Review: A fresh 'Angle' on the spy novel
Bruce Sterling's new book takes author in new direction
By L.D. Meagher
CNN
(CNN) -- The espionage thriller genre has been a bit adrift since the end of the Cold War. The cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction has been a bit adrift since its dystopian visions of a wired world started to look a lot like the real world.
Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of cyberpunk, has addressed the latter issue in his writings. Now, he addresses the former in his novel "The Zenith Angle."
Sterling has created a new post-Cold War milieu for spy stories. Gone is the us-versus-them paradigm of competing superpowers. In its place is another us-versus-them: the United States against terrorists. The tale begins, fittingly, on September 11, 2001.
Derek Vandeveer, uber-techie, is living the good life. He and his wife have a new baby. He's making boatloads of money running research for an Internet company that survived the dot-com bust. He is having breakfast in the suburban mansion he has just purchased when he sees the World Trade Center attacks on television. In that instant, his comfortable existence is over.
Before he knows it, he has signed on with a new, high priority federal project to build defenses around the high-tech U.S. infrastructure.
The protagonist hears a lot of talk about heightened "cyber-security" and a coming "info-war." Mostly, though, he finds himself doing what he did in the private sector -- developing and evaluating new hardware and software.
Cut off from his family by his work, he gravitates into the orbit of a special operations veteran named Michael Hickok. Only then does Vandeveer begin to see the true dimensions of the threat facing the United States.
Edgy narrative
Sterling takes his time laying down the background of the story. The technique allows him to explore Cyber Age concepts and constructs, including a new, state-of-the-art telescope that Vandeveer's wife, an astrophysicist, is working to bring on line.
"This telescope was polished and elegant," Sterling writes, "bejeweled with buttons, plugs, and switches, like a trophy wife at a Nobel Prize party. It -- she -- was five stories high. A towering complex of struts had delicately tapered arms painted in designer enamel. Her bottom was a great big mirror bowl of glassy blue hexagons in a green plastic case. All the joins and seams were suspiciously perfect. This telescope was like the Hubble's sexier little sister."
About two-thirds of the way through the book, the action kicks in. And once it does, the story rockets toward a violent conclusion that leaves Vandeveer -- and everyone he knows -- profoundly changed.
"The Zenith Angle" touches all the bases one would expect from an espionage thriller. And it does so in against a backdrop that is as chilling as it is familiar. Sterling has not lost the narrative edge that gave the cyberpunk movement its vitality. He wields it just as deftly in a very different genre.
This novel may not be the final word on where spy stories are going. But it's a pretty good start.
