Thursday, 29th of May, 2003

I suck. I am so far behind in my listening list that it’s actually impossible to catch up. At least with the reading there’s only a couple of main things, so here goes.

I’m actually someone who has continued to enjoy every William Gibson book since discovering Neuromancer in late school days. I do acknowledge, though, that he seemed to run out of anything particularly new to say in the last couple, enjoyable though it was to be immersed in his singular world-view each time round.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise to be quite so bowled over by his new novel. First of all, it’s not (technically) science fiction! Set in the present, it nevertheless exhibits the slightly sceptical fetishisation of technology we’re familiar with in Gibson, and indeed the parallels with his previous work are striking.
To point out just a few: how cool is it that the protagonist is (almost) named after the protagonist of Neuromancer? Case was the fucked-up anti-hero of that iconoclastic cyberpunk novel. As Charlie Stross has mentioned to me, this new novel is cyberpunk, in the end. And the rather fucked-up but highly sympathetic female heroine is called… Cayce!
We’ve got a mysterious man on a motorcycle, with a reflective helmet obscuring his face (can anyone say “mirrorshades”?), and fuck it, the plot centres around tantalising pieces of art appearing anonymously on the scene (in this case, fragments of movie “Footage”, rather than boxes of beautifully arranged flotsam)…
Clearly Gibson is engaging in a sly revisionism of his themes, packaged for the non-genre audience. And those of us in the know savour every moment. It’s a stunning read. I was delighted that he makes some jabs at post-modernist lit crit whilst engaging in an intertextual exercise of his own. And knowing that the artist in Neuromancer turns out to be a nascent AI, the poignancy of the damaged, solipsistic Russian woman at the source of the Footage is only heightened.
I can’t recommend this enough.

Oh, and I keep forgetting to read his blog, which is invariably highly illuminating.

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