Neal Stephenson. Zodiac. Grove P, 1988.

Neal Stephenson generally comes up with clever scenarios. His recent Seveneves, for example, asks the question, what if the moon exploded?

In Zodiac, the speculative question does not come until about halfway through the book. And in terms of style, Zodiac is more reminiscent of the so-called gonzo style of writing. The reason is simple. The first-person narrator, Sangamon Taylor, is gonzo himself.

For the uninitiated, the term gonzo journalism originally applied to subjective, excited, and often drug-influenced reporting. Hunter Thompson—famously satirized by the character of Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury cartoons—was the most prominent in this category. His most famous work is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Sometimes the early Tom Wolfe (not Thomas Wolfe) books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fell into this category as well.

I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make. (166)

I loitered at a McDonalds. I had one of those milkshakes that’s made from sweetened Wonder Bread dough extruded by a pneumatic machine. (253)

You get the idea.

Anyway, Mr. Taylor works for an eclectic Greenpeace-type environmental organization called GEE, Group of Environmental Extremists. Some might call them eco-terrorists, but they try to cause harm only to property and they attack things that are already illegal. “We avoid taking volunteers, since anyone who volunteers for a gig is likely to be overzealous.” (36) Their main method, at least in Boston Harbor, where much of the tale is set, is to block discharge pipes. They analyze the discharge to insure that it is illegal.

Their big challenge comes when they detect discharges of a certain chemical that is killing fish and lobsters in Boston Harbor. People who handle or eat the fish get a strange rash. GEE identifies the chemical and trace where it is coming from when all of a sudden the chemical disappears, but the fish and shellfish are still affected.

This is where the speculative science comes in. And like most of Stephenson’s work, it is not too speculative. It comes across as possibly realistic. Back in the seventies when I was in the Coast Guard, scientists were researching oil-eating bacteria to see if there were a way to manage oil spills using microbes. Considering that was forty years ago and we never hear of bacteria being used for oil spill cleanups, it appears that so far no one has been able to produce a microbe that will work efficiently doing this.

Besides the obvious scale of effort that there would have to be, another likely reason such efforts have not succeeded has to do with possible side effects. That becomes a speculation in Zodiac as well.

By the way, the title comes from the Zodiac boat, the inflatable power boat favored by spill recovery teams and disruptive demonstrators on the water. It has nothing to do with the constellations.

Zodiac has some very funny parts. Anyone who has attempted to drive in the city of Boston will appreciate the following example:

The traffic signal at Comm Ave [nobody from Boston says Commonwealth Avenue] and Chalesgate West was fried. In Boston this does not lead to heartwarming stories in the tabloids about ordinary citizens who get out of their cars to direct traffic. Instead, it gives us the excuse to drive like the Chadian army. Here we had two lanes of traffic crossing with four, and the two were losing in a big way. (4)

Humorous cynicism abounds.

“…since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its [refuse] in the ocean has claimed it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It’s the [bleeped] ocean, Rebecca. That’s where all the marine life is. Of course it’s going to become a habitat for marine life.” (173)

The Charles [River] wasn’t as bad as it used to be. From here it seemed like the main street of civilization. Beacon Hill behind me, Harvard ahead, MIT on one side and Fenway Park on the other. (189)

One strategic incident takes place next to the replica of “‘the Tea Party Ship. The birthplace of the direct action campaign.'” (233)

There are a few places in the story that sound especially spaced-out because our narrator occasionally gets stoned. Mostly, though, it is a fast-paced narrative of how Taylor has to keep one step ahead of not only chemical companies but also police, fans of the heavy metal band Pöyzen Böyzen, devil worshipers, ex-girlfriends, college professors, and even a former college roommate. There are also some helpful policemen, a very helpful Native American, and an attempted “assassination” of a presidential candidate with a Nerf arrow.

In other words, typical of Stephenson, there is a lot going on here. It is a funny, fascinating, and wild ride. Besides, any book that begins with an epigraph from the song “Dirty Water” can’t be all bad.¹

Note
¹I do have one quibble with either Stephenson or the editor over this. My edition of Zodiac credits the song “Dirty Water” to the Inmates. The original 1965-1966 version of the song was written and recorded by the Standells. The Inmates’ 1979 cover is actually misquoted in the book since that version was adapted for London and “the banks of the River Thames.” Clearly the author was thinking of the original, set in Boston (“you’re my home”) and the Charles River’s dirty water.