t used to be easy to think we could say Now. In 1950, in 1970, even as late as 1990 or so. We who wrote SF in 1950 addressed readers who recognized the Now of 1950, because we lived there, because we thought we knew where we lived, and we could therefore understand what, in our imaginations, we were leaving: 1950 was real, verifiable, mundane, a platform, a springboard. Off this springboard—which did not need to be described for us to know it was there—leapt the typical SF of 1950 (or 1970, or even 1990 or so) into a tale that advocated a significant (and tellable) difference from that Now. "Now" made all the difference possible. We knew what we were leaping from, into the What Then, the If This Goes On. Hence the hypnotic clarity of so much 20th-century SF; hence the power of that SF as an engine of what one might call World Advocacy. Well, goodbye to all that.
By 1990 or so, we began to sense that the old Nows of the world were turning into quicksand, that the narratives of the world had begun to miscegenate beneath our feet and in our blood, that Now was turning into code. It's around this time that so many SF writers turned to alternate-history tales, or to space opera—because these versions of SF require no specific platform to leap from. By 2004, many of the texts we continue to identify as SF now incorporate other genres of the fantastic, and insofar as they address the present day, they do so as magicians might: by a process not of analysis but incantation. Most modern SF, in other words, is spells. So what about Bruce Sterling?
The Zenith Angle is no great shakes as a novel, and there are precious few signs that Sterling worried much about the dead ends and frustrations of his actual storyline, but it very much seems—like his last two novels, Distraction (1998) and Zeitgeist (2000)—to be part of a campaign to reshape SF into a mode capable of catching code on the wing. Though some of its toolkit of characters tend to pray to these codes, The Zenith Angle itself works as a No! in Thunder against spells. There is no ghost in the machine of cyberspace in The Zenith Angle to pray to; there is no Gaia; there is no secret story; there is no Magus who holds the reins; there is no Arthur C. Clarke to reassure us that what seems magic now will soothingly unpack into the mundane (though Clarke is indeed mentioned reverently); there is no spell. For good or for ill, the only people capable of understanding the world—which is to say, operating the codes—are geeks. It may be the central insight of this novel, which starts back in 1999 in order to get a running start on the codes of 2002, that when we say, as we so often do, that the world has become SF, what we are really saying is that a world which is operated as though it were SF is a world operated precisely by the kind of people Sterling portrays here. But one of the more remarkable strengths of this hop-skip-jump of a text is the fact that, though Sterling clearly likes geeks—clearly likes his lumbering quasi-genius geek protagonist—he just as clearly shows that an operated world is a world from which something precious has leaked.
I suppose it might once have been called Being.
9/11 changes everything
We begin with a moment of paradigm shift. A Ted Turner-like IT magnate named DeFanti, whose AOL- or WorldCom-like empire is about to collapse, is geezering about on his vast Colorado dude ranch when he sees flying saucers. Whether they are the effects of a stroke, or an artifact of his viewing technology, the sight drives him kind of mad, and we leave him, more or less for good, though we do learn that, high in the mountains, he is funding a high-tech observatory, presumably to track aliens with.
After a few moments of description of the Dot-Com Bubble Burst, we shift to Sept. 11, 2001. The towers go down. Derek "Van" Vandeveer, a senior geek in DeFanti's umbrella corporation—which is called Mondiale, and which seems to consist mostly of telephone numbers—watches with baffled intensity the birth pangs of the War against Terror, which will be no more stable than the previous bubble. Within hours, Van is being headhunted by an old colleague in the federal government, desperate to enlist his world-class expertise in computer network security issues, because the world of information (which, as we've been arguing, is the world that has become SF) is a sieve. It is not secure. (It will never be secure, Sterling argues, more than once, in more than one fashion, throughout The Zenith Angle.) But that does not mean it cannot be operated. The world of 2001, this unholy dance of spin and sieve and maze, can be patched and goosed. "When the going gets weird," Van says to his wife, Dottie, a world-class astronomer, "the weird turn pro." So he's headhunted.
From this point, we go hither and yon. There is a fascinating (but totally extraneous) chapter set in Afghanistan, with deaths. Acronyms dance across the pages as Van finds himself blundering through the vicious bureaucratic dogfights of the Bush government. Van solves a worldwide computer security problem, in terms which may or may not be "futuristic." I suspect it would take someone as expert as Sterling's weird pro to distinguish what is extrapolatory here from what is simply an inherent part of the code of Now that almost none of us alive has any hope of operating:
"Because no hacker anywhere," says Van, "has invented or found any security holes for Grendel distributed supercomputation code. There are maybe ten guys in the whole world who understand that code. They are all loyal American computer-science academics, and they are all real, real busy."
Caring enough to tell the truth
There is surely a note here of the kind of hard-SF triumphalism which no sane reader in 2004 can encounter without some sense that the madmen have taken over the asylum, but Sterling soon punishes Van for this geek gloat. The Grendel distributed supercomputation code soon fades into a daze of pixel, the agency (the CCIAB—acronyms abound blindingly throughout) which Van works for is disappeared, and The Zenith Angle lurches elsewhere, back and forth, up and down the world-code. Having been screwed by a Cerberus or two of the new regime, Van finally gets mad and fights back; he almost loses Dottie and their child, but she holds firm and he finds peace with her. A mad (and completely irrelevant) scheme is unearthed by the weird pro, and in an action climax hilariously adrift from the real action, he and some pals explosively terminate the lunacy.
So the story itself ends in zilch. And so what: If Sterling doesn't care, and makes it possible for us to skim through without really quite noticing that there is no story there, why should we care to complain now? Because The Zenith Angle is not really the story it tells: perhaps because the geeks who decipher the code that pulls the levers of the world are not themselves truly storyable. The Zenith Angle is all action (like the world of information—information not being information until it is touched) but no story. Perhaps Sterling is simply refusing to make up a story where he thinks one cannot be told.
The Zenith Angle may simply be telling the truth.
