Supposed to be somebody

I don't think I waited long enough to re-read this book All the other Gibson novels I've gone through this month have languished on shelves for years since I read them, but The Peripheral is barely two months old and I've already gone through it twice.

It doesn't suffer in the re-reading, it's remarkably clear and the writing is lovely throughout, but the drama is tarnished because I didn't wait long enough to forget what was going to happen.

But I have at least been able to ferret out a better understanding of who the characters are and what they're doing. This immediate rereading really opened me up to liking Wilf a lot more than I did the first time through - his unacknowledged exhaustion with the world he's living in is much more poignant when it's not overwhelmed with concern for the plot. I got to do more detailed study this time around instead of frenzied glossing over to figure out what was happening and, honestly, The Peripheral is full of stunning and haunting details.

I'm also completely fascinated by Gibson's uncanny ability to not only spin whole worlds out of nothing but to also make them immediately identifiable, understandable, and acceptable to the reader. I got a little lost with the language of fab and funny in my first reading of the first few chapters, but they were entrenched in my vocabulary by the second time I went through the story. I was similarly accepting of Ash's doubled pupils and rambling tattoos as prosaic when they'd seemed needlessly fantastic on my first reading. In this way the reader mirrors Flynne's journey - she has trouble finding her feet when she first uses the peripheral but catches up quickly and finds a home in London just as we stumble over unfamiliar language and concepts at first but then begin catching up and then begin adoring the world we've fallen into.

I almost never know what I'm going to write in these blogs until I write them, but writing this now I'm actually pretty surprised by how much I really enjoy The Peripheral, and how much I'm considering re-reading it when I get home tonight. I won't, because I want to wait for the mystery to build, but I'll think about it and the ability of Gibson's to write that kind of repeatability is just phenomenal.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. The Peripheral. Putnam. New York: New York. 2014. 

All future

There's an oddly distorted pattern in these trilogies: they start with a crescendo in the first novel, build to another, and then fizzle out when it comes time to close. The second novel in the series usually seems more like a part one for the third novel than a book that stands on its own, and the third one always has something completely awesome that happens toward the middle instead of at the end. I guess the Bridge Trilogy escapes that pattern because it has the burning of the bridge at the end of the third book, but the Blue Ant Trilogy has this same semi-disappointing pattern.

As usual with Gibson Zero History isn't bad so much as it's unfulfilled. Yes, there's a big cathartic action scene and we're given the wrap-up with all our favorite characters. But it almost feels like we're looking at the wrong characters. By the end of the book I don't care so much about Hollis and Garreth, I'm more interested in finding out everything there is to know about Heidi. She's set up as this frustrating blank character in Spook Country but then usurps the place of main character in Zero History but you still don't know much about her aside from her horrible taste in men and her ability to kick absolute ass.

But probably the most irksome thing about Zero History is that the nothing-happens-but-everything-changes bit at the end doesn't give us the money shot with everything changing. In the Sprawl Trilogy we see that humans and AI are starting to become interchangeable intelligences, in the Bridge Trilogy we get a shot of Rei Toei walking out of Lucky Dragons all over the world, but in the Blue Ant Trilogy all you're left with is the vague sense that Bigend doesn't know what he's doing but controls the world anyway. It's disconcerting as all fuck (probably intentionally) but it doesn't have the same sense of reality or possibility or hope that the other trilogies sign off on.

Maybe that has to do with what Zero History is all about - there is no history, history is dead and it's a fiction anyway, so all we can do is look to the future and the future is (as it ever is) vague and vaguely unsettling.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Zero History. Putnam. New York: New York. 2010.

Spooks, haunts, and Rivers

*SPOILER ALERT*
I'm like 85% positive that the old man is Win Pollard. The description of him as looking like William S. Burroughs is passing in both novels but the security background and rage that the old man has about the security community reaction to 9/11 fit for me. And I don't think that ruins Pattern Recognition like a lot of online Gibson fans seem to think - why wouldn't Win contact his family after surviving the towers? Because as an old spook he'd know that shit was about to go seriously sideways in a way that would be incredibly unpleasant for his family to be connected with and after it had gone sideways he started committing major, treasonous felonies. Both seem like good reasons to keep his adult daughter out of the loop and let her grieve.

But anyway.

/spoiler alert.

Locative art as it's presented here is a fascinating exploration of just how fast technology changes these days. Look at Ingress now and compare it to this seven-year-old novel and the novel feels disastrously dated. For all of that, it's still fascinating. The things that people would choose to present, the ways that Gibson proposes for the technology to be used, Bigend's ongoing complete misunderstanding of the way the world works (and still being able to wrest money from that misunderstanding) are all captivating.

Hollis is a bit of a blank, though. It's hard for me to connect to her here, it feels like there's not much to see. She's distractingly passive at times and seems to have little to no agency. That sort of thing is understandable with Milgrim and Tito because Milgrim is a captive and Tito had been trained his whole life to function as a cog in a greater machine, but Hollis is supposed to be a rock star (even if that's behind her now). You'd expect a little more get-up-and-go but it really just isn't there.

I know Hollis is the main character here, but in this particular novel it's Milgrim's story that I want to read. His uneasy and coerced relationship with brown is the most cathartic part of the story for me, and he's the character whose head I think we get inside of the most.

As a side note, this book's been out for seven years. Augmented reality is a thing now. Somebody get on this, because The Viper Room is still missing its River.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Spook Country. Putnam. New York: New York. 2007.

Patterns and mysteries

Since I started rereading Gibson I've been waiting for Cayce to headbutt the living shit out of an Italian in Japan and it's still as cathartic as it ever was.

Pattern Recognition is a difficult book to describe because so much of the texture (and even true content) of the novel seems to be made up by, well, pattern recognition. Making an audience read precisely the random noise that the author wants them to is a peculiar and brilliant gift that Gibson has, and when you've submersed yourself in his writing you start picking up on the phrases you know will be important and following them before he's done more than make a passing reference to an object or a concept.

I'm torn as to whether Pattern Recognition or Neuromancer is my favorite Gibson novel because they're very different books that nonetheless have a lot in common. What Pattern Recognition has that is very different than all of Gibson's other novels is a unified voice. There's one narrative here; the book doesn't go dancing around or bouncing through a cluster of disparate characters, it starts, stays, and finishes in the voice and from the perspective of Cayce Pollard. I don't think this particular narrative technique makes the book better or worse than any of Gibson's other books, but it does make it easier for me to identify with Cayce and to understand her fears and motivations. In particular I don't think Cayce's allergy to advertising would have been nearly as completely explored (and therefore as impressive) if we'd had to look through several sets of eyes to see the story.

The novel feels like a shift on Gibson's writing, a movement to something that hadn't been in his stories since the very early parts of Neuromancer and choice bits of Burning Chrome. Pattern Recognition isn't a far-future romp, it's not really a story about hackers, but it seems to be looking at NOW as a new frontier and is fascinating in a way that makes the whole world novel after you're finished reading.

As a side note, I think the book is also one of the very first (and very few) post-9/11 stories that does a very good job of dealing with the implications of a national tragedy with tact and foresight that allow the book to be perhaps more relevant now than when it was published.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. Berkley Books. New York: New York. 2005. (2003)

Onrushing weight

Chevette is one of my top five favorite Gibson characters, with Molly, Cayce, Hollis, and Kumiko generally filling in the other spots. It's really telling that many of Gibson's stories are written from what is primarily a male perspective but the women and girls in the stories become the real heroes and badasses. That's a huge part of why I like him, actually: he gives me actual, real, cool role models to aspire to - I only wish I'd found them when I was younger.

Chevette is probably the most realistic cool badass girl in any of Gibson's universes; she starts as a bridge-dweller and bike messenger in Virtual Light and ends up as a woman who is of and not of the bridge in All Tomorrow's Parties. Berry Rydell has no arc in the Bridge Trilogy, and Colin Laney's arc is from researcher to lunatic. Chevette moves from being an isolated and essentially feral child to a self-possessed and prematurely wise young woman with a kick like a mule during the course of the series. She's the one who grows, so she's the one we should be watching.

The bridge itself also undergoes some changes which the audience would do well to note - the way that squatter's paradise is transformed over the course of the trilogy is the same transformation that our current interstitial/liminal world of the internet is being warped and changed right now. In Virtual Light the bridge is mad and dangerous and hard; in All Tomorrow's Parties it's going the way of Times Square - slowly becoming Disneyland in spite of all its history. There's a lot there that's important, a lot to consider about the need for places uninfected by corporations and the need for freedom from industrialized individuality, and even though All Tomorrow's Parties is a product of 1999 it's got a message that is vital in the discussion of net neutrality.

But what's funny is that the message is secondary to the story and the story is secondary to the scenery. All Tomorrow's Parties has some of my all-time favorite Gibson images lurking in its pages, from an old man painting action figures inside of a cardboard box to flashes of an abandoned and cloudy California coastline to the visceral image of the Golden Gate Bridge swathed in flames while people on it try to survive, All Tomorrow's Parties is brimming with haunting images that rattle around behind your eyes and are hard to detach from. It, and really all of the Bridge Trilogy, is beautiful and full of language that renders stunning visuals of things that are hideous and lovely alike.

As a side note, I finished this book the first time through when I was sitting in a dusty gray Jeep in the California desert on my first trip out of town with my husband, who hadn't proposed to me by then. It was a quiet day, warm but getting cool as the sun set, and he had climbed down into a ravine with a friend while I finished my book and listened to the industrial and electronic music he was only just introducing me to. When he got back in the car and I talked to him about my book he put on another mix of music and we drove out of that little canyon listening to Apoptygma Berzerk's cover of Lou Reed's "All Tomorrow's Parties," a coincidence of timing and style that still makes me feel warm and happy and severely creeped out at exactly the same time. This little story doesn't have any meaning, there isn't any purpose to it. But all the same, you should listen to the song in all its incarnations at some point as you read the Bridge Trilogy: it's a perfect soundtrack to the world that Gibson wrote.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. All Tomorrow's Parties. Berkley Books. New York: New York. 2003. (1999)

Projected desire

I think that I may think Idoru is more hilarious than I'm supposed to. The novel has sadness and suspense in it too, but the delirious absurdity of large parts of the story is too much to be ignored and so I primarily think of it as a funny book. Most of the hilarity has to do with the Lo/Rez fan club and their silly, taken-too-seriously projects, but Laney, Yamazaki, Maryalice, and Keithy have their places in the hierarchy of humor as well.

The book takes place in a Tokyo rebuild by nanotechnology after a tremendously destructive earthquake. Nothing in this book happens on the Bridge, but it shows an alternative response to the same sort of disaster that spawned the Bridge. San Franciscans in this trilogy responded to an earthquake by building a scavenger city, Tokyo responded by rebuilding on a rigid plan but also allowing piss-stained clubs to survive. We're being shown that in spite of the post-global world Gibson is setting up there are still enormous cultural divides that people are unable to cross.

Which may be why Laney has such a rough time of it: not only is he the byproduct of being dosed with a brain-transforming chemical that turns people into psychopathic stalkers, he's moved from LA to Tokyo and can't quite get enough traction to hit the ground running. He's lost unless he's combing through data, and maybe that's what Gibson's trying to say: people are complicated and separated by cultures, but information is above those petty divides.

I guess these novels are supposed to be anti-media, and they largely are, but what they really seem to be is anti-studio: Rei is a media product but she rises above the gross sort of media produced by Slitscan and TV shows like Cops in Trouble. Gibson seems to be advocating for creation over consumption, something that I will never argue against, and I'd love to hear his opinion now on things like TMZ and reality television.

Idoru is a fun, fast read that makes you seriously examine why you believe what you see and how you came to be seeing it in the first place. It's full of people who are fun to read and places that you almost-but-don't-quite want to visit.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Idoru. Berkley Books. New York. 1997. (1996)

Proj on

I've never read the Bridge trilogy as a trilogy - I got the books out of order and pieced them together in my head. I haven't read the books in at least five years either, so I'm coming in to them fresh.

Virtual Light is messy and slapdash, but relentlessly entertaining. Chevette is badass and awesome and makes me want to be a bike messenger, Rydell is kind and a little stupid and an interesting main character because of it, and watching the two of them cause trouble together is a lot of fun.

The background characters really steal the story here. Sublett and his allergies are a funny diversion and the TV cult he escaped from makes me curious to know more about him. Skinner is noble and pathetic and raises a million questions that we don't get anywhere near enough answers to. JD Shapely is a mystery who we're only given enough information about to desperately want more.

San Francisco and LA are also characters, in their own odd way. The cities are smutty and dark and different from the cities as they currently are, but similar enough in enough ways that you can almost see the haze of smog and fog floating through the pages.

This is a great novel to dig in to, to bite down and expand your imagination. It's not as remote and foreign as the universe of Neuromancer, nor as familiar as the world of Pattern Recognition, so you can build up a base of familiar things (security companies, city layouts, bike couriers) combine them with bizarre ideas (nanotech buildings, an earthquake named Godzilla, the Golden Gate Bridge as a city unto itself) and write the concepts in between those two worlds for yourself, making the story richer than just the words on the page.

Gibson's stories demand participation. They ask effort from the reader to make the words resolve into something meaningful. Virtual Light is a great example of this concept, and a good place to start if you're not familiar with the rest of Gibson's works.

Gibson, William. Virtual Light. Bantam Books. New York: New York. 1993.

Circles through the net

The Sprawl Trilogy seems more circular than linear. This makes sense because so much of it takes place in a world that doesn't exist and is constantly rebirthing itself and the culture that surrounds it.

The push-and-pull of the real world and the net is probably a huge part of why Gibson is hailed as such a prescient author. He published The Sprawl Trilogy right as the real-world internet was starting to become something that people actually interacted with and he's one of the few writers who grasped that the larger society would subsume and then be consumed by online lives.

Mona Lisa Overdrive finishes what Neuromancer started - exploring the hair-fine line dividing the net from the real world and the ways to pass through and between the two. Like Dick, Gibson questions reality and its constraints and pushes the boundaries of what his characters (and readers) understand.

MLO brings together characters from both Neuromancer and Count Zero as well as introducing us to some new faces. There are, somewhat unfortunately, no physical visits to Straylight but there is a fascinating filling-in of the physical world - Cleveland and Florida and London appear on the pages as places that are new and bright and filthy and old and tired as our friends (and you do want to be friends with these characters) pass through them.

The geography of the novel is arresting. Neuromancer happens largely in a haze of drugs and jacking in and out of the net, Count Zero takes place in desolate deserts and the crowded Sprawl, but MLO is all over the place - hiding in constructs and bare wastes and the sprawl and old London townhouses. It fills itself with the world and colors the buildings it passes by.

There are huge parts of the story that I like, particularly the relationship between Kumiko and everyone's favorite razorgirl, but the book as a whole leaves me a little cold. I've already said that nothing is Neuromancer, but I can't help feeling that Mona Lisa Overdrive is just close enough to sting. I wish it was a little more than it is, but what it is just has to be enough.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. Bantam Books. New York: New York. 1988.

Ghosts and gods

I haven't read Gibson's trilogies as trilogies. This is the first time I'm sitting down and reading all of the books in order and in their proper groupings.

That being said, Count Zero could almost be part of a different series: clearly it involves the Sprawl and the third book in the trilogy makes it clearer that Count Zero is strongly connected to Neuromancer, but you can't really tell that if you read it out of context. There are just a couple of points in common between the two books - a meeting with the Finn and the brief mention of a razorgirl in orbit.

I think Count Zero is sort of the inverse of Neuromancer: the plot is much clearer but it doesn't leave very strong impressions. I didn't inhabit the Sprawl and its periphery the same way that I inhabited Chiba and Straylight. I can probably tell you more about the individual characters in Count Zero than I can the ones in Neuromancer, but I don't care about them as much. Count Zero is also lacking the smoky noir feel that penetrates every page of Neuromancer.

That is not to say that Count Zero is a bad book, by any means. I don't think that most books look good when you hold them up next to Neuromancer and when looked at by its own light instead of the bright neon shine of its predecessor Count Zero is pretty damned good. It's full of jive and chatter and filth and action. It does a VERY good job of explaining the zaibatsu power structure that hums along in the background of the Sprawl Trilogy and sets the sage beautifully for Mona Lisa Overdrive.

In fact, I think it's a little unfair to think of Count Zero as a standalone book because (even though Gibson didn't plan on making a sequel to Neuromancer) it isn't. It's the middle book in a trilogy and even if that trilogy is rather informally defined it is all part of the same narrative. A lot of what's missing from Count Zero is found in the other books of the trilogy. The parts that aren't in the other books are, I believe, down to the fact that Count Zero was only Gibson's second full-length book and it happened to follow an exceptional but also very foreign first novel.

Either way, whatever's missing from Count Zero isn't enough to put me off reading it again. So it's not Neuromancer - guess what, nothing is. But it's a good story in its own right and it's interesting to have gentler perspectives of the Sprawl.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Count Zero. Ace Books. New York: New York. 1986.

Tactile neon

I don't remember much of my first impressions of Neuromancer beyond knowing that I absolutely wanted to see the world it took place in and that William Gibson was some kind of awesome and terrible magician who found a way to look at a twisted future and bring it back for us to read about in the present.

I do know that Neuromancer was the first Gibson I read, though I don't recall if I read it because one of my hackers pointed me in its direction or if I read the book and it turned me toward the hackers. Time is like that. Memory is like that. You're left with impression but missing their sequence which, coincidentally, is a perfect way of describing Gibson's writing.

There's something magical about how he puts a book together. I can sit down and tell you what happened in the story, how things progressed from page to page and how the plot layered in on itself, but that's not what I remember or treasure about this novel. What I hold onto when I'm thinking about Neuromancer is a television colored sky and lenses like mercury looking through a haze of neon at a man holding a weapon he doesn't know how to use. Neuromancer calls up spider-like robots and dub in zero-g. Neuromancer is a piping, inhuman contralto moving through a head of platinum and precious stones, telling stories about biz and beaches tinted silver.

The book isn't long, the plot isn't particularly original, and as much fun as the noir genre is it isn't exactly fresh in our cultural psyche, but in spite of the fact that Neuromancer is a short book that covers common ground it's also a massive book that always has more to look at, more to feel and share with the reader. It is tantalizing and whole and empty and reaching. I want so badly to see its world but know it would be a bad world to live in. I want to reach out and feel these people and their lives and the vastness of the situation they're living through, but I know it would frighten me terribly to do so.

That's probably the best thing about Gibson as a whole and Neuromancer in particular. It's not a book about good people doing good things, and it's not a book about normal people doing things that normal people can do: it's a book about the possibility of being extraordinary and it makes you long to be more than yourself, even if that concept is terrifying.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Books. New York: New York. 1984.

Farfuture/Splitfuture coolness

I don't remember exactly why I got into William Gibson. I think I may have read Neuromancer and started getting into cyberpunk before I started hanging out almost exclusively with hackers, but I could be off by a couple of months. Either way I know it was around when I was 18 years old which means that I've been a Gibson for about ten years, which in turn means that I've only been able to anticipate the releases of his most recent three novels. I stumbled across the release date for The Peripheral on Amazon and then basically camped out at the bookstore until October 28th to get my copy. I really love anticipating Gibson books because they're always wonderful and there's always almost-too-much time between novels to lose interest or get frustrated but that never happens because you know the book is going to kick ass when it finally drops.

Now that I've said my bit on anticipation, I'm going to do a little begging: please, please, please, please Mr. Gibson, please let The Peripheral be the start of The Spur Trilogy, or The Haptic Trilogy, or whatever it's going to be called or however many more books there will be in it. Please make more in this universe because it's beautiful and scary and insightful and spooky and I want to spend more time in its spaces and faces.

There is an awful damn lot I want to say about this novel but I'm afraid I can't yet because this is one of those times that I actually do worry about spoilers - the book hasn't even been out for a full month so I don't want to destroy any part of the plot for any readers but I do want to commend Gibson for his continual subversion of typical gender roles and attitude toward people of different races, genders, sizes, ages, and abilities to get a lot done.

Gibson writes some of the creepiest institutions that I've ever read, but he consistently writes the best and most inspiring characters that anyone's seen in SF in the last four decades. Yes, he's got plenty of straight white men in his novels; but Gibson's heroes aren't the Han Solos of the world, his heroes are the everymen, everywomen, and everychildren who people his pages but could also be sitting right next to you. That's what I love so much about Gibson - he doesn't teach his readers to aspire to be a particular character, he teaches his readers that everyone can be a hero but it frequently comes down to making some hard and dangerous choices.

Please go out and buy The Peripheral. It's delightful. And please, Mr. Gibson, please keep writing. You're doing a lot of good for my generation and I don't even think we realize that yet.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gibson, William. The Peripheral. Putnam. New York: New York. 2014.