BOOK
Early on in Bruce Sterling's new novel, Zeitgeist, Leggy Starlitz sits poolside in a Turkish Cypriot casino, counseling a member of the band he manages. Starlitz, a hustler who appears in many a sharp-witted Sterling short, is running a high-concept, low-talent girl group called G-7, composed of lip-syncing adolescents, one from each of the leading industrial nations.
The American One is coked up, unhappy, and heavily in debt to her bandmates, burning through cash like a startup with 20-on-40 million Series B financing. She refuses to be called by her stage name, insisting that he use her real name, Melanie. She's hatching schemes to make her crew famous for their art, not just their looks.
"Look, G-7's lyrics are a genius creation, babe," argues Starlitz. "Verse-verse-chorus from every international pop hit in the 20th century, filtered through a 400-word basic-English translation engine." Starlitz tries, he really does, but Mel wants artistic integrity. She used to be a normal Californian, limited in vision, but now she's toured the world and is ready to be famous. He fires her.
That's Zeitgeist in a nutshell, a pharmacy of bitter pills and big philosophical ideas wrapped in a spirited action-adventure romp so slick you barely notice that Sterling has given you a lecture on the nature of fame and cultural tourism, not to mention a survey of the lumpy infodump of Turkish history. As the story progresses, a shady bureaucrat stages a hostile takeover of G-7 and Starlitz himself has to leave the band, trying not to think about the lithe lipsyncers, who are now dropping like flies. Along the way, Sterling demonstrates a deft hand in drawing a cast of spicy characters, from Russian flyboy veterans to the thoughtful Zeta, Starlitz's 11-year-old daughter.
But couched in the plot, Zeitgeist acts as a cheerleader for the future, showing us meaningful, excellent toys that collapse distance, ideas that propagate faster than ebola, and technologies that vaporize provincialism. Sterling is fond of saying, "Apocalypse is boring," and that's his central thesis here. Since the first nuclear explosion at Trinity, the pop-cult groove of The Future has pointed steadily toward the end of the world - poking through rubble, digging for canned goods, killing mutant apes. More than anything else, for Sterling the turn of the century means freedom from this half-century-long narrative rut.
Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling: $24.95. Bantam Spectra: www.bantamdell.com.
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