Bigge, 28, is an established freelance writer on the Canadian circuit (Chatelaine, Toronto Life, the National Post), and a former managing editor at the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters. But most signally, he’s a nerdy, post-collegiate indie-rocker; and of all the thousands of guys like that, both in the habitable world and Canada, he’s the most exemplary you’re ever likely to run across. Bigge seems nice, and rather smart, and a lot of his short freelance pieces are pretty good. His book, though, presents him as something of a cultural bonsai specimen, stunted as a writer by his ironic tics and defensive jokiness, unable to engage the world and its history save through hackneyed pop-culture references, ad-copy locutions and baseless put-ons.

“OK,” “A Very Lonely Planet” begins, “I know what you’re asking. Who is this guy? What does he know about being a Single Guy? If Eminem and Pikachu got in a death match with staplers and other fine, attractively priced office-supply items, who would …”

Actually, that’s a baseless put-on. Bigge did not write that. I am just aping his style. And maybe this is just my opinion. (And that plus $1.50 will buy a tasty cup of tres clichéd coffee at a fine upscale-esque caffeinated-beverage retail chain.) But well-known dead author Tennessee Williams said it best — “Love is just another four-letter word.” Or maybe it was Tennessee Tuxedo. But I’m just trying to get at one thing here. Three words:

Heather Locklear.

This is how “A Very Lonely Planet” reads. For 200-esque pages. And I said before that I would explain in three words. But “Heather Locklear” is two words. Two words is less than three words. Now Gavin is Sad. See Gavin assume a facial expression appropriate to unhappy-esque feelings. Like the expressions a Single Guy facially assumes when perusing the fine, family-values-oriented consumer goods at Crate & Barrel, sans a female-esque lifestyle attachment (otherwise known as girlfriend — or boyfriend if you’re a girl). OK, I know what you’re asking. “Coke or Pepsi, dammit! Coke or Pepsi!?”

Ow! Ow! Not in the face! Help! Hello!? Come back! Anyone? Hey, you!

OK, wait: Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m not saying you can’t have a girlfriend if you’re a girl. Or a boyfriend if you’re a guy, or a rubber snorkel or a beloved Tickle Me Elmo™ doll if you have Special Lifestyle Needs … Coke! Pepsi! No, Coke! Coke. Definitely Coke.

Uh,

[The following 100 pages removed and sent to Penthouse Letters.]

And how exhausting is that? The conceit of Bigge’s title, the “very lonely planet,” is an imaginary island (or a planet, but chiefly an island) where single guys end up when they can’t get a date. Its “mascots,” Bigge writes, “include Charlie Brown, Holden Caulfield, and Nintendo’s Mario. Visitors travel by unicycle or monorail. Everyone eats at the Nighthawks Cafi, home of the Woody Allen Burger, which features extra malaise and a semi-secret sauce.” This is the place from which Bigge hails.

It’s also like the imaginary place imagined by noted dead author Daniel Defoe. Yes, I’m talking about Gilligan’s Island. Except with no girls on it — not even Mrs. Howell. And despite the pretentious nature of my verbose explication, three words will be sufficient to explicate what I’m (OK, OK!) ranting about here:

Radioactive Weasels from…

OK, sorry. Ryan Bigge is a man of his times, although as a post-collegiate indie-rocker, he doesn’t self-identify as a “man.” Rather, he’s a “guy,” which in his context carries something of an apology for masculinity and a promise against assertiveness. Everyone knows a bunch of these guys. They’re girl worshipping and cultivate a bit of a dorky aspect. They’re always getting strung along by their female friends and bullied by campus feminists. They’re part of the demographic for that subgenre of action movie in which latex-clad chicks blow people away with firearms. (As Bigge notes, “I believe [Lara] Croft is a sophisticated feminist icon. By which I mean she carries a gun.”) They read comics like Daniel Clowes’ “Ghost World.” They smoke cigarettes, masturbate and cry — and they publish zines.

Bigge’s zine was called “Single Guy,” and he published it for six years, during college and after, to impress girls. He even started an indie-rock band to impress girls. All to no avail. Bigge couldn’t get a girlfriend. To overuse one of his own locutions:

Ryan was sad.

Bigge is the kind of writer for whom the term “poetry” is always the same as the term “bad poetry” — for whom “pseudo-intellectual” means the same thing as “intellectual,” and everything that’s not self-deprecatingly cynical is “pretentious.” He falls into irreverence the way people fall off skateboards: headlong and flailingly, and without much control over where he’s going to land. George Orwell is introduced as “respected dead English author George Orwell.” Martin Heidegger is “dead German philosopher Martin Heidegger.” He calls Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” (now, mind you, this is from a former managing editor at Adbusters) an “anti-marketing screed,” and summarizes the whole book thusly: “Brands are Bad.”

Which pokes one in the eye a bit. Moreover, Bigge is prone to the collegiate-hipster device of preemptive self-sarcasm, subverting his own arguments before anyone else might have the chance. And as indie as he professes to be, he’s much given to the vernacular of Dave Barry epigrams, “Simpsons” tropes and Letterman-style top-10 lists (“Three words: Saturday Morning Cartoons”).

The reason Bigge can’t find a girlfriend, he says, is postmodernism. Because once, during the decade popularly known as the 1950s, when everything was like ’50s retro, except more so, and people listened to lounge music and said things like “keen” and wore hats and stuff, there were rules. And rules are bad. But maybe having some rules is better than, you know, like it is now, with no rules. Maybe dating would be less awful and humiliating for the Single Guy if things were simpler and you knew what to expect from women — and from yourself. Bigge writes:

Postmodernism has stripped away any semblance of an understandable or sane world. The lack of rules has created a lot of romantic casualties, not to mention a new, imprecise language.

… In the 1950s, everything was black and white. If you wanted to sculpt your hair, you used Brylcreem. There was no gel, mousse, molder, spritz, defrizzer, shaper, styler, or hair cement. And if you had something to say, you said it. You took no guff. There was a rich vernacular: insouciance, peccadilloes, addlepated, moral turpitude, chaperone, licentious, vodka-sodden rake.

Addlepated? Vodka-sodden rake? Yaah, you dirty rat! We all chewed the fat suchlike, thiswise — spoutin’ a mélange of straight-shootin’ rooty-toot and anachronistic book-English. Pass thou the hair pomade, my good man, and dontcha gimme no guff.

But, as Bigge would say, I don’t want to go off on a tirade here. And anyway, that was nearly half a century ago, those mysterious 1950s. It’s not like there’s anybody still alive from back then. Plus, the book’s central point is well taken: Postmodernism — at least as Bigge defines it — has, for many of us, stripped away much of what used to be understandable and sane about dating, and sex, and the world. Perhaps nice, girl-worshipping Single Guys like Bigge have been hit the hardest.

But once you have that notion in hand, it’s not so clear what else he’s trying to say. There’s a long section on dating advice manuals from the ’50s, where he mostly makes fun of them. Another long section describes “the Astute Brute,” which means a sensitive guy who’s not afraid to assert himself, or a category that every single guy falls into, or the Guy who Always Gets The Girl, or the one who never does — or who knows what. His examples include Arno, the character from Nicholson Baker’s novel “The Fermata” (who, unlike you, me and … Bigge, has the power to stop time, and can thus undress women with impunity), and Tintin, the kid from the Belgian comic series — who qualifies because, as Bigge notes in passing, the fact that he “has never, ever had a love interest despite starring in twenty-two books.” There’s an incongruous chapter on the history of indie rock, and … well, lots more too.

What the book is about, mostly, is pathos: the real, heart-scratching pathos of a grown man like Bigge thinking and writing as though he were trapped, swinging, in a gibbet of eternally gawky adolescence. It’s practically impossible to read it without hurling the book down and banging your head against a wall in sympathetic misery. Wham! What, you wonder, between impacts (wham!) … What kind of scourging must a young man’s spirit have sustained to make him sit down and write a book as scattered, as harmless, as gelded and thwarted as this one — a book so weighted with wryness and guilt, so deeply convinced that there’s something shameful and wrong with being smart, male and single? Who did this to you (wham!), Ryan Bigge? The schools? Society? That awful one with the red hair who called you a “dweeb”? The one who heckled you that one time, during class discussion, in sociology of women? Mom? Dad? Television?

The kicker (wham!) is that Ryan Bigge still accepts the terms of his oppression: Someday, he hopes, he’ll find the girl who will make everything all right — who will, by her presence, make him a whole person. She’ll set down the rules and end all the in betweenness and uncertainty. She’ll bring order to his life. “For Sascha, whenever I may find her,” his dedication reads. Ah, well. (Wham!) Maybe “Sascha” is a book editor. And there are thousands of guys like Ryan. Nice guys. Good-looking guys (Ryan’s actually kinda hot). What tha hell?

“At the Very Lonely Planet Imax theatre,” Bigge writes at one point, “you can see ‘Happiness’ (a creepy film with a single guy whose mood is the exact opposite of the title) and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (a movie in which the ugly guy successfully woos the woman). Finally, there are daily continuous showings of ‘Rochelle, Rochelle,’ a young woman’s strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk.” But here’s the wacky part: “Rochelle, Rochelle” isn’t a real movie at all. It’s a quote from that obscure and cult-esque television program sometimes known as “Seinfeld”™.

But avowed Seinfeld fan and “My 1,000 Americans” author Rochelle Morton (these two would, it appears, have something to talk about on a date) traced her strange erotic journey from Chicago to Georgia and back again — with stops in New York and points in between — placing personal ads in newspapers. Along the way, she had sex with nearly 1,000 men.

Actually, that’s not true. Morton says she never had any intention of having sex with a single one of her dates, nor did she lead any on in that direction. But despite her claims in that regard, the ad she placed (“English female 30s, slim and attractive, seeks professional male for fun times”) says something about “fun times,” which makes it seem like she’s looking for a fun time. Did she expect invitations to canasta games? Who knows. She’s English; perhaps fun means something different over there.

Although apparently not. Morton’s first and previous book was about her experiences dating 700 British men, the great mass of whom turned out to be losers, creeps and perverts who all wanted to fun her. And so much for that! American men, on the other hand, as we discover in her new book, are a bunch of losers, creeps and perverts who … oh, it’s shocking. Really.

“My 1,000 Americans” is made up of short chapters, each of which describes a single date. And these chapters go something like this:

Ryan, Age 28, Freelance Writer, Single. When Ryan answered my ad, he was very polite but shy, as if he thought my answering machine would find him wanting, and hang up on him. “Hi, this is … Uh, I’m Ryan, and it’s very nice to meet you. Well OK, I haven’t met you yet. And I guess I’m not even talking to you now, really. But maybe we can go out sometime, if you don’t, uh, mind.” And so on, for almost two whole minutes! He seemed surprised and even shyer when I called him back. And I soon found out why!

I met Ryan in an upscale-esque coffee-beverage chain, where he said he spent a lot of his time. He was blond and young-looking and dressed in a gas-station attendant’s jacket with the name “Tony” stitched on the breast. He was already seated when I arrived, and didn’t stand up to greet me. Ryan was already nursing a cup of half-cold coffee, but hastened to say that I should order anything I wanted. And when he stood up to accompany me to the counter, I noticed he was, well, big. As in, 6-foot-5, and not exactly slender. Now, I like tall men, but 6-5 and not slender is truly inconsiderate! But the nastiest shock was still to come. As my coffee was being poured, and with absolutely no prompting from me, Ryan grabbed my buttocks and shouted, “Hey, girlie! I like to poo my pants and bounce around on a hoppity-hop — that’s my bag. Screw the chitchat, bimbo. Party with the Bigge Man like it’s 1999! Woo-hoo! Give it up, sweet cheeks! I wanna do you so badly!”

“I needn’t ‘do’ so badly as you,” I retorted tartly, leaving my readers with a nagging suspicion that I had misrepresented the whole last part of the encounter. And without a hint that I was only researching a book and had never intended to date Ryan at all, I hoppity-hopped straight out the door. Another total loser! Are there no decent men at all?

Morton describes about 300 dates, almost all of which begin with an unattractive suitor and end with either gross rudeness or an untoward proposition — often of the “hey baby, wanna get busy” variety, but not infrequently involving some kind of odd (shocking!) fetish or sex practice. There are so many of these, one after the next, that it appears Morton must have been sneakily doing her job as a journalist and author, helping the conversations along in order to draw her subjects out of their shells. She makes a fair bit of hay over the fact that many of her suitors are married, which adds the stain of dishonesty to their crimes. (“Appalling,” she calls it.)

But, as she points out repeatedly, Morton herself was only pretending to be interested in these men and was practicing a sort of date fraud. There’s a small section at the end of the book devoted to good dates, with good men, and Morton claims that only one of these was upset when she unmasked herself as an undercover book author. The rest thought it was all a great laugh. And then most of them paid for the date.

And fair enough. But an obvious, yet somewhat difficult conclusion that you have to make from all this is that in order to do what Morton did, running around with 1,000 men over the course of a year, rejecting nearly all of them as not up to standards and casually humiliating a fair number — whether or not they deserved it, which doubtless many did — you have to have a lot of something that Ryan Bigge doesn’t have any of. You have to have a lot of power, and the confidence with which to use it.

And you have to be able to use that power arbitrarily, and even unfairly, if you feel like it. Which brings us back to Bigge’s rudimentary but impassioned attack on “postmodernism” and his tentative espousal of the ’50s. What Bigge is struggling, under his prejudices, to say, and what Morton is saying without trying to, is that the power balance is askew, datingwise. Females have laxer restrictions upon them now and have gained a lot in the way of traditional male perquisites. Males haven’t gained much slack, or many feminine perquisites, in return. Men — well, “guys,” rather — haven’t gained the feminine perk of commanding sympathy and protection: Bigge, nice and sweet, not bad-looking, can’t get a date because he’s sad and harmless. Chicks squish him. Ha!

Morton, on the other hand, is protected from the traditional masculine sanction of looking like an arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerk. He rumbles across the landscape like a Panzer division, crushing “losers” under his treads. What an asshole, that Richard Morton — swaggering like a tin-pot potentate. One thousand dates, and he tars almost every woman he met as a creep, a pervert or a loser. One must admit, it all looks less charming with the gender reversed. Misogynist that way; misandrist this way. Leaves a bad taste either way.

OK toilet reading, though, both tomes. And they really do make you want to stay home and play canasta, rather than mixing it up with the Bigges and the Mortons of the world. Or to make that “choice” the Republicans are so wackily insistent about and adopt the gay lifestyle — if only the recruiting center were ever open. Either way, though, what I really want to get at here is just three words:

Rodney Allen Rippey.

Ow! Ow! Not in the face! Aah! Ow! Oh, my ribs. Hey — wait! Come back!

“Do you know who I am?” the voice boomed.

A point of purplish light winked into existence in the center of the room, and grew into a small, rotating cube. Vertiginous, flashbulb purple — retinal purple, spinning like mad. I swallowed dryly. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t eaten anything. The cube grew to the size of a hatbox, and then to the size of a stack of LPs.

“No,” I said. “I don’t have the vaguest … What do you mean, you can see through my pants?”

“I can see through everyone’s pants,” the cube said. “I can see inside every locked door, every box and safe … I can see the fast-food wrappers stuffed under your car seat, and read the expiration date on the milk in the fridge. Your milk,” the voice settled into an imperious cadence, “is nearly expired.”

There once again seemed nothing to say.

“It’s all easy, you see.” The cube spun madly and grew to the size of an overstuffed ottoman, or a crate of pineapples, or something like that. “When you exist in four spatial dimensions, as I do. To me, your whole universe looks like someone left the lid off. You have 38 cents in your pocket, and an ATM receipt that looks like it’s been through the wash.”

I looked. It was so.

“And when you’re four-dimensional,” the cube said, “you can do stuff like this!”

The cube winked out of sight, and I felt a mild tugging sensation amidships. A pair of jockey shorts appeared, twirling in midair. A vertiginous purple light strobed through the leg and waist holes.

“Hey! Those are mine! Take those off!”

The shorts vanished and the cube winked back, about the size of an iMac, spinning zanily. A ball of baked beans glopped to the floor beneath it. “You’ll never guess where your shorts are now!” the voice boomed.

“OK,” I sighed, opening the drawer under the counter and reaching for the can opener. “How did you do that?” I lifted the cans in the cupboard, one by one, until I found one that was much lighter than the rest.

“Although I might look like a cube to you,” the voice intoned, “that’s because you can only perceive things in three dimensions. What you’re really seeing is the infinitesimally thin slice of my true form — my 4-D form — which intersects with your three-dimensional world.

“Imagine Flatland,” the cube said. “Do you know what Flatland is?”

I said, “It’s an imaginary place with only two dimensions: a standard trope of mathematical brainteasers, which first appeared in a novel called ‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,’ by a man named E.A. Abbott, in 1884. It was a novel about geometry, and the main character was a two-dimensional square who was visited, in his two-dimensional house in his two-dimensional world, by a three-dimensional being — a sphere who … Oh, now I see what you’re up to.”

“Yes, quite,” said the cube. “But let’s back up a moment. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’ is often called a novel these days, but it’s really an example of an extinct form — a kind of light, slim, often self-illustrated book that Victorian authors would turn out between more serious projects, as bagatelles; or that gentleman dilettantes would sometimes write instead of the standard travel narrative or rote historical study. The form granted license for bad verse, broad allegory and things like that — these were something like children’s books for adults.

“‘Flatland,’” it continued, “was as much a work of broad Victorian social satire as it was a geometrical fantasy. The Flatland of the title, for instance, with its literal depthlessness, its snobbery and rigid social stratification, replicates the British class and gender hierarchy of the day in perfect, Swiftian form.”

I was, I remembered vaguely, listening to a glowing purple cube that had teleported my underwear into a bean can.

The cube continued, “But it’s the book’s geometrical conceit that’s kept it in print, continuously, for the past 117 years. If you read ‘Flatland’ straight, it’s a whimsical romp of a mathematical book — more Lewis Carroll than Jonathan Swift. It explains advanced geometrical concepts in a way that makes total, intuitive sense, so as you read the book, you don’t even realize how it’s blowing up your brain and twisting it into balloon animals. Mathematicians love allegory anyway. Lewis Carroll is as much a literary icon to them as Ernst Haeckel and M.C. Escher are their anointed poster-artists.

“Anyway, as the years passed, ‘Flatland’ became a classic, and began a tradition of allegorical, often whimsical popular-scientific literature — not infrequently with a progressive socioreligious message. Direct sequels to ‘Flatland’ started appearing in 1965, with Dionys Burger’s ‘Sphereland.’ ‘Planiverse,’ by A.K. Dewdney, appeared in 1984. But some of the stories in the 1954 Abbott-inspired story collection ‘Fantasia Mathematica’ (and its sequel, ‘The Mathematical Magpie’) date from as far back as the 1920s.

“For a time, in the ’70s and ’80s, it was quantum physics, not math, that generated the biggest popular-science titles, with John Gribbin’s ‘In Search of Schroedinger’s Cat’ and Gary Zukav’s ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ and all those books like that. But in the past few years there’s been an outpouring of books in the ‘Flatland’ tradition, including Clifford Pickover’s ‘Surfing Through Hyperspace: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons’; ‘Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension’ by Michio Kaku; and the Abbott-inspired children’s book ‘MathTrek: Adventures in the Math Zone’ by Ivars Peterson and Nancy Henderson. And recently, we’ve seen the most ambitious Flatland sequel yet, in Ian Stewart’s ‘Flatterland.’”

“Ian Stewart?” I said. “Wasn’t he killed in a — ?”

“No, that’s the other, evil Ian Stewart — vocalist of the British Nazi skinhead band Skrewdriver. This one’s a math professor at the University of Warwick. And just like in the original Flatland, the story in his book begins with a three-dimensional spheroid entity visiting a 2-D world and spiriting off one of its inhabitants into realms theretofore unimaginable. Only instead of a square — the Abbott character was named ‘A. Square’ — the main character is a line named Victoria. That’s a London subway pun, by the way. And instead of a sphere, the visitor is a being that looks like an inflatable hoppity-hop toy that British kids bounce around on — a ‘Spacehopper.’ Like that Julian Cope song of the same name.”

“Didn’t he just die from — ”

“No, that was Julian Cole, the applied mathematician. Terrible loss for the field. It’s like this: In Flatland, there are only two dimensions. So if a sphere, or a round-bottomed Spacehopper, were to visit you there, you’d see it not as a sphere but as a circle — as the infinitesimally thin slice of a sphere that touched the 2-D plane you inhabited. Plus, you’d see it edgewise: Since there’d be no up or down for you — at least none to speak of — you’d see it as a line that looked circular as you moved around it. That’s what it would look like in two-space. And if that round 3-D shape were to move down through the 2-D plane, what you’d see would be the circle getting bigger.” The cube doubled in size. “And then smaller.” It shrank to a glowing point, and then slowly swelled back to form. “And then vanishing altogether.”

“But now,” the cube continued, “imagine you’re the Spacehopper. You’d look down on Flatland, and nothing would have a roof or a top on it, or anything. It would all be made up of lines, like a huge architectural drawing. You could hang, invisibly, inches above the surface, and reach right into everything. And you could do things like …”

The cube vanished. I braced myself.

“This!”

I felt my damp, beany underwear reappear under my trousers.

“I guess that all makes sense intellectually,” I muttered.

“Oh, it’s a great allegory,” it replied. “Especially if you have no experience with this stuff. It’s much easier to grasp at first than the Mulder-and-Scully detective story in ‘Surfing Through Hyperspace,’ Pickover’s book, where higher-dimensional beings swoop down and kidnap the president. Abbott’s book used his allegory to suggest how four-dimensional space would seem to a person like yourself, who lives in a 3-D world. Stewart goes much further, using it as a jump-off point to describe various types of curved and funny-shaped space, quantum and relativistic phenomena, black holes and superstring theory. Victoria and the Spacehopper use a device called a virtual unreality engine — shades of Douglas Adams, a terrible loss for his own field — to insert themselves into alternate universes, where particles sing, and a group called the Space Girls dances, and Stephen Hawking is the overlord of a black-hole construction empire.

“You know, according to superstring theory,” the cube said meaningfully, “there’s a general, albeit fitful, consensus that there are actually nine spatial dimensions in this apparently 3-D universe of yours. Most of them are just really small — almost flat — so you can’t see them.”

I was puzzled. “Well, OK. That would definitely explain why subatomic particles seem to behave so weirdly. But what would a 10-dimensional universe look like?”

“Well, one of the strengths of Stewart’s book, and of the whole allegorical approach, is that it’s much easier to fathom it the other way around — starting from your own 3-D perspective, and imagining how you’d interact with oddball lower-D geometries. But I’ll show you.”

The cube vanished. I braced myself.

The president of the United States winked into existence on my pantry floor. He was ashen, his limbs flailing, his face a mask of horror. He vanished again in midscream. His voice seemed to Doppler into the distance.

“Don’t worry.” The cube had returned. “We’ll put him back again. Just decided to get a bit Lovecraft on his ass after all that business with the Kyoto accord, and the tax plan and everything. He seemed to lack …” The cube might’ve been chuckling. “Perspective.”

“I voted for Nader.”

The cube continued as though it hadn’t heard. “Yes, so superstring theory is pretty counterintuitive and hard to visualize — as ‘Hyperspace,’ Kaku’s book, says in no uncertain terms. Stewart might’ve bitten off more than he could chew in that regard. After some great chapters on alternate-shaped universes and curved space-time and such, he covers the contemporary stuff pretty broadly — superstring theory, supersymmetry. It’s as though he wanted to make ‘Flatterland’ a comprehensive book about all the strange implications of modern mathematics and physics — while at the same time needed to step up his writing pace as he went on. Like Abbott, Stewart is the author of about 60 books, and sometimes ‘Flatterland’ reads as though he were already thinking about the next one: It gradually starts to seem a bit willy-nilly and half-cooked.”

“I mean, if I didn’t live in a state that Gore was supposed to win, I probably wouldn’t have.”

“And while Stewart understands that the original ‘Flatland’ was a work of satire — an engaged work — as well as a geometry book, he doesn’t continue that project. He reimagines Abbott’s Draconian 2-D world as a place where ’60s-style lifestyle reforms are solving all of society’s problems. It’s a bit, you know, flat in view of the visionary current that’s enlivened pop-science books throughout the century: Carl Sagan’s wide-tie futurism, the neo-Taoist quantum physics of the ’70s and ’80s, the whole cyber-prophet thing of the last decade. Pickover, in his book, wonders whether he can find mankind’s gods in four-dimensional geometry — whether a “god” might just be a four-dimensional entity, able to act outside of the physical laws that people take for granted. It’s wacky, maybe, but it gets you thinking about something more than math and physics. If there’s one thing ‘Flatland’ did for popular-science writing, it’s that it granted authors a license to be playful and visionary — both at once.”

I suddenly remembered the can opener I was holding. “So OK,” I said, “how did you do that thing before, with my shorts?”

I felt a pull, from everywhere and nowhere at once. I saw my pantry as a maze of disconnected forms: cabinets askew, with gaping holes in every joint; the floor tilted, yet straight, with the basement showing beyond. The basement didn’t look too good either. I shifted position and everything rearranged slightly, moving in and out of everything else. I could see my arm in front of me. It came from the wrong direction.

“Gaah!” I cried. And then everything was back to normal again. Except the pantry was facing the wrong way. The cereal box had all its letters backward, and the numbers on the kitchen clock were reversed.

“Sorry, hold on,” the voice boomed.

The world righted itself.

“I flipped you by mistake,” the cube said, still spinning zanily. “Listen, I’ve got to go; the president has an appointment coming up with that new drug czar of his. Take these.”

A burlap sack fell from midair and thumped heavily to the floor. I looked inside. It was full of ballpoint pens, guitar picks, coins and socks.

“And try to keep better track of your stuff from now on, eh?” the voice warned. The cube vanished.

“Author Unknown” traces Foster’s career to date, and explains the method that launched him as the world’s most acclaimed sniffer-outer of literary attributions. It’s much like fingerprinting or DNA typing: No two writers, he explains, share the same punctuation and spelling habits, the same locutions and frequency of word usage. Even the frequency of such words as “and” and “the,” which writers use unconsciously, can give clues to authorship. The Foster method is at least as much art as science, though: Its data-crunching is guided by intuition — a certain unquantifiable feel for the details that set a writer’s work apart and for what literary influences might be present within it. To some extent we all have that faculty; certainly Foster has more than most. But he gives more credit to the wonky aspects of his method than to the art, which is strange because if you’re at all an avid reader, you may be able to peg many of his conclusions pages ahead of the revelation, without a computer or any special knowledge, just by looking at the sample texts he provides. Which is to say, there might not be much suspense to “Author Unknown.”

It’s still a hell of an interesting book: Foster writes precisely and artfully, with easy humor and a cadenced wit. You rarely see one of his one-liners coming until it’s too late to duck.

“Author Unknown” also comes with a shocking disclosure, first unveiled in the New York Times: Clement Moore, an epic, real-life grouch and intolerant muzzlewump, did not write the poem now named “The Night Before Christmas.” It was the work of a jolly New York Dutch landowner named Henry Livingston. Below are samples of Moore’s and Livingston’s verse. These passages are fairly representative of each writer. Quick: Which one wrote “‘Twas the night before Christmas”?

1)
To me ’tis giv’n your virtue to secure
From custom’s force and pleasure’s dangerous lure.
For if, regardless of my friendly voice,
In Fashion’s gaudy scenes your heart rejoice,
Dire punishments shall fall upon your head:
Disgust, and fretfulness, and secret dread.

2)
Such Gadding — such ambling — such jaunting about!
To tea with Miss Nancy — to sweet Willy’s rout,
New Parties at coffee — then parties at wine,
Next day all the world with the Major will dine!
Then bounce all hands to Fishkill must go in a clutter
To guzzle bohea, and destroy bread and butter.

Livingston wrote the second one.

Foster’s gift and attainment is that he can spell out the difference between these two gentlemen’s styles, and explain how he knows what he knows. He’s also a great storyteller, not least in the way his early adventures in the Shakespeare trade read like an academic thriller. We join Foster in graduate school, where he discovers a funeral elegy signed by a “W.S.” and printed by Shakespeare’s stationer. Certain phrases in it betray a knowledge of Shakespeare’s later plays. Foster writes up his findings and submits a manuscript to Oxford University Press for publication, which ends up being chewed up and spit out by the anonymous expert reader hired to evaluate it. Internal evidence alone, the reader claims, cannot establish authorship: There must be evidence outside the text. Foster responds by analyzing the reader’s letter, discovering his identity and writing him a pleasant note asking him to reconsider his opinion.

The reply is a curt harrumph. He nails the next two expert readers as well. Meanwhile, a blazing media controversy ensues over another, dodgier Shakespeare attribution: the notorious “Shall I die/Shall I fly” poem, a total stinker promoted as a long-lost work of the Bard by Foster’s antagonists at Oxford. And since a man can only take it on the chin for so long, Foster snaps a clip into his rifle and rushes into the field. Fusillades of charges and rebuttals roar out. Bold assaults are conducted against enemy data. Wounded are abandoned on the field; prisoners shot. Foster prevails.

His Shakespeare book was eventually published, and its controversial attribution of the funeral elegy became, if not universally accepted, then widely credited. In 1996, his career as a public figure began. With the “Primary Colors” authorship mystery in full swing, New York magazine decided to give Foster a whack at identifying the author, furnishing him with searchable writing samples from several dozen possible candidates. Foster tagged Klein immediately. Both the anonymous “Primary Colors” author and Klein had an idiosyncratic way of using colons: voilà. And fragments. Plus elongated-constructions-tied-together-with-hyphens, and a kind of incredibly dorky locution fulla slang terms. Foster’s intuitions about the anonymous author’s psychic landscape and literary influences seemed to fit Klein as well. And then Klein — slimetudinously — prevaricated. And did a pulling-media-strings kind of thing to discredit Foster: sort of. Until he got busted. When some slimebucket turned up a manuscript with his handwriting. On it.

Foster’s next few adventures are somewhat less dramatic. It’s his storytelling that carries the ball, along with the opportunity each case provides him to talk about style and language. He had a minor role in the Unabomber case, examining already attributed documents to establish that Ted Kaczynski, a careful, fussily correct writer, had, in fact, written them. He did a cursory analysis of Monica Lewinsky’s “talking points” document — a strange list of prevarications and notes-to-self upon which Kenneth Starr hung much of his subsequent investigation. Lewinsky, who writes like an airhead, seems to have indeed fashioned part of it. And Foster identified one Donald Hawkins (ex-beatnik; now deceased) as the author of the “Wanda Tinasky” letters, written to local newspapers in California and attributed to Thomas Pynchon. For that one, especially, the sample text Foster provides gives away the ending. As you make your way through Foster’s presentation of the case, it’s not clear who “Wanda Tinasky” will turn out to be, but if you’ve read any Pynchon at all, the prose keeps insisting that it’s not going to be Pynchon.

Despite his impressive record of literary sleuthing, it’s somehow unsettling to realize that Foster isn’t a superman — it’s just that his close attention to language has become all too rare a practice.

A good nest of laurels? Not exactly. A lot of silly stuff came out of the whole cyberpunk trend. Beforehand, when you were on the Internet you were merely slouched out in a chair, typing onto a Compuserve message board or something. Afterwards, you were flying bodilessly through cyberspace, a creature of pure data, communing with other cyberbeings through virtual reality. It’s taken years to get people to stop talking that way, not to mention believing some of that bunkum. Also, the books mostly haven’t held up well. In just over a decade, early renderings of the Internet have come to seem quaint and self-astonished in the same way as Jules Verne’s “A Trip to the Moon” must’ve seemed during the height of the space age. Less so, but in that way, Sterling’s 1988 novel “Islands in the Net” flourishes that sexy new com-tech apparatus, the fax machine. All the same, when the day comes, they’ll use that “cyber” word way up top in Sterling’s obituary — there’s no avoiding it.

He deserves better. If any classification fits Sterling’s fiction easily, it’s one of his own making: He coined the term “slipstream” to denote books and authors that share some of the speculative, experimental ends of good science fiction, but which use different, often more mainstream, ways of reaching them. Thomas Pynchon would be a slipstream author, as would Kurt Vonnegut and Iain Banks, maybe David Foster Wallace, and definitely Borges and Kafka.

Sterling remains a science-fiction loyalist in principle, but there’s long been a hint of ambivalence, a hint perhaps of thwartedness and pique, in the way he champions pure SF in his essays while excoriating the SF scene as it really exists because it produces mostly genre paperbacks, tie-ins, paint-by-numbers imitations and sequels-of-sequels-of-sequels. Conversely, writing on John Updike’s “slipstream” novel “Roger’s Version” in the fanzine SF Eye, he comes off like a heavy-metal kid apologizing to his friends about liking Beethoven. Like: I know what you’re thinking; it’s just some boring old geezer. But wait! If you pay attention to it — like really give it a chance — the guy really has something going! Sterling has serious authorly instincts and sensibilities, and “Zeitgeist” is proof of his being too large for his current aquarium.

Sterling’s new novel, “Zeitgeist,” is a lot of things at once. It’s a fast, dense, complex fin-de-siècle novel, rendered as a pileup of telling details, that tries to encompass the entire world. It’s an epic human tragicomedy like Tom Wolfe might’ve done if he were a bit younger and could notice something besides korina wood tea carts and duvet covers. “Zeitgeist” is what Douglas Coupland could do if he could stop sniffing his fingers and checking his hair. You could call it Pynchonesque for its playfulness, or compare it to Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” because of all the poststructuralist theory sandbagged around its pilings and the grad-school references spilling out into the dialogue. It’s a really smart book and a gleefully dumb, breezy book, both at the same time. Big in scope; fairly small in heft. What it ain’t, however, is a stock science-fiction offering, or a blind paean to technology.

The year’s 1999, we’re in Istanbul, and Leggy Starlitz is a fat-assed bunco artist with connections to unpleasant characters all over the world — Russian gangsters, ex-spooks, Turkish oligarchs, paparazzi, Janet Reno, individuals associated with the music industry. He’s been up; he’s been down. This time he’s up. Starlitz is our man — the American 20th century personified — and he’s promoting a crassly talentless, violently ordinary lip-synch ensemble called the G-7 Girls, one girl from each member nation, each nameless and instantly replaceable, each replete with cheeseball “native” costume. The G-7 Girls are the idols of preteen girls all throughout the habitable world and France. But they don’t sell records. It’s all about the merchandising — the action figures, the inflatable backpacks, the candy necklaces. It’s a giant sham, launched via a bet between Starlitz and Makoto, a Japanese global pop sensation of his acquaintance. The only condition: The G-7 Girl concept ends in Y2K — vanishes, like it’s never happened. It must have a shelf-life.

The act travels to Turkish Cyprus. Adventure and hilarity ensue. Gangsters, gangster-capitalists, bankers and capitalist-gangsters mix in recombinant fashion, pretty much like in real-life. NATO is crooked, everything smells rotten and the rot always runs right to the top. Again: life. As Leggy explains, “G-7 is a stone multinational. We got personnel from all over the world. That’s the new way to do biz, you know? You gotta stop being picky. You’re part of the steamroller, or you’re part of the road.”

Pausing to bury a corpse acquired along the way, he chats with Viktor, a young Russian rave kid with big pants and an up-and-comer on the Russian mafiya circuit:

“There’s death, and there’s death,” Leggy postulates. “When you bury a century, a whole lot has to go down with it. Spirit of the times, brother.”

“Yes,” Viktor said weakly. “My artist friends in Petersburg always say that. ‘Even spirits die.’” …

“Spirits die first.” Starlitz started the engine …

Their situation called for something nice and loud. Something mawkish. Something mundane, that would restore them to the default position of human banality, circa 1999. Celine Dion singing the theme from Titanic. Perfect.”

Sterling is an author and essayist of complex, often unpredictable convictions. His “Manifesto of January 3, 2000″ calls for deep environmentalism marketed through chic fashions and an up-amped pop culture industry — a sincere but weird proposal, especially given his steely attitude toward pop culture in other contexts. He’s a big advocate of regional culture, but also a globalist. It all gets complex. But while he doesn’t have much that’s positive to say about organized political action — Marxist, Social-Democratic, pistachio, anarcho-whateverist, butter pecan or elsewise — when it comes down to it, Sterling will always side with people against technology, and with either against entrenched power.

In “Zeitgeist” — interestingly for a book by a god-influential futurist — technology nearly always appears on power’s side. Tech is an ambivalent thing, wondrous in itself, but dangerous when it’s pointed at you — and often beguiling and soul-tapping for those who come to depend on it. Leggy’s ex-wife, Vanna, pulls out a k-rad Motorola Iridium satellite phone.

“Instant global access,” Vanna announced, bravely sniffing back her tears. “It’s linked up, like, totally out of this world.”

“Yeah, that gizmo is totally not of this century. It’s got the new stuff!”

“Calls cost six bucks a minute!” she said proudly…

Starlitz stared in silent hunger at the satellite telephone. The device stank of futurity. They would probably go broke, being so far ahead of the curve and all, but the gizmo was an utter harbinger of things to come, like discovering a fossil in reverse. Starlitz felt a powerful urge to grip the phone, caress it, perhaps bite it.”

The single incident in which the Internet, the crown jewel of the modern techno-juggernaut, appears in the book is when a government spook is projected from it as a slimy black presence, beamed to the site of a covert battlefield via spy satellite. The tech that comes off the best in “Zeitgeist” is antique — a set of ’60s vacuum tubes smuggled to the G-7 soundman, an Aston-Martin DB-5. We might have to have all this new stuff, the book suggests. We have to keep on top of it all, but we don’t have to surrender to it. We don’t have to get hooked.

The plot of the book basically falls apart after the first 150 pages, when Leggy loses his group to a Turkish gangster-capitalist, collects his 10-year-old daughter and hits the road on the way to nowhere in particular. Things get episodic, with detours here and there, and all the narrative tension of a collapsed lung. It doesn’t matter, though. The hits just keep on coming. Leggy explains French literary theorists to his daughter, Zeta:

“You can tell they know what’s really going on, because when you read what they say, it sounds really cool and convincing, until you realize that even though you know it, you can’t use that knowledge to change anything. If you can understand reality, then you can’t do anything. If you’re doing anything, it means you don’t understand reality.”

Which is about as cogent and final a dismissal of the entire meta-meta academic climate of the 1990s as has ever been uttered by any character, fictional or otherwise. The book’s hot that way.

Leggy and Zeta make their way back to Cyprus, and Sterling starts patching the plot back together like an eight-armed Hindu deity working a phone switchboard. Denouement ensues, and “Zeitgeist” ends on a note of hope: The 21st century can’t possibly be as awful as the 20th. We’re learning our lesson: It should be more about people from now on. Whatever happens over the next hundred years — and whatever “cyberpunk” starts to look like once the last of its pre-millennial edginess has worn smooth — that idea should hold up well.