|
zeitgeisty
In a phone conversation this week, my friend Eric B. remarked that he'd recently heard people turning the term "zeitgeist" into an adjective: "zeitgeisty." Both of us agreed that the word sounded kind of disgusting. "Faintly digestive," I said.
As its title might imply, Bruce Sterling's Globalhead is a book that aspires to be zeitgeisty, and often it succeeds. The book's thirteen stories touch on lots of last-quarter-of-the-twentieth-century hot points: Islamic fundamentalism, American pop culture, the collapsed Soviet Union, celebrity as political capital, nanotech, black market economies, abortifacients, rock music (American and Japanese), and (sigh) Lester Bangs.
It's a decent read, although the stories mostly feel faintly thin, underdeveloped. They are, for the most part, stories built around one good(-ish) idea. (I should say here that I'm not the hugest fan of science-fiction short stories in general. I like SF for its world-building qualities, and short stories often have the problem that by the time they've set up the parameters of their worlds, it's time for them to end. This is probably part of why my favorite SF short stories are ones that take place in a world further developed elsewhere (say, Gibson's "Burning Chrome" or "Johnny Mnemonic") or stories in an extended story cycle (say, the Shaper/Mechanist cycle in Sterling's Crystal Express)).
A richer work, and one equally zeitgeisty, is Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, which I enjoyed far more than I expected to. It's slightly dated (©1995, after all) and occasionally its glibness irritates, but the book is spilling over with provocative ideas. Coupland is so full of trenchant observations and clever aphorisms and zany theories that he can just spill them loosely throughout the book.
This prediction struck me as uniquely prescient:
"We decided that in game shows in the future, contestants will win a free focus-grouping, where they spend six hours with ten demographically preselected focus-groupers commenting [on] and criticizing all aspects of their lives."
The characters are obsessed with pop culture and trivia, they lack a coherent sense of politics, and they have no critique of power—but for my money this representation hits the nail right on its zeitgeisty little head. |
Monday, October 06, 2003
7:23 PM
|
