editor:
Mirror Shades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

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