Zeitgeist, Bruce Sterling
Zeitgeist, Bruce Sterling
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Zeitgeist

Author: Bruce Sterling

Narrator: Jeff Woodman

Unabridged: 10 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/01/2001

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction


Synopsis

Bruce Sterling is "perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today" (Time), offering haunting visions of a future shaped by a madness of our own making. His latest novel is a startling tragicomic spectacle that takes a breathtaking look at a world where the future is being chased down by the past....

Zeitgeist

It's 1999 in Cyprus, an ancient island bejeweled with blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers and littered with rusting land mines, corroding barbed wire, and illegal sewage dumps. Here, in the Turkish half of the island, 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 band ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. And 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 group will never release.

Leggy's brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world's most dangerous people. His business partner is the rich and connected Mehmet Ozbey, a man with many identities and a Turkish girlfriend whose beauty and singing voice could blow G-7  right out of the water. His security chief is Pulat Romanevich Khoklov, who learned to fly MiG combat jets in Afghanistan and now pilots Milosevic's personal airplane. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, Leggy must act quickly and decisively. Bombs are dropping in Yugoslavia. 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 gets a surprise when the daughter he's never met arrives on his doorstep. A major fan of G-7, she is looking for a father--and her search forces Leggy to examine his  life before making a madcap journey in search of a father of his own. It's a detour that puts his G-7 Zeitgeist in some real jeopardy. For in Istanbul, Leggy's former partners are getting restless, and the G-7 girls are beginning to die....Zeitgeist is a world-beat tale of smugglers, paparazzi, greed, war, and a new era of cultural crusades. Here Bruce Sterling proves once again that in the fiction of imagination, he is one of the most insightful writers of our time.

About The Author

Bruce Sterling is an Austin-born science fiction writer and Net critic, internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist who is also considered one of the forefathers of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. He has won a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award.Jeff Woodman is the reader of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Life of Pi, The Venetian Affair, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and previous edition of Don't Know Much about History. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Daniel on March 01, 2008

Bruce Sterling is easily one of the most original writers out there today. So many works in the sci-fi/fantasy field are simply remixes of Lord of the Rings, or Conan, or a Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke/Niven novel. But when you open a Bruce Sterling novel you know you will be getting something that isn't......more

Goodreads review by Sasha on September 10, 2015

Bruce Sterling has a sawed-off idea shotgun and you're about to get it in the face with this messy book. He has a new idea for every page, and some of them are interesting but none of them are focused; it feels indulgent, like he thinks he's too smart to need rigor. Pretty smart he is: this is one of......more

Goodreads review by Alan on March 12, 2010

Zeitgeist is exceptional, particularly in this sense: it's one of the very few near-future thrillers that has tumbled into the recent past almost unscathed, without becoming stale and irrelevant. Yet, anyway. Sterling's novel came out during The Year 2000, and it captures the jittery sense that many......more

Goodreads review by David on October 10, 2014

All in all another great read from Bruce Sterling. I picked it up and was hooked pretty quickly, and ended up reading 80% of the book in one sitting (staying up way too late); fortunately I had enough left to make a good reading session while wrapping it up the next night, This is another fascinating......more

Goodreads review by Steve on September 02, 2022

This was great. Good, 3-D characters. Not science fiction; a little bit of magic realism. Funny in parts. I liked the protagonist a lot.......more


Quotes

“Brilliant!”
The Washington Post

“A gem.”
Chicago Sun-Times

“Turn-of-the-millennium spectacular ... Y2K’s Catch 22!”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The book’s preliminaries showcase Sterling’s erudition about back-page global politics, [but] they’re upstaged by his coolest trick: He can write about pop.”
City Pages (Minneapolis)


Also by Bruce Sterling:

Novels:
The Artificial Kid
The Difference Engine
(with William Gibson)
Distraction
Heavy Weather
Holy Fire
Involution Ocean
Islands In the Net
Schismatrix

Stories:
Crystal Express
Globalhead
A Good Old-Fashioned Future

Nonfiction:
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Editor:
Mirror Shades: The Cyberpunk Anthology