3 / 5 Stars
'Zodiac' (308 pp.) was issued by Bantam Books / Spectra in July, 1995, with cover art by Bruce Jensen. The novel first was published in 1988 (making author Stephenson a 'first generation' cyberpunk) by the highbrow Atlantic Monthly Press. Later, after Stephenson's 1992 novel 'Snow Crash' and his 1995 novel 'The Diamond Age' broke big, Bantam prudently acquired the mass-market paperback rights to 'Zodiac' and got it into print to capitalize on the wave for all things Stephenson.
I should state at the outset that 'Zodiac' is very much a 'Boston' book. Most of the action takes place in that city, both on land, and on the water (the title refers to the rubber boat beloved by commando teams). I'm not at all familiar with Boston so I imagine I'm missing out on the way in which the novel ties into that city with mingled affection and annoyance.......
The novel is set in the late 1980s or so, and features as its protagonist one Sangamon Taylor, a 27 year-old environmental activist and (in Stephenson's own words) an utter asshole.
Taylor works for a nonprofit called GEE International (the CEO or founder of GEE never is disclosed, but presumably he or she is an altruistic capitalist). The organization has a handsome budget, one that allows its employees to purse environmental causes full-time, often from the decks of various watercraft. In between campaigns to identify and expose polluters, the GEE staff enjoy recreational drugs, bouts of fornication, meals in the better restaurants in the Boston area, and the knowledge that they are just too hip, to even be hip (i.e., they do things like order Singha beer when in Thai restaurants).
Taylor specializes in benign vandalism of polluter's discharge pipelines and toxic waster dumps, and in bringing these acts of vandalism to the attention of the media. Chemical corporations in the wider Boston area, indeed, in the USA proper, don't like Taylor.
The main plot of 'Zodiac' doesn't arrive until page 93, and it involves Spectacle Island, and a legacy of the dumping of PCBs in Boston Harbor. Taylor is interested in seeing if the legacy PCBs can be detected in the muck under Spectacle, but soon he's running into some peculiarities in his sampling scheme. The PCBs are there, but only for a brief time, something unlikely with a persistent organic pollutant. Could the strange distribution of PCBs having something to do with the actions of the newly founded biotech firm Biotronics ? Laughlin, the CEO of the firm, would like to co-opt Taylor into endorsing Biotronic's plan for the future: eliminate toxic waste via biological processes. But Taylor isn't so sure Laughlin is the nice guy he makes himself out to be.
Complicating things is that the dumping of PCBs likely was done by the Basco chemical company, whose former Senior Engineer, Alvin Pleshy, now is running for the Presidency, as a standard-issue, white liberal male with (at least on the surface) a deep concern for the welfare of the environment.
As the novel progresses, Taylor discovers he has made enemies of some very powerful and avaricious people. People whose adversaries tend to die in 'accidents.' So, it's up to Taylor; Boone, a renegade environmental justice warrior; and Jim Grandfather, a down-at-home Native American, to risk their lives to discover the truth behind the poisoning of Boston Harbor..........
'Zodiac' advertises itself as a 'Eco-thriller,' and it is indeed ecological, but as a thriller, well.....I can understand the need for a thriller to have some improbable plot developments, but in 'Zodiac', these improbabilities come so fast and so furious in the last 100 pages that they undermine the narrative's credibility. All sorts of fortuitous coincidences pop up, with such regularity that I felt there was no way for Taylor and his brave Eco-warriors to lose. In its favor, 'Zodiac' has an easygoing prose style, a sort of breathless hipster stream-of-consciousness that flows smoothly all the way to the end page.
Summing up, 'Zodiac' is (arguably) one of Stephenson's more accessible novels; it's relatively brief, and goes light on the pedantic discourses that occupy his more recent works (like 2008's 'Anathem,' where he devotes something like two and one-half pages to describing the mechanism of a timekeeping device in a monastery, presumably an allusion to the real-world 'Clock of the Long Now' project......). If you are willing to overlook the frantic pacing of the final third of the novel, you may find 'Zodiac' rewarding.
