Ah yes, perfect for this place, the patron saint of the insane, “Wow, that’s crazy.”
That new book by Bruce Sterling, The Zenith Angle? I was reading the bottom of page 66, and I’d include a quote, but I can’t figure out how to punctuate a character quoting a character in another book. And while it’s dangerous territory for an author to invoke the grand masters, I got about halfway through that quote, in fact, just into the first part of the first line, and I knew who was being quoted. I can go one further, I think the book’s still on my shelf someplace, or a copy of it. The first time I read it? It was a black paperback, with a title in white letters and some “spacey” artwork. Gave me shivers.
Reading the lines, the beginning of the character quoting another character, in another book, just the opening couple of words, it’s like hearing the refrain from a song, and then, instantly, that song is stuck in your head for the next day.
I haven’t chased down the original quote yet, but I’m thinking, it’s misquoted in Sterling’s text. Sort of an intellectual game.
Just the reading the prologue to Sterling’s recent novel, I’m hoping it’s a masterpiece, The Zenith Angle, I was wondering why can’t I write such workman-like prose. Spins a yarn with substance and data, but the yarn get up and rips right along.
When I got done with the book, yes, read it all in one sitting, I realized that I’d 1) put it on the shelf with his last half dozen novels as a “keeper” and 2) in a few years, it will read as rather dated material.
But that’s why I like the book, out of all his works, Islands in the Net, in some ways, seems a little dated, but the concepts covered, the way our present world looked like it might be, when the book was written, in 1988? That’s what’s so cool. In some cases, it’s eerily prescient.
In a similar fashion, I’m sure, when I come back and revisit The Zenith Angle, some of the concepts will appear naïve and dated. That’s the beauty of it; it’s set in the present.
Being suckled on classic space opera – of the literary sort – I rather enjoyed the pacing. And the echo of the grandmaster.