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

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....

Zeitgeist is the work of brilliant man, and a phenomenally gifted writer, who has thought long and hard about epistemology, global capitalism, cultural cross-pollination, modernity, liminality, and moral responsiblity. These real world issues having proved too taxing for the tools of modern speculative fiction, Sterling retreats from the paradigmatic high ground of his last two novels, only to embrace stale academic orthodoxies once thought dead. The novelistic result is a painfully embarrasing, and unexpected, admission of creative defeat from science fiction proper to the world of literary respectability. Considering the source, it is at least as surprising and discomfiting as the deathbed coversions of some of the High Modernists to Mother Church.

From its crackerjack "prize" of poststructural theory (presented here as hot-off-the-press wisdom) to its threadbare vestments of magical realism - garishly accessorized with patches of literary postmodernism - Zeitgeist reads like the work of a late seventies graduate student who somehow gained access to CNN feeds. Its historical knowledge is cutting edge, detailed, sharp - its style and thematic lenses, however, were dull when they were ground thirty years ago. Think of the outfits sported by Edina Monsoon on television's Absolutely Fabulous - technically, they're au courant - Dior, Givency, etc. But the mind that has assembled them into jarring, incoherent gestalts - that mind is Carnaby street at its seventies nadir.

Just so with Zeitgeist. How else can one describe characters in a twenty-first century science fiction novel engaged in a self referential meditation on their status as narrative constructs? Given average fan reading habits, perhaps these clever tableaus will strike some as the very voice of the Now. Readers who have come to expect an incisive, original intelligence from Sterling, however, will go home empty handed. The man who once urged us to "woo the muse of the odd" has turned to wooing the muse of Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace, with disappointing results.


Post-911, a prophetic book   January 2, 2002
 13 out of 15 found this review helpful

A science fiction novel about Y2K written after Y2K? No, i think the real mystical power of this book came into play in our post-911 world, where the reality of the "culture war" became apparent even to ignorant, self-centered Americans. Can you think of any other novels that mention Osama bin Laden by name?

Personally, i think this is Sterling's best work in years. The self-referentiality and magical realism aspects are hard for many people to grasp (judging from other reviews), but if you're familiar with French semiotics and Spanish language magical novels, it is much easier. And really, magical realism and self-referentiality is as good a lens to view our world of constant surveillance, mass marketing, and millenial change as anything anyone else has to offer in the marketplace of ideas.


Feeling slow-witted about this one -- or is it the book?   April 9, 2001
 12 out of 13 found this review helpful

First, if this is the first time you have heard of Sterling and haven't read his other work, STOP right there. Read his short stories in Globalhead or A Good Old Fashioned Future. Then, decide if you are interested in reading more. If this were the first Sterling work you ever picked up, I doubt you would ever read anything more by him. You need a gentler introduction to Sterling.

Second, before you purchase this book, take a look at Sterling's Leggy Starlitz short stories. The three that I know of are: "Hollywood Kremlin" (in Globalhead), "Are you for 86?" (in Globalhead), and "The Littlest Jackal" (in A Good Old Fashioned Future). If you like those stories and want to know more, for sure read Zeitgeist - you will probably like it. Also, if you don't read the short stories, you will have a harder time figuring out all of the details in Zeitgeist - not 100% necessary but very helpful.

Leggy Starlitz is definitely one of those characters that you really love and "get" or one of those characters that you hate, you think is shallow, and you just don't understand. Personally, I think that I understand at least a little of who/what Starlitz is and (especially in the short stories), I really loved him. He's not a flat character and there is a lot about him that is not explained either in the short stories or in Zeitgeist.

That said, did I like Zeitgeist? "Yeah, no, maybe" sums it up pretty well. In case you don't know, the word zeitgeist is German for "the spirit of the times". That's the basic concept driving this book. The question is, what is time all about? How does time work? Does the millennium have any meaning at all or is it just another year?

I'm not going to pretend that I actually figured out answers to those questions by reading Zeitgeist, but it did make me think about them a lot. Honestly, I felt that I was a bit out of my depth reading this book. I could definitely tell that there were some super high level concepts that Sterling was trying to get across but I had a hard time understanding them. The main idea was something along the line of time being a narrative and about how events either "fit" the narrative or just don't make sense in it. If events don't belong in the narrative, then bad things tend to happen.

There is a great deal of depth to this novel beyond the high level plot about Starlitz managing a faux Spice Girls band. This is also the case with all of the Starlitz short stories - there's always more than meets the eye. Although that high level plot isn't half bad either, it's the behind the scenes action that I really like. And the tiny Princess Di subplot made me fall over laughing when I figured it all out.

As for the argument that this is a book about Y2K that was published a year to late... If you actually get to the end of the book and still think this, you have definitely missed the point.

Also, as for the argument that Sterling is mired in jargon and doesn't make sense... come on! It's Sterling for crying out loud. This should not be your first Bruce Sterling experience and if you've ever read anything by him, you know what to expect in terms of jargon and being "kool".

Basically, no guarantees that you will actually like this book if you buy it. I would not say that I liked it that much. It's not my favorite work of Sterling's - Heavy Weather and his short stories seem much better to me. In fact, on occasion, Sterling's style falls a little short - in the final section when we're getting closer to Y2K, the story seems to get a bit muddled... but that might be part of the point as well.

Not my favorite Sterling work, but DEFINITELY a book that I will want to re-read in six months or a year. To me, actually wanting to re-read a book is the best possible test of how worthwhile the book was to read.


bad enough to stop halfway through   July 18, 2002
 9 out of 17 found this review helpful

I'm a voracious reader, and that equates to about a book a week for me. I am a lover of all sci fi, and plenty of other fiction, too.

This book was as fingernails on slate by the time I was half through so I stopped. It is self-consciously clever- so much so I blushed with embarassment for the author. A 10 year old girl demonstrated a working familiarity with scholarly writings on existentialism and feminist politics to her estranged-but-loveable dad. He didn't comment on this absurd precosity. That's when I gave up.

As much as I read books and these reviews which often guide my purchases, I rarely post anything, myself. Here I make the effort to save you -stranger- from a distinctly unpleasant dose of forced
and insincere mirth.


Too hip-hype for the room   March 16, 2001
 6 out of 10 found this review helpful

Anyone who reviews this book, unfortunately, has to dig into the same kool, kultural well as Sterling does and ends up sounding as badly antedated as this book already is. So here I go shooting myself in the foot.

Leggy says the whole G7 deal has to wind up by New Year's Day of Y2K? Well, this book is using cultural references that are already atavisms in year Y2K + 1. Too hip, too noir and too self-aware for the room. I think I saw this (type of) film with John Travolta in it and that one creaked of sweat, effort and dialogue that was just a little too precocious. However I did learn a new word: "Rhizomatic". So it's not a complete waste. And it would make a pretty good junk film if the right mind got a hold of it. I think a British director would do it up right.

And it's "Alvin Toffler" not "Toppler".