I know how controversial this will be, but this is my favorite Stephenson. I haven't read them all, I admit, but it seems preposterously unlikely that will ever change. The main character is just fantastic -- basically a Captain Jack Sparrow you can really root for, just as flawed, but a better noble quest.

Very enjoyable (non-Science Fiction) novel by Stephenson. Another one of his early books, Zodiac is a quick read and is correctly advertised as a eco-thriller. The protagonist is funny, disreputable and surprisingly not preachy, despite being a "professional asshole" (his words) for an environmental direct action group. Much of my knowledge of (modern) Boston and chemistry comes from reading Zodiac - which is more of an indication of how little attention I paid in high school chemistry than anything else. Please, for the love of god ignore the Goodreads description of this novel; it is simultaneously inaccurate and spoiler-filled. Solid 4 stars.

Wow really great book I felt very engaged throughout the whole thing and honestly a nice change of pace compared to whatever I’ve been reading because this felt like kinda energizing

While I liked Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, I liked Zodiac even better! Zodiac is a fun romp through the adventures of Sangamon Taylor, a pompous, crazy, monkey-wrenching, intrigue-savvy environmentalist. During his adventures he deals with toxic waste, the mafia, satanists and islands of trash in and around the Boston harbor and the whole time you are pulled along at breakneck speeds just as if you were on the back of a zodiac raft with him.

It's true that this book was published in the late 1980s, but other than the lack of use of social media and cell phones, the issues and situations in this book are still contemporary and relevant and it doesn't feel too dated.

4 stars + ½ for Boston references + ½ for historic vibes.
Having grown up near the Boston Harbor which was once the most polluted harbor in the states and is now one of the EPA’s big success stories, this was a great read. I love a sassy and annoying ecoterrorist with a knack for chemistry as the narrator. This was a good reminder that not all books about the environment have to be about saving the world from climate change, and (perhaps because of when it was written) this book was a refreshing break form the modern zeitgeist I have been literarily trapped in. This book managed to do so much sneaky teaching about chemical pollution which remains relevant to today’s PFAS discussion. At times, a mid-20s wander, an action thriller, a mystery, with a dash of textbook and lots of local geography I can’t wait to ready more by the author. I will say while the sentiment of environmental justice is really there (such as the connection between agent orange and chemical dumping in North America ), some of the language is dated. Cryptonomicon here I come.

““Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism.” “Catchy. But if it’s not violent, there’s no terror involved.”

“You go around thinking you’re cool, a veritable shadow in the night, and then you find out that someone’s got your number.”

“There’s no incentive to keep a garbage pile neat, which was the problem with Boston harbor to begin with.”

Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.

I'm lacking a grounded center presently. Neal Stephenson is very topical right now. Returning home, I was looking for something outside of my own normal. That clumsy phrase is rather accurate currently: outside of my normal. Zodiac is environmental noir; a gumshoe--a professional asshole--works for a Greenpeace type organization and his purpose is the eradication of illegal dumping of toxic waste.

The true hero of the book is Boston Harbor. This is what drew me to the novel. I spent a few marvelous days in East Boston a few years ago and each morning my wife and I and my eight shots of espresso would go to water's edge and simply marvel. I miss that.

My failings with this novel are largely my own. The promise of the novel is limited and I suspect I was hoping for more. There is more violence than I imagined. Hoping I can restore some vision to my reading life going forward.

Zodiac is described as an eco-thriller, which about sums it up, actually! It certainly is a thriller - I read all 290 or so pages in one (long) night, gripped from the outset. The hero of the story is a chemist working for GEE, a direct action environmental organisation, in its Boston branch. He's out to get the companies dumping toxic waste into the harbour and the rivers and canals that feed into it. He has three company logos on the bows of his inflatable raft with its over-size outboard motor, capable of making it fly. None of those companies is trading anymore. Now he's gunning for his fourth, but the opposition start gunning for him, literally, and some of that opposition are criminal Families not criminal Corporations.

The man on a crusade has a big mystery, more enemies than he can figure out reasons for, a neglected girl-friend, a freak-show of friends, a knowledge of chemistry, his wits and a Zodiac boat. This turns out to be plenty to drive this taught, pacy, funny and occassionally unpredictable novel forward but at the end one question is left unaswered: what does our non-violent eco-warrior want more? To protect the aquatic eco-system or bash big corporations?

The main character and narrator of this book is one awesome dude. He's an ecological activist who fights big corporations that pollute the environment with chemical waste. The bad guys are unbelievably bad, which is sometimes a good thing, and other times, not so much. For example, they have a diabolical way of trying to save their own asses, which end up getting them into worse trouble, only after some clever detective work on the protagonist's part. This was cool. But the shoot out with paint ball guns? The suspense wasn't credible, so it didn't work well. Anyway, I found the most entertaining aspect of the book to be the recreational drug use by the protagonist. He's so effing crazy! Also, a good biological science fiction aspect was present, and important to the mystery/suspense aspects of the plot. I enjoyed this a lot.

But I don't think Stephenson has heard of horizontal gene transference? Getting rid of a colony of bacteria does not destroy the enzyme they possess. It just reduces it's abundance in the wild to a nearly but notably non-zero value.

Also, the metabolism of the doomsday bugs doesn't make energetic sense at all, because the energy stored in the covalent bond of any chlorinated dioxins is more than ionic bond in sodium chloride!

Not sure where the story is going.

An early variant of Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' writing style. More down-to-earth plot, set in the present rather than the near-future, but just as much fun. It definitely feels rougher and less polished than either Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, but it's great fun. And the description of trying to cross the street in Boston is worth the purchase price.

You've got to appreciate this book, if only for the sheer amount of research that went into it. Not since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring have I been so inundated with the names of chemicals and the horrific things they can do to a body. I don't know if Stephenson's science is correct, but it's convincing enough to make me terrified and sick of the greed and shortsightedness of the human race.

Sangamon Taylor is a Boston-based environmental activist with an addiction to nitrous oxide (Sangamon's principle: the smaller the molecule, the better the drug), who spends his time zipping around Boston Harbor in an inflatable zodiac, testing the putrid water for toxic waste, plugging toxic waste discharge pipes, and generally trolling the less environmentally friendly corporations in the area. One day he finds the wrong toxic barrels on the harbor floor and chaos doth ensues.

Some of the zaniness of the later Snow Crash is here (see Sangamon's principle above, the double-umlaut heavy metal band Pöyzen Böyzen, the multiple plotlines that crash like so many drowning waves upon the reader), but Stephenson hadn't quite found the ecstatic voice or world of that book yet. This is still very much our world, and I'm thankful to Stephenson for reminding me how disgusting we are capable of making it, and that we need to fight against that. Boston Harbor is now cleaner than it was in '88 when this book came out, but the greed of capitalism still abounds.

I couldn't find what I was looking for on my first visit to the library, so I settled for this because the author had penned one of the other books I was looking for. Glad I picked it up. Written in the first person, this yarn follows the self-proclaimed Toxic Spider-man on his crusade against giant companies who love to pollute the Northeast. A fast read with a sarcastic voice, and some decent science to back it up. Guns, germs and mayhem.