Zodiac Neal Stephenson

Whatever else you want to say about Neal Stephenson, he’s not dull. This is his second book, about a punk Boston ecologist who specializes in busting the balls of the local industrial polluters, one of whom has developed a toxic waste-eating bacterium which, of course, doesn’t quite yield the intended results once released into Boston harbor. The science isn’t too hard, and the humor isn’t wry, it’s outlandish. But he doesn’t give as vivid a vision as he does in his other books that I’ve read, SNOW CRASH (an alternative present-day California where an L. Ron Hubbard-type is spreading an atavistic Sumerian computer program that lobotomizes people), or THE DIAMOND AGE (Shanghai, China, centuries in the future, is built around nanotechnology and an interactive book ends up teaching its lesson all too well). He’s always entertaining and thought-provoking; definitely worth your time.