[ISN] Book review: The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

[InfoSec News]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/books/review/20SCIFIL.html

[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345460618/c4iorg  - WK]


By GERALD JONAS
NYTimes.com 
Sunday Book Review 
Published: June 20, 2004

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The Zenith Angle
Bruce Sterling
Hardcover - 352 pages (April 1, 2004) 
$24.95 - Del Rey Books ISBN: 0345460618

THE ZENITH ANGLE, by Bruce Sterling (Del Rey/Ballantine, $24.95), also 
deals with bureaucratic foot-dragging in the face of clear and present 
danger. Sterling, one of the progenitors of cyberpunk, allows his 
hero, Derek Vandeveer, a computer genius nicknamed Van, to win one for 
the C.C.I.A.B., the Coordination of Critical Information Assurance 
Board. A family man whose astronomer wife handles the child care, Van 
builds a security system -- based on something called a ''Grendel 
supercluster'' -- to safeguard the federal government's computers 
after 9/11. ''Grendels,'' he explains, ''are made from obsolete PC's, 
but clustered in parallel without any von Neumann bottlenecks.'' 

And that's just for starters: ''Van was planning to implement 
distributed streams within the Grendel. That was overkill, really. 
There wasn't a kode-kid, cracker, hacktivist or even intelligence 
agency in the whole world that could break into a Grendel. But a 
Grendel running streams -- man, that would be beyond all coolness.'' 
This is the way Van talks, and Sterling sees no reason to translate 
his professional enthusiasms into ordinary English. Indeed, Van's 
story floats on a Sargasso sea of jargon and bureaucratic acronyms 
that grows ever thicker as the threats escalate from ''infowar'' and 
''cyberwar'' to vintage mad-scientist ''spacewar.'' At some point, 
even Van can't do his duty within the system, so he goes rogue with 
some ex-Special Ops to take down a satellite-killing laser. 

Van's adventures inside and outside the Beltway are treated with some 
amusement, but Sterling underscores their plausibility by dating them 
from September 1999 to September 2002. Which raises the question: how 
much of this is science fiction and how much is fact? When Van visits 
the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force base that commands America's ICBM's, 
he shares this technical detail: ''The entire base was supported on 
giant, white-painted steel springs. If half of Cheyenne Mountain 
vaporized in a 50-megaton first strike, the deep bunker would just 
bounce on its springs a little.'' I'm not sure about the Grendels, but 
this I believe.