The Future solution for SPAM

It's the doldrums of summer when everyone is off on holiday or surfing for porn on the internet with their laptop out in the park. I've got a short break between Finnish courses and I've been catching up on my reading a bit. I thought I'd read a bit of fiction for a change so I gave The Zenith Angle a try. This book was so bad that I would feel a pang of pity for Sterling if it hadn't wasted a few hours of my time reading such a pathetic excuse for a book. Oh, how I mourn the days of wonderful sci-fi with authors like Clarke, Verne, Wells, Burroughs and E. E. Smith who never, ever wrote crap like this:

We are attacking that Iridium satellite, said Tony. Right now. There is no visible beam. It is a very energy-efficient process. The adaptive beam has to penetrate miles of atmosphere with as little signal loss as possible. We don't even generate the laser pulses locally. we amplify them and collate them. We are beaming Internet traffic up into the sky, from the telescope, right now. Those Internet signals come from all over the planet.

Don't the people miss their Internet when you throw it up into outer space? said Sanjay.

It's all spam.

No.

Yes, I am attacking a satellite with laser spam.

No.

We are running a major Internet backbone across the Rocky Mountains here, said Tony patiently. We have spam filters. Nobody ever asks where the spam goes. We beam the spam into outer space.

Insert a Dr. Evil-esque RRRiiiiigggghhhhT in there, call it the "Alan Parsons Project" and it could almost be a comedy. And this is as good as it gets in the book. There is a glue gun that gets so much air time in the story that it becomes a motif and I think maybe that Sterling had been huffing the glue pretty hard while writing. Sure, it's peppered with references to people in this reality and, of course, 911, but this book is so bad I hope there is a way to deploy the remainders against the terrorists instead of vicitimising the unsuspecting bargain hunters at B&N with this monumentally craptastic attempt at a story. I think I'll just go back and re-read the classics instead of wasting my time and money on these horribly disappointing books.