"Like Tom Clancy on PCP." That's how Bruce Sterling describes his fin-de-siècle head trip, Zeitgeist, a typically Sterling spectacle packed with verbal flash and digerati wit, along with the expected rail-gun-steady stream of well-thought-out ideas and references. His self-appraisal, as it turns out, is right on. This is a guy widely considered "another, hipper Alvin Toppler" (in the words of cyberpunk godfather John Shirley), an effortlessly intelligent master of both style and substance.

Fans will recognize Zeitgeist's antihero protagonist Leggy Starlitz from Sterling stories "Hollywood Kremlin," "Are You for 86?" and "The Littlest Jackal." The well-connected, world-class fixer is part mystic, part sleaze--sort of Uncle Enzo meets Templeton "Faceman" Peck--and his latest hustle is plying the Third World with merchandise from his all-fake, all-girl band, G-7. (Its seven talentless, Wonderbra-wearing members are known simply as the American One, the French One, the German One, etc.)

Starlitz makes use of a shady, flamboyantly weird network of state officials, bodyguards, photographers, and other assorted players to push the merchandise--action figures, lip gloss, shoes, you name it--on what one of G-7's savvier members calls the "Moslem hillbillies." But things get surreal as G-7 girls start dying, characters start explicitly referring to their purpose in the narrative, and one of Leggy's associates conspires to break G-7's most sacred rule: that the whole enterprise must end by Y2K. --Paul Hughes


From Publishers Weekly
Rife with profound ruminations on the "master narrative" of life, Sterling's newest evokes vestiges of his collaboration with William Gibson (1991's The Difference Engine) as he journeys back to 1999 to detail the escapades of Leggy Starlitz and his latest marketing triumphDthe G-7 girls. Using his international girl band to move products such as G-7 lip gloss, candies and sparkly pantyhose, Starlitz embarks on a glamorous Third World tour that skids to an abrupt halt in Turkish Cyprus. Although the dialogue riffs along energetically while Starlitz and Turkish millionaire mobster Mehmet Ozbey discuss the future of G-7, politics and life's "deepest truths," fans of Sterling's fast-paced thrillers will find little suspense or intrigue in this experimental piece. Starlitz passively steps aside, allowing Ozbey to use the band as a front for his illicit negotiations, and dutifully assumes the role of father when his lesbian ex-wife suddenly appears with his telekinetic daughter in tow. Abandoning Cyprus to conjure up his "Javanese Navajo" father (who dematerialized as a result of being too close to an atomic bomb test in the '50s), Starlitz travels to New Mexico and stages mock-Christmas festivities. When the G-7 girls begin to die, however, Starlitz returns to Cyprus to engage in another aimless battle of wits with Ozbey. Although this tragicomedy resonates with Sterling's striking prose and strong characterizations, these do little to salvage a tale that reads more like a disjointed dream than a cohesive narrative. Nevertheless, Sterling's strong following will certainly buoy the sales of this leaden sinker. (Nov. 7) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Abandoning the future in this bold, sprawling book, sf novelist Sterling reveals an equally fantastic present and brilliantly captures the moral and cultural climate of an end-of-millennium world full of twentieth-century detritus. The world is dominated by Western cultural influences, even in Islamic countries, and the "military-entertainment complex" has superceded the military-industrial complex. As Y2K approaches, Leggy Starlitz thinks he is about to pull off his greatest scam, "scouring the marginal, emergent markets with a Spice Girls copy band." The knock-off is G-7, a hit in places like Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and Turkey but virtually unheard of in the West. Starlitz oozes charisma and, though he isn't always on the level, is an endearing, unlikely hero. When his estranged prepubescent daughter shows up, he takes on the new role of father, ditches G-7, and undergoes a massive transformation that takes them across the planet before returning to his true calling. Sterling's cutting-edge knowledge of cultural movements, emerging and dead technologies, conspiracies, and tipping points makes Zeitgeist a powerful, poignant, and hilarious read as the twentieth century gives way to the new millennium. Benjamin Segedin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Praise for the novels of Bruce Sterling
Distraction

"Classic Sterling."
-- The Washington Post

"Distraction is more than a futuristic political thriller; it is Sterling's persuasive vision of a social revolution that is as much biotechnological as philosophical in scope....Hereserves a killer blow for the most familiar thing of all: the way we think."
-- The Village Voice

Holy Fire

"A haunting and lyrical triumph."
-- Time

"Holy Fire is a book made entirely of big ideas....An intellectual feat, it is also a treat for the spirit and the senses."
-- Wired

"A patented Sterling extra-special."
-- Newsday

Heavy Weather

"A remarkable and individual sharpness of vision...Sterling hacks the future, and an elegant hack it is."
-- Locus

"So believable are the speculations that... one becomes convinced that the world must and will develop into what Sterling has predicted."
-- Science Fiction Age


Resonates with Sterling's striking prose and strong characterizations


Review
Praise for the novels of Bruce Sterling
Distraction

"Classic Sterling."
-- The Washington Post

"Distraction is more than a futuristic political thriller; it is Sterling's persuasive vision of a social revolution that is as much biotechnological as philosophical in scope....Hereserves a killer blow for the most familiar thing of all: the way we think."
-- The Village Voice

Holy Fire

"A haunting and lyrical triumph."
-- Time

"Holy Fire is a book made entirely of big ideas....An intellectual feat, it is also a treat for the spirit and the senses."
-- Wired

"A patented Sterling extra-special."
-- Newsday

Heavy Weather

"A remarkable and individual sharpness of vision...Sterling hacks the future, and an elegant hack it is."
-- Locus

"So believable are the speculations that... one becomes convinced that the world must and will develop into what Sterling has predicted."
-- Science Fiction Age


Resonates with Sterling's striking prose and strong characterizations


Book Description
Bruce Sterling is "perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today" (Time), offering haunting visions of a future shaped by a madness of our own making. His latest novel is a startling tragicomic spectacle that takes a breathtaking look at a world where the future is being chased down by the past....

Zeitgeist

It's 1999 in Cyprus, an ancient island bejeweled with blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers and littered with rusting land mines, corroding barbed wire, and illegal sewage dumps. Here, in the Turkish half of the island, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted, pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the "G-7" girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl band ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. And his market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7's massive merchandising campaign--and to wildly anticipate music the group will never release.

Leggy's brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world's most dangerous people. His business partner is the rich and connected Mehmet Ozbey, a man with many identities and a Turkish girlfriend whose beauty and singing voice could blow G-7 right out of the water. His security chief is Pulat Romanevich Khoklov, who learned to fly MiG combat jets in Afghanistan and now pilots Milosevic's personal airplane. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, Leggy must act quickly and decisively. Bombs are dropping in Yugoslavia. Y2K is just around the corner. And the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000.

But Leggy gets a surprise when the daughter he's never met arrives on his doorstep. A major fan of G-7, she is looking for a father--and her search forces Leggy to examine his life before making a madcap journey in search of a father of his own. It's a detour that puts his G-7 Zeitgeist in some real jeopardy. For in Istanbul, Leggy's former partners are getting restless, and the G-7 girls are beginning to die....Zeitgeist is a world-beat tale of smugglers, paparazzi, greed, war, and a new era of cultural crusades. Here Bruce Sterling proves once again that in the fiction of imagination, he is one of the most insightful writers of our time.



From the Inside Flap
Bruce Sterling is "perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today" (Time), offering haunting visions of a future shaped by a madness of our own making. His latest novel is a startling tragicomic spectacle that takes a breathtaking look at a world where the future is being chased down by the past....

Zeitgeist

It's 1999 in Cyprus, an ancient island bejeweled with blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers and littered with rusting land mines, corroding barbed wire, and illegal sewage dumps. Here, in the Turkish half of the island, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted, pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the "G-7" girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl band ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. And his market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7's massive merchandising campaign--and to wildly anticipate music the group will never release.

Leggy's brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world's most dangerous people. His business partner is the rich and connected Mehmet Ozbey, a man with many identities and a Turkish girlfriend whose beauty and singing voice could blow G-7  right out of the water. His security chief is Pulat Romanevich Khoklov, who learned to fly MiG combat jets in Afghanistan and now pilots Milosevic's personal airplane. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, Leggy must act quickly and decisively. Bombs are dropping in Yugoslavia. Y2K is just around the corner. And the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000.

But Leggy gets a surprise when the daughter he's never met arrives on his doorstep. A major fan of G-7, she is looking for a father--and her search forces Leggy to examine his  life before making a madcap journey in search of a father of his own. It's a detour that puts his G-7 Zeitgeist in some real jeopardy. For in Istanbul, Leggy's former partners are getting restless, and the G-7 girls are beginning to die....Zeitgeist is a world-beat tale of smugglers, paparazzi, greed, war, and a new era of cultural crusades. Here Bruce Sterling proves once again that in the fiction of imagination, he is one of the most insightful writers of our time.


From the Back Cover
Praise for the novels of Bruce Sterling
Distraction

"Classic Sterling."
-- The Washington Post

"Distraction is more than a futuristic political thriller; it is Sterling's persuasive vision of a social revolution that is as much biotechnological as philosophical in scope....Hereserves a killer blow for the most familiar thing of all: the way we think."
-- The Village Voice

Holy Fire

"A haunting and lyrical triumph."
-- Time

"Holy Fire is a book made entirely of big ideas....An intellectual feat, it is also a treat for the spirit and the senses."
-- Wired

"A patented Sterling extra-special."
-- Newsday

Heavy Weather

"A remarkable and individual sharpness of vision...Sterling hacks the future, and an elegant hack it is."
-- Locus

"So believable are the speculations that... one becomes convinced that the world must and will develop into what Sterling has predicted."
-- Science Fiction Age


Resonates with Sterling's striking prose and strong characterizations


About the Author
Bruce Sterling is the author of the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown, as well as the novels Distraction, Holy Fire, Heavy Weather, Schismatrix, and Islands in the Net. With William Gibson he co-authored the acclaimed novel The Difference Engine. He also writes for popular science and travel journals. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Austin, Texas.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Summer in Istanbul. Roses in a hammered silver urn. Fresh-ground coffee in a shiny brass hand-mill. The rich tang of fertilizer and fuel oil hung over the damaged cafe. Starlitz could smell the hot caramel aftertaste of the car bomb, right through the baked metal, smashed cement, and burnt upholstery.

"Where are the girls?" said the Turk.

"The girls are in Cyprus. They're partying."

"With Greeks?"

"Oh, heavens no," Starlitz assured him. "The girls are in the fun part of Cyprus. Turkish Cyprus."

The Turk smiled. He picked open the lid of the coffeepot and deposited a heaping spoon of brown sugar.

Starlitz leaned back in his wrought-iron chair and folded his plump hands over his lilac waistcoat. He and the Turk sat in companionable silence, with hooded eyes behind their designer shades, and watched the pot reach a boil. The Turk, who called himself Mehmet Ozbey, was young, and rich, with a film star's good looks. In his Italian leather jeans and camel-hair jacket, Ozbey was the picture of masculine chic.

Starlitz felt at peace. Local events were going very much his way. There had been a time in his checkered career when he would have shown up in Istanbul two days before a car bomb. He would have hit town with the plan, and the contacts, and the agenda, and he would have found the old city strained and jittery with fatalistic Ottoman tension.

Here at the tag end of the twentieth century, however, Starlitz was pampered by  circumstance. He had arrived in Istanbul two days after a car bomb. The catastrophe was behind them now. They had entered the professional realm of consequence management. Bored Turkish cops measured their new monster pothole with yellow metal pull-tapes. Indifferent janitors swept up the scattered tonnage of broken glass. Istanbul downtown girls, in their chunky gold chains and Chanel suits, were trying to window-shop through the street's battered length of plywood sheeting.

Mere domestic terrorism could not cause Mehmet Ozbey to break a business appointment. The shrapnel-damaged cafe was almost deserted, but the young pop promoter had arrived bang on time, clean, shaved, sober, and toting a white calfskin valise. The cafe Ozbey had chosen was lovely, though its windows had all been shattered by the car bomb's concussion. The cafe staff doted on Ozbey, touched by his loyalty during their trying circumstances. They kept tiptoeing up to offer lacquered trays of sliced melon and baklava.

A young woman passed the damaged cafe and caught sight of Ozbey. Instantly entranced, she stumbled headlong into a striped police sawhorse.

"My little girlfriend Gonca," Ozbey remarked solemnly, "would very much like to meet your G-7 girls."

"I'm sure that can be arranged."

"She's especially fond of the French One."

"Everyone has a favorite G-7 girl," Starlitz allowed.

"The French One has the most talent," said Ozbey judiciously. "She can almost sing."

Starlitz nodded. "Yeah, that's her Left Bank cafe chanteuse riff."

Starlitz and Ozbey watched the pot foam up, once, twice, and the full and traditional third time. Starlitz was pleased to have stolen this moment from the onrushing millennium. It was important to pry these little breathing spaces from the final hum of the dying century. It was good for him, like oxygen.

Ozbey removed the curved pot from its flickering burner, and with exaggerated hostly care he began to pour.

"Why is there no Russian G-7 girl?" Ozbey said, setting the pot aside. "Because it's the Group of Eight now, officially. With Russia."

"That's an odd thing," said Starlitz, accepting his cup. "No one ever asks me why we have no Russian girl in the group. Unless they're Russian."

"You don't like Russians, Mr. Starlitz?"

"I fucking love Russians," Starlitz said politely, "but Russians just don't get it with the tie-in merchandising angle. They still think that a pop group has to sell music."

Ozbey removed his shades, folded them fastidiously, put them in an inner jacket pocket. He lifted his gleaming demitasse and gazed at Starlitz across its gilded rim. " 'Selling the whole concept,' " he quoted.

"Right you are." Starlitz savored a sip. He rinsed his molars with the coffee grounds. That subtle flavor of cardamom. Business was good.

Ozbey cocked his freshly coiffed head. "We sell the big picture. We sell the whole bag of wax."

"It's the spirit of the times." Starlitz nodded. "It's the soul of postmodernity."

"We sell little plastic dolls, for instance."

" 'G-7 action figures,' " Starlitz corrected.

"They're very popular with children. And the lip gloss. The candies. Those very big shoes that they wear."

"Yeah, G-7 WonderBras, G-7 pantyhose--the tie-in apparel thing has definitely been a breakthrough area for us."

Ozbey put his cup down and leaned in intently. "Who is your supplier? For the clothes."

"Indonesia, mostly," said Starlitz. "Before the currency crash."

Ozbey placed his jacketed elbows on the polished marble tabletop. "My Uncle the Minister," he announced, "has many interests in the Turkish apparel trade. He is very influential in domestic Turkish manufacturing."

"You don't say." Starlitz scratched his double chin thoughtfully. "That's very interesting."

"My Uncle the Minister has extensive interests in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus."

"The Republic is a very interesting place," said Starlitz, leaning forward in tandem. "After just one week on the ground in Turkish Cyprus, I could tell that it's a country of tremendous opportunity."

Starlitz lifted one meaty hand in mock demurral. "Yes, I know--some people claim that the Greek half of the island has a better tourist industry. But if you ask me, the Greek scene in Cyprus is yesterday. They're all overbuilt and tapped out. All those nightclubs, and the rave scene, and the big cruise ships in from Beirut . . ."

"Let me show you the Meridien," said Ozbey. "Turgut Altimbasak's casino in Girne. That establishment is very . . . what is the English word?"

" 'Suave?' "

"Yes! Very suave, very international-playboy. Mr. Altimbasak is a friend of my uncle's. You could gamble freely there, Mr. Starlitz. You could run a big tab." Starlitz considered this bold proposal. It was very much to his liking. "Call me Lech," he said.

"Okay!" grinned Ozbey. "You call me 'Mehmetcik.' Mehmetcik, it's like 'Johnny.'"

"Mehmetcik, my friend, let's be frank together," said Starlitz, steepling his big blunt fingers. "In the past we in G-7 were very displeased with our offshore accounts in Jersey and Bimini. But then you brought those Turkish Cypriot banks to our attention. Your Uncle the Minister had a few helpful words there. It's all very smooth now. That broke up the red tape. My accountant's very happy about all this."

"It's good to have happy accountants," said Ozbey. "We should all have happy accountants."

"We can all be very happy doing business together," Starlitz said. "As long as we always remember the number-one G-7 rule."

"The number-one rule is that everything shuts down before the year 2000."

Starlitz leaned back in contentment. "Mehmetcik, I knew you were very special from the first time you sent us fan mail."

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
The closing years of the 20th century were good ones for Bruce Sterling. Beginning in 1994, he published a series of memorable, idiosyncratic novels (Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction) that brilliantly reflected the political, social, and technological trends of a turbulent era. Sterling closed out a productive decade with Zeitgeist, a visionary portrait of a balkanized world that is slouching, uneasily, toward the millennium.

Zeitgeist begins in Turkish Cyprus in 1999. Its "hero" is Leggy Starlitz, peripatetic entrepreneur and recurring Sterling character. Leggy, for once, is in the money, having discovered and exploited the basic principle of modern marketing: Tell the people what they want, then sell it to them. What Leggy is selling is a prefabricated, all-girl pop group called G-7. G-7 has neither talent nor musical ambition but serves as the basis for a massive, ancillary marketing campaign that sells toys, clothes, and overpriced accessories to impressionable teenagers everywhere. It is also the first pop group with a built-in expiration date. Leggy plans to dissolve the enterprise on or before January 1, 2000, at which point the "master narrative" -- the zeitgeist itself -- will, according to Leggy, assume a new and unpredictable form.

Leggy's scam goes belly-up when his partner, a Turkish zealot named Mehmet Ozbey, assumes control of G-7. Mehmet plans to use the group as a weapon in the "cultural war" against the entrenched fundamentalists of the Moslem world. At about the same time, Leggy encounters Zeta, the 11-year-old daughter he has never known. Trading one set of responsibilities for another, Leggy slowly transforms himself from an opportunistic hustler into something he has never been before: a father.

The bulk of the ensuing narrative is a patented, plotless Sterling tour of a fractured contemporary landscape. Leggy and Zeta travel together from Cyprus to Hawaii, from Hawaii to Mexico, from Mexico to Istanbul, encountering a colorful variety of crooks, con men, schemers and believers along the way. Blending satire and documentary realism with an occasional touch of the fantastic (such as a visit from the ghost of Leggy's father, an enigmatic spirit who speaks in perfect palindromes), Zeitgeist looks backward toward a vile, violent century marked by death camps and genocidal initiatives, and forward toward a world shaped by a different kind of "narrative," a narrative in which "the children stop screaming" and "the pain and the terror goes away." The result is a shrewd, funny, endlessly entertaining novel that is essential reading for anyone concerned with the forces that have shaped the modern world, and for anyone interested in speculative fiction at its most intelligent, developed, and assured.||||||||

--Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has just been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It's 1999 in Cyprus, an ancient island bejeweled with blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers and littered with rusting land mines, corroding barbed wire, and illegal sewage dumps. Here, in the Turkish half of the island, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted, pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the "G-7" girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl band ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. And his market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7's massive merchandising campaign - and to wildly anticipate music the group will never release." "Leggy's brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world's most dangerous people. His business partner is the rich and connected Mehmet Ozbey, a man with many identities and a Turkish girlfriend whose beauty and singing voice could blow G-7 right out of the water. His security chief is Pulat Romanevich Khoklov, who learned to fly MiG combat jets in Afghanistan and now pilots Milosevic's personal airplane. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, Leggy must act quickly and decisively. Bombs are dropping in Yugoslavia. Y2K is just around the corner. And the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000." "But Leggy gets a surprise when the daughter he's never met arrives on his doorstep. A major fan of G-7, she is looking for a father - and her search forces Leggy to examine his life before making a madcap journey in search of a father of his own. It's a detour that puts his G-7 Zeitgeist in some real jeopardy. For in Istanbul, Leggy's former partners are getting restless, and the G-7 girls arebeginning to die.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Rife with profound ruminations on the "master narrative" of life, Sterling's newest evokes vestiges of his collaboration with William Gibson (1991's The Difference Engine) as he journeys back to 1999 to detail the escapades of Leggy Starlitz and his latest marketing triumph--the G-7 girls. Using his international girl band to move products such as G-7 lip gloss, candies and sparkly pantyhose, Starlitz embarks on a glamorous Third World tour that skids to an abrupt halt in Turkish Cyprus. Although the dialogue riffs along energetically while Starlitz and Turkish millionaire mobster Mehmet Ozbey discuss the future of G-7, politics and life's "deepest truths," fans of Sterling's fast-paced thrillers will find little suspense or intrigue in this experimental piece. Starlitz passively steps aside, allowing Ozbey to use the band as a front for his illicit negotiations, and dutifully assumes the role of father when his lesbian ex-wife suddenly appears with his telekinetic daughter in tow. Abandoning Cyprus to conjure up his "Javanese Navajo" father (who dematerialized as a result of being too close to an atomic bomb test in the '50s), Starlitz travels to New Mexico and stages mock-Christmas festivities. When the G-7 girls begin to die, however, Starlitz returns to Cyprus to engage in another aimless battle of wits with Ozbey. Although this tragicomedy resonates with Sterling's striking prose and strong characterizations, these do little to salvage a tale that reads more like a disjointed dream than a cohesive narrative. Nevertheless, Sterling's strong following will certainly buoy the sales of this leaden sinker. (Nov. 7) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Leggy Starlitz, shameless entrepreneur and manager of the all-girl G-7 band, has his finger on the pulse of the 20th century's final year--until his old associates grow impatient with him, and someone begins murdering members of his band. The author of Distraction puts his sharp perceptions and cynical optimism to good use in this wry commentary on the Y2K phenomenon and other foibles of the modern world. Sterling's ironic voice and pointed humor make him one of sf's most lucid satirists. A good choice for sf collections. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Glenn Garelik - New York Times Book Review

Sterling is a sharp-tongued, convincing witness to global disintegration.

Kirkus Reviews

Turn-of-the-millennium spectacular, from the estimable Sterling (Distraction, 1998, etc.). Impresario Lech "Leggy" Starlitz arrives in the impoverished Turkish half of Cyprus ("Houseplants had eaten all the homes. Feral lemons and oranges supported a miniecosystem of rats and stray dogs") ready to launch his girl band, G-7, at the Islamic world. The girls, known by their nationalities (the French One, the American One, etc.) can't play or sing, though Leggy knows it's not about music but concept. He has only one rule: it ends at Y2K. His new partner is Mehmet Ozbey, a handsome Turk with friends in the secret police and ways to launder money. To Mehmet, Leggy makes one further stipulation: none of the girls must die. Then Leggy discovers he has a daughter by his lesbian ex: 11-year-old Zeta loves G-7 and has telekinetic abilities—so long as there are no recording devices in the vicinity. And soon, despite his wheeling and dealing with Russian gangsters, Leggy's squeezed out by Mehmet. He decides it's time to disappear, so he smuggles himself and Zeta into the US in order to contact his father. The latter, having been at ground zero in the first nuclear bomb test, has become delocalized in time: he exists "anywhen" in the 20th century and speaks entirely in palindromes. Thereafter, Leggy turns straight, working in a 7-11, sending Zeta to school—until he learns that Mehmet intends to continue G-7 into the next millennium; worse, he has allowed some of the girls to die. Time for Leggy to intervene. An inspired and brilliant paean to the old millennium and harbinger of the new, brimming with wit, flair, andinsight:Y2K's Catch-22.