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BOOK REVIEW – NEAL STEPHENSON – ZODIAC 1988 Penguin Books. Science fiction with a strong environmentalist
theme, and told with a great deal of offbeat humour and plenty of action. Sangamon Taylor is a Greenpeace like organization activist, exposing US business corporations who flood the seas and rivers with toxic waste. He operates largely from a fast moving speedboat called a Zodiac. He finds the pipes and sewer to river outlets that factories use to pump their pollutants into the waters and blocks the pipes with concrete amidst a great deal of media attention. To many, Taylor is a folk hero. To many businessmen, he is a terrorist, though Taylor never hurts anyone other than in self-defence. A pipe location and plugging operation in Boston Harbour becomes highly dangerous. A group of satanic thrash metal fans have been using a toxic island for drug parties, and get hostile to the environmentalists. Worse, one form has started to use illegal genetic experiments to create a bacteria that will eat the pollutants it is guilty of spilling into the water, but the pollution eater could also starve the waters of oxygen and kill all the fish in all the seas. As Taylor and his allies get closer to the truth, the corporation resorts to kidnapping and murder, and frames Taylor for a terrorist attack on his own house. Taylor, knowing that the evidence he needs is on a ship owned by the corporation, comes up with an audacious plan to steal the ship. Before the corporation’s own terrorists blow it up and sink it first. Thrilling, funny and with a lot to say on how environmental pollution happens. There are great moments such as the press conference when fifteen executives place chairs around the one chair they expect Taylor to use, in order to intimidate him – he sits on another chair behind them instead causing them to have to turn round awkwardly to address him. There is a fleeting reference to Hero Protagonist, a character central to Stephenson’s later masterpiece, Snowcrash. 1992.
Published: November 25, 2007
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