Father Time

When the 20th Century morphs into the next, at the pre-Y2K reunion of Zeta and Leggy with his father, the adventures of narrative are the main event. Old Joe starts saying things like, "Man. Eve let an idiot--a retromastoid idiot, Sam, or teratoid--in at eleven A.M." Or, more to the point: "No darn radon!" The father represents the 20th Century's key fact that made clear that history might end: the atomic bomb. So Leggy's pop's narratives end and begin in the same place. That's his story line--palindromes. And when you think about it, a similar specter was haunting 20th-century narrative from James Joyce to Samuel R. Delany--the circle. Nonlinear narrative--it seemed like a good idea at the time, but did it go anywhere? Was it the sort of story line that could make it straight through Y2K?

Sterling's narratives, picaresque sometimes to the point of bagginess, don't necessarily lead anywhere either. After the palindrome climax, Y2K itself passes with the merest ripple, and Zeitgeist's resolutions--generational sequence and how it could matter if pop did matter--are so subtle that for all the buildup, the new century's Zeitgeist seems less butterfly than winged caterpillar. That's Sterling's real/ideal interface again. But there's another punch line here. Like we used to say in the 20th Century, the medium is the message. And Sterling's messages translate through the medium of pop, which, like Joe's palindromes, can signify even when its head is up its ass. It doesn't matter if it doesn't matter, but it does matter if it does, because we share this narrative with a crowd.

So we don't have to be as exclusive as old Grandpa Joe, who queried, "Are we not drawn onward, we few--drawn onward to a new era?" We can jump right to the medium's message, which reads like this: If you have to end somewhere, it's a good place to start.