"What's happening is a new cultural agreement about literary and cinematic conventions. It's a new standard for the suspension of disbelief. People are accustomed to weirdness in their entertainment now; they no longer even see the missing seams of the 19th century's naturalistic tradition. That's dead, it's as dead as Modernism. Words on paper aren't 'reality.' Moving images on a screen aren’t 'reality.' It's not that people are delusionary; they just don't need any corny handholding when it comes to dealing with the narrative structures of media. Political and economic reality isn't 'reality,' either, and everybody knows it. It's all in the spin.

"Why even stop the riffing to 'explain' how we're squeezing into John Malkovich's head? What conceivable 'justification' is gonna help us with this premise? Either you’re hip enough to go with it, or you just don't go to the movie."

It is not difficult to understand Sterling's dismissal of magic and surrealism, both as terms and as belief systems. But Zeitgeist features a young girl who sits on the ceiling and a mystical old man who moves through time and space with a wine fart.

"It's a fantasy novel, okay?" he says in response. "I'm not seriously promulgating a fantasy novel as a belief system; I'm not going to go down and testify to Congress that I really think 11-year-old girls can levitate.

"In the made-up world of Zeitgeist, deconstruction trumps every aspect of reality – deconstruction is reality. So their world is literally made out of language theory. If you’ve got the right grip on the consensus narrative and the dynamics of socially constructed reality, then you can deconstruct your way right through a locked keyhole and float out the other side, presto! It's something like Lysenkoism, where you just give the wheat a lecture on Marxist dialectical materialism and it obligingly turns into barley.

"I'm thrilled that I was able to harness this kind of rhetoric in the service of a fantasy novel; in a sci-fi genre context, it's a wonderfully fresh kind of mumbo-jumbo. So yeah, maybe it works like magic. But hey, that's not magic-magic; I'm not gonna go down to the cop on the beat and tell him that the planet Earth is dominated by occult forces."

The essential 'spin' in Zeitgeist revolves around Sterling's fictional all-girl band G-7. The entire structure of the G-7 girls is a barely disguised commentary on the inequality of the United Nations and global politics, a theme that Sterling was at no pains to hide.

"Well, nobody would name a pop act 'G-7' if they weren't making some kind of commentary about the G-7," he says. "Of course it's all about the G-7 dominating the Third World with sleazy, sampled pop product – if cultural imperialism wasn't working, the band wouldn't make any money. They don't call it the Military-Entertainment Complex for nothing."

Pop bands die fast if they’re taken too literally, says Sterling. "It's like U2 and their origin as Cold War Euro peaceniks; their modern fans probably don't even know that U-2s were the Cold War's high-altitude spy planes. So what? If U2 are mellowing a little now, it's probably got everything to do with tintinnitis; it's got nothing to do with the literal fact that U-2s have long long since replaced by Keyhole satellites."

But Sterling's dabbling with politics in both Distraction and Zeitgeist raises the issue of whether contemporary culture can make a real impact on society. Sterling's response strikes a careful balance.

"Frankly, I'm not really that big a fan of days and ages where writers can 'make an impact." he says. "Wars, revolutions, situations of desperate need and oppression; sure, some heroic writers make a real political impact under those conditions, but most writers end up shot and buried in a trench.

"I tend to think, judging by my e-fanmail, that I actually do make some kind of impact, but if I had my druthers, Vaclav Havel can have all my 'impact.' I'll settle for just gleefully scrambling people's heads. Trust me, you really don't want to see the kind of world where Bruce Sterling has as much political impact as, say, Thomas Paine. That wouldn't make your world a happier, jollier place. You'd be lucky to find the doorknobs and water faucets."

Living in Texas, and having written a book about political campaigning, Sterling-style in Distraction, the author remains apparently unimpassioned, or even largely unconcerned, about the election of a decidedly conservative leader in the United States.

"Well, his wife's a librarian." he says blithely. "That's got to be some kind of plus for guys who put ink on paper."

"I've been living under a Bush administration for years. I can't say it's slowed me down much. I got along okay. He's a popular guy in Texas; I'm not quite sure why, since Texas Governors never do very much, but people do genuinely like him. I'm not his devotee or anything, but the stuff people are most upset about, like the smirks, the crass jokes and the rich-kid party-boy background – if W's got a saving grace, it's gonna be found in that part. That's the part of W that's actually a stand-up guy. You know, the part that looked at his Dad's CIA Establishment running-buddies and said 'Hey, up yours. (smirk). Pass the margarita pitcher.'"