Bruce Sterling's doing a virtual public interview on the WELL this week about his new technothriller, The Zenith Angle. I really liked this — the blurb I sent Bruce went "Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called 'thrillers' but very few are this thrilling."
The thing that always intrigued me about technothrillers
was that technicians are support staff rather than
protagonists. I mean, who makes a worse enemy —
James Bond, with a "license to kill" — or H. Ross Perot?
Perot's a weedy-looking Wally Cox mainframe
nerd, but he doesn't hesitate to hire ex=Special Forces
types and conduct private black-bag operations
in Iran.
