Creativity is a status symbol of the global post-industrial bourgeoisie

[petronia]

tsutanai reminds me to write up my (non-spoilerish!) review of Spook Country.

The thing about William Gibson's novels - since the 80s, anyway - is that no one buys them to read for the characters or plot*, but their comparative quality is... dependent on the characters and plot? ^^; The ideas and esoterica (what Gibson calls the "Google cloud" of the work) are always incisive and compelling, but they'd be equally incisive and compelling if he'd posted them to Twitter. For instance. Then again I just said that fiction was the best vehicle for conveying complicated information, didn't I. XD;

I like Spook Country better than Pattern Recognition because one of the protagonists used to front a 90s indie rock act. Laff away but the music stuff made Hollis come across as a real person, which Cayce never quite did. Also Gibson's unerringness with the language of the moment** made said music stuff very funny. I actually listened to the first half of the book as mp3s, which I'd downloaded from the flist at some point (forgot whom), and the format really brought out the podcast quality to Inchmale's and Bigend's pronouncements on "dead platforms" and "preubiquitous media"... I'd literally never listened to an audiobook before. Always assumed the concentration required would be exhausting. In actuality it worked out fine, and made it much easier to "read" while eating a burger and fries at a 24-hour greasy spoon, though I'm still not sure I would do well with more redundant prose than Gibson's.

(I mentioned the book to Sandy Pearlman, who said that he'd tried on the back of it to recruit Gibson for a "neurojacking"(?!) panel at the Future of Music Policy summit, but that Gibson had refused on grounds that he no longer felt like he had a grasp on the big picture that was solid enough to be worth sharing. Make of that what you will. Anyway, Spook Country is more about politics than music, or rather seems to be a reification of one character's maxim re: applications of cutting-edge technology being either military or artistic. The book is set in 2006, so the tech is now mass, and imagining the ramifications is too.)

The endings are key. Gibson has a propensity to understate, such that transformative events sometimes go off in his novels with a whimper - no one notices at the time, characters get on with lives, reader has to close the book and think about it first. That's when it's a transformative event and not a "so what?". I think dude decided in due course that Neuromancer's baroque climax was an aesthetic failure, which I disagree with because you can't exercise talent at building tension without owing readers a gunfight at the end. XD; Literal or metaphorical. Spook Country's finale is more "so what?" than transformative, objectively speaking, but it's emotionally satisfactory: the book comes right into focus when one figures out what the characters were trying to do (like many Gibsons it's a whydoingit rather than a whodunnit). It turns out they're angry, and the book is angry, and has been all along - so understatedly one didn't notice. But mild-mannered liberal intellectuals harbour revenge fantasies too.


* The sex is gone as well, and people don't get killed much anymore. That as much as anything makes dude's later books not!cyberpunk.

** I typically notice it only when he gets something a tiny bit wrong; like it seems to me the Curfew should've just been "Curfew", without the "the".

Comments

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Never mind why I'm trawling your book reviews 2 years after the fact XD but ...

I think dude decided in due course that Neuromancer's baroque climax was an aesthetic failure,

Really? Did he say this somewhere? I thought it was pretty brilliant. A good reveal is worth as much as a good gunfight, but maybe I just like aesthetics over gore, sometimes. XD

like many Gibsons it's a whydoingit rather than a whodunnit

I really like that phrasing! That reminds me, I like Gibson more than a lot of authors who are just as good/better at worldbuilding because he often goes hard for the extreme scenarios that would result from his setup, instead of building things for the sake of making them and then just rolling around in the sandbox. XD