Spook Country; Extending Realities
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
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Ahh, William Gibson really truly and deeply wanted the internet to become a seamless extension of reality. A seamless extension of self, just seen through a different lens, like the contrails of heat left by a walking person as seen through an infrared camera. I’ve had a strange love/hate relationship with Gibson, he has easily been my worst girlfriend, ever. [yes Danilee, feel free to add that to your quotes “William Gibson has been my worst girlfriend ever”.] It’s not helped by the fact that as much as I like reading science fiction, or like the idea of reading science fiction, I find so much of it being bad fiction propped up by the genre. You read it because it’s sci-fi, not because it is a good book anyway. I find that problem with a lot of genre fiction, though sci-fi has the added problem of telling stories that the reader has no frame of reference for. If you’re not careful, it just turns into word salad. I held off reading Neuromancer forever, [well it seemed like forever when I was that age, 10 years] because I was having a hard time with sci fi in general. I actually had to read the book for a class, but then inhaled it in two gulps, folded into a chair in my college library. It was a really good book, regardless of genre. I was fascinated by it, even though I never really “got” cyberspace the way he did; I still tend to think of it as a telephone with a really comprehensive phone book.
Then I read his other books. Count Zero kept getting lost in technical gobbledygook. Mona Lisa Overdrive just kept hitting the nail driven in by Neuromancer, the book wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t seem to move the overall arc of the storyline among the books forward. Then came his next trilogy. By this time I had started buying his books new, just about the only books I ever buy new, one of my few masochistic traits. I really wanted to like his books, but I just didn’t. The story arc for Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties were originally based on a very short work, “Skinner’s Room”, written for an art exhibit imagining the future of urban San Francisco. When you expand such a small work into something so large, the holes just get bigger. It was like watching a very bad magician fumbling through his illusions. You could see what was happening, but clearly, there was no magic. This was also about the time of his rewriting Johnny Mnemonic for the movie, the very nadir of his career if ever there was one [I like Burning Chrome, it contained his good writing, even the Twilight Zone-y The Belonging Kind]. It was like getting punched in the face. Godzilla 1985 had a better plot. Teenwolf had more empathetic characters.
But I held in there, I knew there was a good writer in there somewhere, even though I was contemplating driving to Vancouver to send him a note with my opinions wrapped around the brick that just went sailing through his living room window.
But then I heard an interview with him on NPR about his then latest book, Pattern Recognition. “9/11 killed science fiction,” he said, “our vision of the future has been radically changed by terrorism.” Maybe, but loved the book. I’m almost finished with Spook Country, and like that just as much. Not science fiction, but maybe speculative fiction? Just fiction? Or is it the science fiction of the present? This is the Tomorrowland that we got, not the one we necessarily wanted. This is the Great Cosmic Joke of the march of technology; technology is only half of the puzzle, the uses for it are the other half. And so often, like the internet, the actual uses are so unlike the imagined uses that the bear little resemblance to each other, in the end.
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Ahh, William Gibson really truly and deeply wanted the internet to become a seamless extension of reality. A seamless extension of self, just seen through a different lens, like the contrails of heat left by a walking person as seen through an infrared camera. I’ve had a strange love/hate relationship with Gibson, he has easily been my worst girlfriend, ever. [yes Danilee, feel free to add that to your quotes “William Gibson has been my worst girlfriend ever”.] It’s not helped by the fact that as much as I like reading science fiction, or like the idea of reading science fiction, I find so much of it being bad fiction propped up by the genre. You read it because it’s sci-fi, not because it is a good book anyway. I find that problem with a lot of genre fiction, though sci-fi has the added problem of telling stories that the reader has no frame of reference for. If you’re not careful, it just turns into word salad. I held off reading Neuromancer forever, [well it seemed like forever when I was that age, 10 years] because I was having a hard time with sci fi in general. I actually had to read the book for a class, but then inhaled it in two gulps, folded into a chair in my college library. It was a really good book, regardless of genre. I was fascinated by it, even though I never really “got” cyberspace the way he did; I still tend to think of it as a telephone with a really comprehensive phone book.
Then I read his other books. Count Zero kept getting lost in technical gobbledygook. Mona Lisa Overdrive just kept hitting the nail driven in by Neuromancer, the book wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t seem to move the overall arc of the storyline among the books forward. Then came his next trilogy. By this time I had started buying his books new, just about the only books I ever buy new, one of my few masochistic traits. I really wanted to like his books, but I just didn’t. The story arc for Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties were originally based on a very short work, “Skinner’s Room”, written for an art exhibit imagining the future of urban San Francisco. When you expand such a small work into something so large, the holes just get bigger. It was like watching a very bad magician fumbling through his illusions. You could see what was happening, but clearly, there was no magic. This was also about the time of his rewriting Johnny Mnemonic for the movie, the very nadir of his career if ever there was one [I like Burning Chrome, it contained his good writing, even the Twilight Zone-y The Belonging Kind]. It was like getting punched in the face. Godzilla 1985 had a better plot. Teenwolf had more empathetic characters.
But I held in there, I knew there was a good writer in there somewhere, even though I was contemplating driving to Vancouver to send him a note with my opinions wrapped around the brick that just went sailing through his living room window.
But then I heard an interview with him on NPR about his then latest book, Pattern Recognition. “9/11 killed science fiction,” he said, “our vision of the future has been radically changed by terrorism.” Maybe, but loved the book. I’m almost finished with Spook Country, and like that just as much. Not science fiction, but maybe speculative fiction? Just fiction? Or is it the science fiction of the present? This is the Tomorrowland that we got, not the one we necessarily wanted. This is the Great Cosmic Joke of the march of technology; technology is only half of the puzzle, the uses for it are the other half. And so often, like the internet, the actual uses are so unlike the imagined uses that the bear little resemblance to each other, in the end.
