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 -=- 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. _________________________________________ ISN mailing list Sponsored by: OSVDB.org - For 15 cents a day, you could help feed an InfoSec junkie! (Broke? Spend 15 minutes a day on the project!)
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