"I'm less cynical than most people. I'm completely at ease about it. I just can't see why starchy, serious, music-critic people get all bent out of shape about the utter vacuity of, say, Britney Spears. She’s a cute teenage girl who dances and sings, for Christ's sake. Of course she's shallow. She's a kid.

"For us, Britney's the cultural equivalent of a Tahitian maiden hula-dancing on the rim of a live volcano. People just hold their breath in the tabloids waiting for her to be broken like a fortune cookie and bloodily devoured by the almighty God of Celebrity. Britney's given enough, okay? In 10 years she'll either be stone dead, or somewhere in LA selling real estate. Let Britney be a kid entertainer who sings and dances, just give her the ticket money. You don't have to go up and grill her about Wittgenstein.

"The Spice Girls should be left in peace with their bankers and their ex-husbands and their kids. Except for Ginger, who probably really does belong in politics."

Sterling's support for the Spice Girls and Britney Spears is defendable if not admirable, but by no means a position that is going to find him great love in the alternative world. Sterling doesn't care.

"Frankly, I rarely feel driven to make those distinctions any more. I come from a musical town, I've listened to a whole lot of music. I'm not a music critic, and I don’t listen to it for music-critic reasons; mostly, I'm interested in what popular forms of expression say about societies.

"At the moment, I'm listening to music from the Court of King Janus at Nicosia, a CD of 14th century music from the Crusader Kingdom of French Cyprus. This music comes from a single moldy manuscript from a library in Turin, and it's the final musical witness to an obliterated culture. This stuff is seven centuries dead and it is genuinely haunted; especially track nine, Personet Armonia, which is described as 'a virtual catalog of the manifold rhythmic devices used by the French on Cyprus.' I have no idea what a 'three-part isorhythmic motet' is and I've got little interest in learning, but the little three-minute piece of music is truly and seriously uncanny.

"Right now, after determined effort, I'm about to get my hands on the discography of Ceca Raznatovic, the Serbian 'turbofolk' pop star who was married to the late Arkan, an internationally wanted war criminal and Balkan warlord. It's coming direct from Belgrade by airmail. Now that's 'pop music,' dude. I just can't spare much time these days to focus in the Boho credibility issues that people chew over in New Musical Express. I guess it's honest work, but let someone else do it."

So can we define substance from saccharin?

"Yeah, maybe in a hundred years," he says. "Even then, I wouldn't count on it."

Zeitgeist seems to also be almost an excuse to delve into a lot of Sterling’s own influences and phases of culture that he himself has travelled through. A conversation between Leggy and his daughter Zeta about language brings up Barthes, Kristeva, Althusser. "These are the wisest people in the world," says Leggy. However Sterling's take on the relevance of the post-structuralists in the new century is largely dismissive.

"I think they're sunk," he says bluntly. "I think they've fallen so far off the edge of the table that even science fiction writers can use them. I think their presence in science fiction may be the most interesting place where they can have a cultural effect right now. They're defunct as philosophers and psychoanalysts, but as colorful, exotic fantasists, they are top notch.

"I kind of like reading Barthes, but Jean Baudrillard is someone I sincerely admire as a writer. When it comes to mind-warping effervescence, he rivals H.P. Lovecraft. Reading Jean Baudrillard genuinely expanded my mind. I hope Baudrillard gets the Legion of Honor; I'd like to see him live to be about 90, creeping out around 2038 to tell everybody that reality vanished long before they were born. I'm thinking he'd get a tide of warm, nostalgic applause."

Sterling's inclusion of these figures in Zeitgeist is reminiscent of a tactic used by Mark Z. Danielwski in House of Leaves. In a recent conversation with Danielwski, he expressed the belief that it was almost a responsibility to give younger readers a nudge in that direction or to use fiction to help uncover other ways of thinking or looking at the world. Sterling agrees.

"Very much so. I'm a passionate devotee of uncovering new ways of thinking, and trying orthogonal angles from which to examine consensus reality. I do make one important caveat. Just because it sounds super-cool doesn’t mean it's going to work.

"The best way to have a great idea is to have a whole lot of ideas. I have a hell of a lot of ideas, I have thousands, it's like a congenital condition. So, conceivably, amid all this 'nudging' and 'uncovering,' I may someday stumble across some truly important idea. But if I do, (a) I probably won't realize it, and (b) it'll probably be one of my ideas that I think is kinda boring and that I don't really like very much."

So, with George W. in power and Britney Spears on the radio, Sterling seems content to shoot from the sidelines. And one thing can be sure, despite what seems to be a calculated cynicism in an age of a largely saccharin cultural cold war, Sterling's ideas are still flowing molten.