The Zenith Angle

The Zenith Angle is a science fiction novel by the American writer Bruce Sterling, first published in 2004. Its central character is a young and well-respected computer scientist called Derek Vandeveer.

Van is rich with stock options and pleased with his own success when the planes begin crashing into the World Trade Center, and the attacks change his world permanently. Within months his fortune is gone in a scandal of the kind that destroyed Enron.

His wife and son have moved west to work on a new telescope being developed by a billionaire entrepreneur, and Van is recruited into a nascent part of the government that sits outside the main bureaucracy. His task is to improve the security of government systems, and his design earns him a great deal of respect from his peers.

The novel is about an information-age security expert caught up in a war on terror fought through networks, and about a man whose technical talent becomes more and more bound up with what the state wants from it.