''The Zenith Angle'' is a science fiction novel by American writer

Bruce Sterling Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the ''Mirrorshades'' anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre. Sterling's first ...

, first published in 2004, about a pioneering expert in computer and network security with a traditional

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...

personality named Derek Vandeveer. His life irrevocably changes after the

September 11, 2001 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

on the

World Trade Center World Trade Centers are the hundreds of sites recognized by the World Trade Centers Association. World Trade Center may also refer to: Buildings * World Trade Center (1973–2001), a building complex that was destroyed during the September 11 at ...

Plot summary

Derek "Van" Vandeveer is a young, well respected, computer scientist. He is rich with stock options and heady with his own success when his whole world is suddenly and forever changed as the planes begin crashing into the

. Within months his fortune is gone to an

Enron Enron Corporation was an American Energy development, energy, Commodity, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was led by Kenneth Lay and developed in 1985 via a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both re ...

-like scandal, and his wife and son have moved west to work on a new telescope being developed by a billionaire entrepreneur. Van is recruited into a nascent wing of the government, working on the outside of the main bureaucracy to vastly improve the security of government systems. His ingenious design gains him even more respect from his peers, but as the project continues Van goes through personality changes, becoming more paranoid and simultaneously more patriotic. Without the psychological aid of the money and nice house of his former company, he even begins to question whether he really is a computer scientist or just an over-glorified technician. The novel comes to a head as Van is asked to look into the reason a multibillion-dollar pork project spy satellite is failing in space. The bureaucracy, thinking that he will fail in this endeavor, hopes to use it to discredit his boss and him and put an end to their power climb in Washington. Van discovers the problem and through a covert military-like attack on the source, puts an end to it.

Themes

Bruce Sterling touches on many of his current interests during the course of this

techno-thriller A techno-thriller or technothriller is a hybrid genre drawing from science fiction, thrillers, spy fiction, action, and war novels. They include a disproportionate amount (relative to other genres) of technical details on their subject matter ...

. Environmentally friendly design, the dot-com bomb,

Bollywood Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood and formerly as Bombay cinema, is primarily produced in Mumbai. The popular term Bollywood is a portmanteau of "Bombay" (former name of Mumbai) and "Cinema of the United States, Hollywood". The in ...

, computer and network security, and the ubiquitous

fiber-optic cable A fiber-optic cable, also known as an optical-fiber cable, is an assembly similar to an electrical cable but containing one or more optical fibers that are used to carry light. The optical fiber elements are typically individually coated with p ...

External links

"Beyond the Beyond"
Bruce Sterling's current weblog

2004 American novels 2004 science fiction novels Novels by Bruce Sterling American science fiction novels {{2000s-sf-novel-stub