Book cover for The Zenith Angle: A Novel by Bruce Sterling

The Zenith Angle

A Novel

2004 Released
320 Pages
5-6 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Paperback Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Del ReyISBN 9780345478320

“Gleeful, shrewd, speculative, cynical, closely observed . . . The Zenith Angle offers wisdom and solace, thrills and laughter.”—The Washington Post

“Compelling and important  . . . A darkly comic fable of info-war, the black budget, über-geek idealism, and the politics of Homeland Insecurity.”—William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition 

          
Pioneering computer wizard Derek “Van” Vandeveer has been living extra-large as a VP for a booming Internet company. But the September 11 attacks on America change everything. Recruited as the key member of an elite federal computer-security team, Van enters the labyrinthine trenches of the Washington intelligence community. His special genius is needed to debug the software glitch in America’s most crucial KH-13 satellite, capable of detecting terrorist hotbeds worldwide. But the problem is much deeper. Now Van must make the unlikely leap from scientist to spy, team up with a ruthlessly resourceful ex-Special Forces commando, and root out an unknown enemy—one with access to a weapon of untold destructive power.

“Great fun . . . A cyberthriller of 21st-century technologies [that] peeps wittily behind the national security scenes of a modern superpower.”—New Scientist

“A comedic thriller for the homeland security era.”—Entertainment Weekly

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is an American author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk science fiction movement. He began writing in the 1970s; his first novel, Involution Ocean, about a whaling ship in an ocean of dust, is a science fictional pastiche of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. His other works, including his series of stories and a novel, Schismatrix, set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, often deal with computer-based technologies and genetic engineering. His five short story collections and ten novels have earned several honors: a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, a Hayakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award. Sterling has also worked as a critic and journalist, writing for Metropolis, Artforum, Icon, MIT Technology Review, Time, and Newsweek, as well as Interzone, Science Fiction Eye, Cheap Truth, and Cool Tools. He edits Beyond the Beyond, a blog hosted by Wired.  Sterling is also involved in the technology and design community. In 2003 his web-only art piece, Embrace the Decay, was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and became the most-visited piece in the museum’s digital gallery. He has taught classes in design at the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam, Centro in Mexico City, Fabrica in Treviso, Italy, and the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Sterling lives in Austin, Texas; Belgrade, Serbia; and Turin, Italy.

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