[Bruce Sterling], [November 2000]

Summary & Review:

This book follows shady entrepreneur [Leggy Starlitz], the hero of several of [Bruce Sterling|Sterling]'s short stories, as he lives out the final year of last century managing an all-girl no-talent ultra-commercial [pop group], named [G7|G-7], after the nations of birth of its members.

The book deals with [Y2K] in a very original way (with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight): the "bug", and the--as it turned out, largely exaggerated--fear of it, are mentioned in passing, but much more weight is given to a [fin de siècle] crash of [narrative]¹; as much as anything, it is an [obituary] of the [20th century], and a provocative view of things to come. While today terms like [war of cultures], [closed society|closed] vs. [open society|open societies] and [globalization] are much (over-)hyped themes, [Bruce Sterling|Sterling] can be called somewhat of a visionary for writing about them in a pre-[9-11] novel, and even mentioning [Osama bin Laden] by name in this context.

Zeitgeist is a pretty thin book, and an astonishingly quick read, especially considering the wealth of information presented in this book. I don't know if this is a conscious joke by [Bruce Sterling|Sterling], but to illustrate the enormous [information density] of the book: [Bruce Sterling|Sterling] treats almost all of the historical contents of the 1000+ pages of [Neal Stephenson]'s [Cryptonomicon] in a single paragraph.

Names dropped² in the book:

Another case in point of this being one of the richest books with respect to information I've ever read. I have listed here only the names of people mentioned explicitly in the book (So, for instance [Diana, Princess of Wales|Lady Di] and [Nick Leeson] are missing.), and then only if they were not fictional³ characters.

[Theodor Adorno], [Mehmet Ali Agca], [Madeleine Albright], [Louis Althusser], [Mustafa Kemal Atatürk], [Tex Avery], [Hülya Avsar], [Safiye Ayla], [Roland Barthes], [Jean Baudrillard], [Jean-Paul Belmondo], [Boris Berezhovsky], [Tony Bennett], [Napoleon Bonaparte], [Matthew Brady], [Italo Calvino], [Sibel Can], [Mariah Carey], [Elena Ceausescu], [Nicolae Ceausescu], [Oral Celik], [Ozer Çiller], [Tansu Çiller], [Eric Clapton], [Bing Crosby], [Marie Curie], [Dariush], [Gilles Deleuze], [Jacques Derrida], [Porfirio Díaz], [Celine Dion], [Michèle le Doeff], [Isadora Duncan], [Umberto Eco], [Albert Einstein], [Brian Eno], [Muhsin Ertugrul], [Khashaiar Etemadi], [Cheba Fadela], [William Faulkner], [Joschka Fischer], [Ian Fleming], [Jane Fonda], [Michel Foucault], [Bill Gates], [Jean Paul Gaultier], [Frank Gehry], [Vincent van Gogh], [Benny Goodman], [Al Gore], [Tipper Gore], [Sydney Greenstreet], [Felix Guattari], [Ebru Gündes], [Vladimir Guzinski], [Muserref Hanim], [Jimi Hendrix], [Billie Holiday], [Doc Holliday], [Grace Hopper], [Howard Hughes], [Luce Iragaray], [Israel Kamakawiwoole|Bradda Iz], [Robert Johnson], [Janis Joplin], [Julia Kristeva], [Ted Kaczynski], [John Keats], [Christine Keeler], [Cheb Khaled], [Ayatollah Khomeini], [Osama bin Laden] (!), [John Lennon], [Sean Lennon], [Monica Lewinsky], [Alyaksandr Lukashenka], [Mirjana Markovic], [Gabriel García Márquez], [Alexander McQueen], [Marko Milosevic], [Slobodan Milosevic], [Mariko Mori], [Murakami Haruki], [Rupert Murdoch], [Benito Mussolini], [Gamal Abdel-Nasser], [Isaac Newton], [Abdullah Öcalan], [Yoko Ono], [J. Robert Oppenheimer], [Orhan Pamuk], [Carol Pateman], [Victor Pelevin], [Kim Philby], [Pol Pot], [Elvis Presley], [Ceca Raznjatovic], [Janet Reno], [Rembrandt van Rijn], [Jimmy Rodgers], [Mathias Rust], [Mehmet Sener], [George Soros], [Britney Spears], [Josef Stalin], [Masami Teraoka], [Alan Turing], [Alparslan Turkes], [Ted Turner], [Vladimir Vinogradov], [Voltaire|Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire], [Jody Watley], [John Webster], [Ludwig Wittgenstein], [Boris Yeltsin], [Hamiyet Yuceses], [Vladimir Zhirinovsky]

Basically everyone but [Adolf Hitler and Ayn Rand].

¹The book (or at least some of its [protagonist]s) view narrative as the driving force behind reality: some things cannot happen, simply because they do not fit the narrative, and there is a radical break in the narrative between the [20th century|20th] and the [21st century].
²Literally, most of the names are only mentioned, and [WTF] is left as an [exercise for the reader]. While this may be viewed as [namedropping] in the worst sense of the word, it makes for a book that is both easy to read (if one doesn't mind missing a lot of the references) and a [the perfect node|starting point for exploration] into [terra incognita].
³You shudder as you enter the maze of literary theory.
You see here:
An [ontology|ontological] mess.

Zeitgeist (thing)