Commentary: William Gibson And The Blank Slate of History
It has been, quite literally, years since I posted a Commentary. Apparently I do come back to things.
It having been so long since the last Commentary, I ask regular readers to bear with me while I catch up new readers - and myself - on what the format is supposed to achieve, and how it's supposed to achieve it.
The basic theory is that a single book review is useless without context. A reviewer might praise Twilight as a revolutionary new take on the love story, not having read the books from which it draws its structure. Or they might slate Lovecraft as unimaginative, drawing on ideas made cliche by other writers. If you can supply the context yourself, you know to take these writers' advice with a pinch of salt; if you can't supply that same context, you're going to begin with a dubious set of assumptions concerning the books. You might be put off books you'd actually enjoy, or you might buy ones you'd hate - but this is just an extreme example. Let's touch on an example that can happen regularly.
Way back in the late 90s-early 00s, the Future Publishing magazine SFX was a guaranteed purchase for me. Pre-page slash, pre-new editor, pre-revamp, it reliably carried some features on developing US concepts (including perennial one-page feature 'Development Hell' which tracked the status of geek-related films. Watchmen had a slot in there every month, back when it was a Terry Gilliam project coming off the recent success of Twelve Monkeys. But the real reason I read SFX religiously was the reviews section.
Because I knew the reviewers. I had, by the end, something like seventy issues of SFX; in a couple of cases, they'd joined the magazine from others that I'd followed, and I knew their tastes. It was important to know whether I agreed or disagreed; I might think one of them was an idiot, but if I knew where he and I didn't see eye to eye, his review was still useful to me.
So the Commentaries are... an attempt to create a series of reviews, both with their own context and putting books in the context of others. Others can be reached through the Books tag.
So. Zero History.
William Gibson writes in incidentally-trilogies. That's not quite true, but it's become his tendency; he writes a novel in which he defines a conceptual filter, a way of looking at the world, an atmosphere. And having done so, two more novels extrude from that; and we call this, often unwisely, a trilogy.
A trilogy is more commonly, after all, defined as a narrative which takes place over three instalments. Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive don't so much make up a single narrative (though they share features and characters) as they form a hologram image of the future they depict; by which I mean that, through examining these three perspectives, one can see the whole of the image, even the parts which should logically be hidden, as is the fascinating property of the hologram.
But for whatever reason, setting aside his short stories and the Difference Engine collaboration with Bruce Sterling, Gibson has thus far produced three... trilogies, for want of a better word... that all serve as this kind of window into their world... or their mindset, as much as their world. And each is a different setting, effectively, a different take on futurity, to riff on something that's just come up in discussion with calephotos. The Sprawl series, as Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive/short story collection Burning Chrome are collectively known, was one of the defining factors in shaping cyberpunk, right at the start, and at opening up what cyberpunk COULD be wider as the series went on. By contrast, the Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light/Idoru/All Tomorrows Parties) also seems to explore a future extrapolated from the time he wrote it, consequently dealing with very different themes, advances, and concerns.
Gibson thrives on what we might call future shock, the period at the onset of technology-triggered cultural shift during which the shape of the future society begins to emerge, and this most recent trilogy (Pattern Recognition/Spook Country/Zero History) takes place in the contemporary juncture, where between the futurists, the transhumanists, and the coolhunters, we've evolved a cadre of specialists whose job/hobby/calling is to map the future.
And the series... well, it took 7 years just in publication time. Most of the decade, likely, in writing time. Each book is very much of the time it's written, and Spook Country hinges, in many ways, on events and news stories that hadn't come out at Pattern Recognition's publication. Gibson's described his work as 'termite art'. For which description to make sense, this:
There’s an essay entitled “Termite Art”, in Manny Farber’s Negative Space, a book of film criticism. I discovered this essay around the time I was starting to write short fiction, and, though Farber was talking about film, and particularly about films by a certain kind of American director, I found it hugely encouraging. The following, please note, is not Farber’s theory, but what I’ve always remembered it to be. Which is all you need to know for present purposes, as I’m trying to explain something about how I write, and why.
Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) that European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be like a monumental slab. It’s about that slab, and how it’s been shaped, or what’s been carved on it. In “termite art”, though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.
That encouraged me, in 1977, because that felt to me like what I actually did when I attempted fiction. And my slabs were truly pathetic, particularly my earliest tries, but I could bore a mean and twisty wormhole from the very start. In another sense, Farber provided an crucial angle of attack, a working attitude: I’d called my slab “science fiction”, but the art I’d cultivate would be the art of interstice, burrowing from surface to previously unconnected surface, through the waiting wealth of weirdness I sensed between those surfaces.
I haven't always agreed with that, but the Blue Ant trilogy, as wikipedia informs me people are calling this latest grouping, does feel that way. Perhaps it's the contemporaneity of it, boring through the surface of our own time, presenting a new angle to look, new tunnels to glance through, rather than sculpting a future and holding up the model for us to inspect; Gibson's futurity here is not a trick of perspective, but it is a shift of perspective.
And it could be that Gibson almost seems to be consciously being Gibson - I described Spook Country as 'what happens when William Gibson sits down and says "Today I will write a William Gibson novel" instead of "Today I will write a novel"', in the same way that Anathem feals like Neal Stephenson consciously decided to write a Neal Stephenson novel, and I stand by that, although Zero History, with its questions of loyalty, duty, and friendship, and which must be paramount at any time, reads more like Gibson's pass at a Graham Greene novel.
The series is about emergence, not from areas you haven't seen, but from realms you know well enough not to have bothered mapping - and not well enough to truly know. It's that point where something undefined emerges, demanding definition, and becomes apparent. It's about finding that shape - and most of all, it's about that strange cadre mapping the future through their own gut feelings and discomfort. And that's reflected in the termite-art nature of the writing; you slowly start to find out the shape of the novel, and of the trilogy, as it comes.
For people who love discovering fictional worlds, this is a great way to apply that to the real world.
It having been so long since the last Commentary, I ask regular readers to bear with me while I catch up new readers - and myself - on what the format is supposed to achieve, and how it's supposed to achieve it.
The basic theory is that a single book review is useless without context. A reviewer might praise Twilight as a revolutionary new take on the love story, not having read the books from which it draws its structure. Or they might slate Lovecraft as unimaginative, drawing on ideas made cliche by other writers. If you can supply the context yourself, you know to take these writers' advice with a pinch of salt; if you can't supply that same context, you're going to begin with a dubious set of assumptions concerning the books. You might be put off books you'd actually enjoy, or you might buy ones you'd hate - but this is just an extreme example. Let's touch on an example that can happen regularly.
Way back in the late 90s-early 00s, the Future Publishing magazine SFX was a guaranteed purchase for me. Pre-page slash, pre-new editor, pre-revamp, it reliably carried some features on developing US concepts (including perennial one-page feature 'Development Hell' which tracked the status of geek-related films. Watchmen had a slot in there every month, back when it was a Terry Gilliam project coming off the recent success of Twelve Monkeys. But the real reason I read SFX religiously was the reviews section.
Because I knew the reviewers. I had, by the end, something like seventy issues of SFX; in a couple of cases, they'd joined the magazine from others that I'd followed, and I knew their tastes. It was important to know whether I agreed or disagreed; I might think one of them was an idiot, but if I knew where he and I didn't see eye to eye, his review was still useful to me.
So the Commentaries are... an attempt to create a series of reviews, both with their own context and putting books in the context of others. Others can be reached through the Books tag.
So. Zero History.
William Gibson writes in incidentally-trilogies. That's not quite true, but it's become his tendency; he writes a novel in which he defines a conceptual filter, a way of looking at the world, an atmosphere. And having done so, two more novels extrude from that; and we call this, often unwisely, a trilogy.
A trilogy is more commonly, after all, defined as a narrative which takes place over three instalments. Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive don't so much make up a single narrative (though they share features and characters) as they form a hologram image of the future they depict; by which I mean that, through examining these three perspectives, one can see the whole of the image, even the parts which should logically be hidden, as is the fascinating property of the hologram.
But for whatever reason, setting aside his short stories and the Difference Engine collaboration with Bruce Sterling, Gibson has thus far produced three... trilogies, for want of a better word... that all serve as this kind of window into their world... or their mindset, as much as their world. And each is a different setting, effectively, a different take on futurity, to riff on something that's just come up in discussion with calephotos. The Sprawl series, as Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive/short story collection Burning Chrome are collectively known, was one of the defining factors in shaping cyberpunk, right at the start, and at opening up what cyberpunk COULD be wider as the series went on. By contrast, the Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light/Idoru/All Tomorrows Parties) also seems to explore a future extrapolated from the time he wrote it, consequently dealing with very different themes, advances, and concerns.
Gibson thrives on what we might call future shock, the period at the onset of technology-triggered cultural shift during which the shape of the future society begins to emerge, and this most recent trilogy (Pattern Recognition/Spook Country/Zero History) takes place in the contemporary juncture, where between the futurists, the transhumanists, and the coolhunters, we've evolved a cadre of specialists whose job/hobby/calling is to map the future.
And the series... well, it took 7 years just in publication time. Most of the decade, likely, in writing time. Each book is very much of the time it's written, and Spook Country hinges, in many ways, on events and news stories that hadn't come out at Pattern Recognition's publication. Gibson's described his work as 'termite art'. For which description to make sense, this:
There’s an essay entitled “Termite Art”, in Manny Farber’s Negative Space, a book of film criticism. I discovered this essay around the time I was starting to write short fiction, and, though Farber was talking about film, and particularly about films by a certain kind of American director, I found it hugely encouraging. The following, please note, is not Farber’s theory, but what I’ve always remembered it to be. Which is all you need to know for present purposes, as I’m trying to explain something about how I write, and why.
Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) that European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be like a monumental slab. It’s about that slab, and how it’s been shaped, or what’s been carved on it. In “termite art”, though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.
That encouraged me, in 1977, because that felt to me like what I actually did when I attempted fiction. And my slabs were truly pathetic, particularly my earliest tries, but I could bore a mean and twisty wormhole from the very start. In another sense, Farber provided an crucial angle of attack, a working attitude: I’d called my slab “science fiction”, but the art I’d cultivate would be the art of interstice, burrowing from surface to previously unconnected surface, through the waiting wealth of weirdness I sensed between those surfaces.
I haven't always agreed with that, but the Blue Ant trilogy, as wikipedia informs me people are calling this latest grouping, does feel that way. Perhaps it's the contemporaneity of it, boring through the surface of our own time, presenting a new angle to look, new tunnels to glance through, rather than sculpting a future and holding up the model for us to inspect; Gibson's futurity here is not a trick of perspective, but it is a shift of perspective.
And it could be that Gibson almost seems to be consciously being Gibson - I described Spook Country as 'what happens when William Gibson sits down and says "Today I will write a William Gibson novel" instead of "Today I will write a novel"', in the same way that Anathem feals like Neal Stephenson consciously decided to write a Neal Stephenson novel, and I stand by that, although Zero History, with its questions of loyalty, duty, and friendship, and which must be paramount at any time, reads more like Gibson's pass at a Graham Greene novel.
The series is about emergence, not from areas you haven't seen, but from realms you know well enough not to have bothered mapping - and not well enough to truly know. It's that point where something undefined emerges, demanding definition, and becomes apparent. It's about finding that shape - and most of all, it's about that strange cadre mapping the future through their own gut feelings and discomfort. And that's reflected in the termite-art nature of the writing; you slowly start to find out the shape of the novel, and of the trilogy, as it comes.
For people who love discovering fictional worlds, this is a great way to apply that to the real world.