William Gibson

Sunday, June 4th, 2006 | Personal

Ever since I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, I have been hooked by the truly artistic writing style. His penchant for portraying a plausible, dystopian society in a setting not unlike present-day Earth, is envious. But we should not forget that his books are for the most part a commentary about contemporary issues, but you can, of course, ignore this aspect when reading them, though it does give the books an interesting other dimension to them.

A while back I took to rereading the books I had by him, and also picked up a few new ones. The long-standing classic, Neuromancer is, of course, the thing that really gathered readers for Gibson’s novels, and he hasn’t quite managed to write something that good for a long while. That is, until his latest book, Pattern Recognition, that I picked up recently. It is unique for a William Gibson book in that it is the first of his book that takes place in a contemporary setting, interweaving actual events such as the planes crashing into the World Trade Center in 2001. In the book we follow Cayce Pollard, who has an affliction that’ll make my lactose intolerance seem benign: she has allergic reactions to succesful brandings like the Michelin man. Cayce has found an avenue to exploit her curious allergy: high-level marketing consultancy. If she gets an allergic reaction, the customer has a good design.

Cayce does, of course, suffer from this allergy, so she lives in her own world, stripped of any style or fashion. She has only one hobby: the footage. The footage is mysterious segments of video that are released seemingly at random on the internet. As it has a lot of people interested one of her less-than-appealing clients, Bigend, wants to figure out who is behind the footage, and he wants Cayce to figure it out for him. Reluctantly Cayce is forced into it and is swept across Europe in a chase where it isn’t always apparent who is being chased. It is a classic William Gibson novel in style with Neuromancer where layer upon layer is added with no apparent connection, only to be completely unravelled at the end, bringing all the parts together in one big whole. One of my most-recommended Gibson books, by far.

Another William Gibson book I return to often is the short-story collection, Burning Chrome, which contains a long palette of fascinating stories. Some with more action than others. The two favourites of mine in the book are Fragments of a Hologram Rose by Gibson and The Belonging Kind that Gibson co-authored with John Shirley.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose is a meandering tale of a breakup, painted with words. It’s not that the story is great, it is actually rather benign, but it is just told in this very fascinating style that makes me reread the short-story again and again.

The other story, The Belonging Kind, is more atypical of Gibson as in it is set in what could be contemporary America or Europe. It is a fascinating tale of a rather boring and altogether uninteresting social interactions professor who hasn’t got the foggiest clue how to interact socially himself. To alleviate the boredom he visits nondescript pubs in the evenings where he drinks with himself, until, one day, he discovers something else pubcrawling a varied range of places. He discovers the belonging kind.

I still haven’t picked up a couple of the intermediaries like Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. I will have to rectify that sometime soon.

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