Zero History (and other books)

[petronia]

Finally finished this a couple of days ago! I don't know if it's as structurally similar to All Tomorrow's Parties as my memory makes it out to be (already the three books in the current trilogy have the same plot, what do you want XD;), but experientially that's how it was - leisurely zigzagging for 4/5 of the book, reveals and romantic resolutions for the last 1/5, tailing off on a quiet apocalypse undersold to the point of hilarity ("...wait did that just happen"). The prose is as always. Or no - one suspects Twitter has had a detrimental effect on Gibson's dialogue. XD; It's like one is getting a character-count-conscious shorthand version of each conversation instead of the sounds actually coming out of ppl's mouths.

I found it weirdly hilarious that Hollis and Heidi's conversations kept failing Bechdel - one wouldn't normally even think of rating a Gibson novel on that criterion. (ZH as a whole passed easily.) Mind you both Hollis and Heidi must be pushing 40, and the narrative assumes as a matter of course that they would score smoking hot, athletic, younger partners like the aging rockers they are (indeed, like the surviving male member of their band), which feels refreshing. Out of all the items they worry about as grownups, losing desirability is not on the radar. Nor should it be... I mean, Heidi, dude. XD Seeing her in what is presumably closer to her etat naturel, it's no wonder Hollis found her Beverly Hills marriage such a mindfuck.

I've pretty much settled on My Bloody Valentine as the template for The Curfew's cultural position (even though the characters are clearly not based on MBV, and are a few years younger).

Ultimately I had more realism niggles than when reading Spook Country, which is... maybe a result of getting deeper into digital marketing? XD;;; (Not being Steve Albini, I not-so-secretly suspect working for Blue Ant would be fun. My instinctive reaction to Bigend is probably closest to Inchmale's.) But also stuff like, I am flatly convinced the Festo AirPenguin wouldn't steer well in the open air. Even though I can understand Law Of Cool-ing it, because I was obsessed with the thing for like a month when I first saw it. ......On William Gibson's Twitter, natch.

It turns out Hollis is kind of a Holmes nerd, which is... not surprising. XD; Actually I kept thinking that a modern-day revamp of Col. Sebastian Moran should be something like an evil version of Garreth. (That isn't a null-set observation, is it?) I mean, that's basically how his thing with The Old Man is. XD; Though I re-read The Valley of Fear the other day**, which made me realize you're not actually given anything on Moriarty and Moran's working relationship other than Holmes's forensic accounting. And I can't remember anyone trying to complicate it, make it interesting, in derivative works... Mind you when you've got three out of four corners, which is basically the case in both current adaptations, you can proceed by inference for maximum punchiness.

In the same bookstore session I also read half of Let The Right One In (or Let Me In, as it's been translated per Hollywoodization), but stopped when I realized it would be LUMINESCENTLY DEPRESSING. G went to see the movie and said it was scarier, had better effects, but I liked the quiet observation of the original; the way it's not cued as a horror flick. Plus they took out the androgyny, no surprise.


** Sometimes it's good to have no memory - I found I had no idea what the resolution of the mystery was. XD;; Then skipped the Inevitable American Bit(tm).

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_mike/]

I'd sort of noticed that! It took me a few dozen pages to get into the prose (after which it was smooth sailing) and I identified the terse, telegraphic quality responsible, but I didn't make the Twitter connection. The man does tweet like a fiend.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It always takes me a while to get into Gibson's prose! IDK, even though as narie says it's flattened down compared to what it used to be, at first it always feels so mannered. Even though (because?) my own natural style reads a lot like it. XD;

[narie.livejournal.com]

So I had never gotten around to purchasing/reading Spooks Country until this week (and Pattern Recognition was loaned to a friend who never returned it before it was available in soft bound, so ages ago) and I was not very impressed by it, actually. I think you're right to bring up Twitter, but it is something that was already happening in Spooks Country; at a couple of points I sat down and skimmed paragraphs for commas and clauses of any sort and found none. It was all simplistic prose which seemed to have lost a lot of its sparkle, and while the way the man views the world is always intriguing, the way in which he describes it is getting duller by the day.

I was also thrown by the use of a capital G when talking about googling something, although that is no fault of Gibson's but rather a sign of the times if there ever was one. And by the strange spelling choices for some names, viz 'systema,' 'Vianca,' 'Ramone,' and 'Sylvia' which were all trying to be clearly hispanic but failing for reasons that would be obvious to anyone who speaks Spanish. And I do blame him for that.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Someone or other on my Tumblr feed remarked re: U2 that there's this thing where v. distinctive guitarists (viz. The Edge) start experimenting with conventionality late in their careers, reaching the technical stuff everyone else normally starts off with and simultaneously attaining an appreciation for, and that this is infuriating if they settle into it for too long and abandon their distinctiveness... Actually I think Gibson's tendency, intentional or otherwise (IMO at least partially intentional, but no one ever asks about his prose style in interviews) has been paring down for a long time, getting rid of anything that could be considered an "effect" - stylistic, literary, whatever - getting in the way of a bald presentation of Shit I Think Is Neat(tm). Which is infuriating, particularly when it involves aspects like not giving the plot a climax.

Haaa that is the thing about Gibson, all these tiny yet completely non-equivocal WRONG!! bits. XD It's like reading newspaper articles about scenes one's deeply into. I mean, "The Curfew", that's wrong, they're an early 90s band and therefore would have been "Curfew" straight up. ("The Bollards" is hilariously on-target though.) "Brand narrative" not "brand vision transmission". Stuff like that drives me nuts constantly. Probably someone else who knows a lot about US defense agencies or armoured vehicles would have a whole different set of niggles.

[narie.livejournal.com]

He's becoming rather a minimalist, yes, but I'm not sure he's doing it with skill - you're right that it's paring paring paring, but in a very basic, obvious way. You can try simplistic sentences to great effect (see Jules and Jim), but it's not working so well for Gibson here. In fact, one of the things that galled about SC (I've been good and put ZH on my library queue, but for now we'll have to talk about SC) was the chapter sizes, actually - they were too short for any sort of real narrative to develop, the equivalent of a show with a mad editor and far too many cuts and jumps between plot lines. Now that you've provided the Twitter excuse I shall overextend it and lay the blame for that at its feet too; I do recall he used to keep a blog when writing PR but then started twittering in time for SC (didn't he?). I don't have my copy of Neuromancer with me, but I think I do recall the prose being of a much greater quality. And since we're at it, Spooks Country really had little in the way of a plot, didn't it? I mean, it sort of did, but it was not the book's strongest point, was it?

I was highly amused by the existence of The Bollards, I must confess - indeed a good call there on his part. But reading newspaper articles about something you know more about than the journalist is actually a rather god explanation. Obvs it was never as grating in either the Sprawl or the Bridge trilogies, because there was a lot less opportunity for cognitive dissonance to ensue, what with it being The Future. Actually, to further on that, in some ways SC felt oddly dated - maybe locative art has taken off and I just know nothing about it, but it seemed like a failed attempt at speculative fiction, that soon we'd all be looking for these hidden works; perhaps the closest we have come is Banksy?

(Although the image of rooms full of digital poppy fields was actually lovely)

I'm rambling again. I will stop now.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

One of the earliest written conversations in ZH (dude posted WIP bits) was Hollis and lead (male) Bollard commiserating over how tabloids always made one out to be sleeping with one's guitarist. XD;

You're right on the chapter sizes. It's really a game of wondering what the title means, then watching for it to turn up. XD; I think I gave up on Gibson's "plots" entirely circa... yeah, it must have been ATP. He doesn't do much more than suggest them, really, handwaves in the direction of genre convention. By ZH there's clearly (well, dude said so in interview) an aspect of undercutting satire: yes, these characters are as deadly serious about a denim jacket as anyone else might be about weapons of mass destruction. Of course, it being intentional and satire doesn't make it good: after all I don't care about designer denim at all. XD; (I actually wonder how someone who was obsessed with denim would feel about it! ...Irritated, probably, like s/he was reading a newspaper article about the phenomenon.)

SC (the entire trilogy) is intended to date, that I know for certain. XD; I think if anything Gibson is aiming for readers in 2025 to be like OMG THAT WAS *SO* 2006. (I think locative art was not so much a prediction but an imagining of a not-very-well-known scene that could plausibly have existed in 2006, just before all the geo-locative commercial stuff one sees nowadays took off. There is so much frenzied activity with that aspect of mobile marketing right now, it's mad.)