Comment Bogus review, grotesquely overrated author (Score 2, Funny) 110
Let's start with the tag line in Stross' review: "Bruce Sterling has been writing on the cutting edge of SF for close to thirty years now."
Wrong.
Tragically, Bruce Sterling's latest novel sags like a falsie on an aging Las Vegas chorus girl. Still scribbled in the same antique cyberpunk vein he pounded out 30 years ago, Sterling's prose has gotten so cobwebbed you have to blow the dust off before you can read it.
Just as Distractions offered a mediocre rewrite of 1949's All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren with superfluous cyberpunk elements thrown in, The Zenith Angle offers a fifth-rate rewrite of 1994's The Great Hacker Crackdown with unnecessary 9/11 cyberspookery tossed on...in the manner of croutons dumped on a wilting salad.
Even sadder? How far Cory Doctorow has gotten by french-kissing Sterling's bunghole. Doctorow types creatively enough, but Doctorow's own efforts ("0wnz0red") recap the already tired territory of 80s cyberpunk with a sixth-rate rehash of Greg Benford's "Blood Music" (a vastly superior story). Yet Doctorow's stunningly mediocre story made it to the Nebula Awards finals...a brutal indictment of the current bankrupt state of science fiction.
Bruce Sterling excels, all right...but not as a novelist.
His speciality? The chautauqua. A hallelujah-I-done-found-Jesus William Jennings Bryan old-fashioned rabble-rousing speech. Sterling does great chautauqua. His rip-roaring rodomontade "A Contrarian View Of Open Source" remains by orders of magnitude the best piece of persiflage Sterling ever wrote:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08
Unfortunately, Sterling plots books a la Chip Delaney -- he throws 'em up in the air and takes whatever lands as the end. That usually fails badly, as in Distractions, Schismatrix, Islands In the Net and most of Sterling's other botched novel-shaped abortions. (In fairness, Holy Fire actually worked -- a rarity for Sterling's oeuvre.)
As mentioned, Sterling's short fiction far excels his novels, and his essays and lectures vastly outshine his short fiction.
Like Sterling, Doctorow writes better essays and puff pieces for the unwise common wisdom than fiction. This week, GPL licenses and open-source-everything. (Everyone genuflect! The answer has arrived! Open source! Never mind asking how musicians or writers or artists will earn a living... Hey, works great for operating systems, so why not try it with everything?) Next week, who knows? Coal tar health elixirs? The magnificent amphicar? How about megadoses of Vitamin C?
Though he poses as a member of the technorati, Sterling lacks basic technical knowledge of the kind of slashdotters take for granted. And Sterling's appalling misinformation oft catches up with him, as in Doctorow's aforementioned transcript of Sterling's SXSW talk.
Viz.: Sterling calls doubts about global warming "Lysenkoism," a claim which squarely contradicts the facts. Compare this article from the Christian Science Monitor on global warming:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0318/p13s01-sten.
I despise Dubya more than Doctorow or Sterling put together, but the evidence just fails to support sweeping claims of the kind Sterling makes -- especially his absurd charge of Lysenkosim.
Bottom line: climatologists have no real idea why the Little Ice Age occurred, and the current warming trend appears to have begun circa 4000 BCE... Which makes it hard to blame on CFCs.
I digress, but with purpose: Bruce Sterling slings around this kind of rampant misinformation willy-nilly, and his credibility suffers for it. A "cutting edge" cyberpunk would check his facts. Try google, Bruce. Visit the hard science journals online. Or, if all else fails, visit the local university library.
So calling Sterling "cutting edge" makes up in amusement value for what it lacks in accuracy.
As for William Gibson, he long since fell into a rut, pounding out the same old novel every 4 years. (His latest, Pattern Recognition , retraces the infinitely superior Count Zero with Euclidean precision, point for point.) Even worse, Gibson's unfortunate love affiar with multiple simultaneous narrative POVs. That gaffe renders all Gibson's books after Count Zero virtually unreadable. I say "vritually" because if you thumb through Gibson's books and tear out all the pages unrelated to the main character's POV, the novels then become highly readable...albeit much shorter.
But hey, people... a reader should not have to tear pages out of a book to make it readable. That's the editor's job pre-publication. So where are the editors? Why haven't they done their job?
Same question lays its foetid hand on Sterling's Distractions. A competent editor would've tossed the manuscript back in Sterling's lap. "Rewrite it," a competent editor would have ordered Sterling, "without pulling a plot out of your ass as you go along."
This points up one of the saddest aspects of the collapse and decline of modern science fiction: namely, editorial incompetence. Any competent editor would have tossed All Tomorrow's Parties back in Gibson's face and told him to rewrite the book with a single POV. The book would have become readable, and the editor would have had a chance to do her job rather than attend pointless meetings about the sales of movie rights.
So both Gibson's and Sterling's careers, as well the rehashed tired 80s cyberpunk Doctorow cranks out (which Greg Benford penned a lot better 20 years ago), embody the gross incompetence of today's science fiction editors as well as the general decline of basic skills among people who write for a living. The basic rules of writing from the pulp era have vanished from living memory, along with the typewriter, the LP, and the sentence diagram. To wit -- plot a book out beforehand, or if not, fix up the plot afterward so halfway parses...use a single central narrative POV...avoid superfluous characters in meaningless scenes...steer clear of huge blocks of expository material disguised as lectures to the reader. Notice that both Sterling and Stephenson have fallen into these wretched habits, and no editor has had the gumption to bitch-slap 'em out of it.
No surprise.
Once upon a time, kids diagrammed sentences. Nowadays, socially promoted Ivy League grads routinely fail basic literacy tests:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/1998/Mar
This has eaten away at today's authors' basic writing skills worse than a Drano enema.
Perhaps the single worst symptom of the general level of incompetence throughout the publishing industry remains the odious Teresa Nielsen Hayden. An editor who dotes on calling writers "twerps" and "idiots," she adores infantile name-calling like "auctorial insanity." Meanwhile, Hayden's own spavined prose sticks to the ear like congealed bacon fat, riddled with "to be" constructions of the kind that would embarrass a high school essayist.
Don't get me wrong. Excellent writers abound in science fiction - they just can't get published. Kathe Koje and Carter Scholz some to mind -- but, alas...you guessed it. These superb writers barely squeeze into print once per leap year, while third-rate wannabes like Bruce Sterling and burn-outs who've made a career of rehashing their one good novel like William Gibson , and inept thugs like Teresa Nielsen Hayden rise to the top of the heap.
Well, no one ever called the world fair.
Maybe we should blame the times. After all, a guy who can't even speak the English language coherently has risen to the Presidency, and Lawrence Summers, the imbecile who wrecked the Russian economy with his botched shock therapy privatization scheme, got awarded the presidency of Harvard for his appalling incompetence. And to top it all off, the jerkoff who brought us the Edsel got promoted . He became Secretary Of Defense under JFK! And then he did for Viet Nam what he had done for Ford with the Edsel!
But wait! It gets even better! Because then the world-class dufus Robert S. McNamara went on to ruin the world bank with a chain of global defaults, and after this unparalleled career of failure and folly, now McNamara gets hailed as a paragon of wisdomn courtesy of the Oscar-winning documentary "The Fog Of War."
(Sigh.) Blame the times we live in. Adoring crowds cheer O.J.'s acquittal... Kenny Lay lives large in Aspen. Meanwhile, Aung Saun Sukyi languishes under house arrest in Myanmar. And Richard Jewell and Dr. Wen Ho Li watch their lives gurgle down the toilet courtesy of botched and baseless FBI accusations.
No, nobody ever called the world fair. But when, oh when, did Dubya's mangling of the English langauge suddenly turn from laugahle dyslexia into scintillating eloquence? When, pray tell, did crass incompetence like Sterling's botched novels become a lifetime meal-ticket to wealth and fame...?
