Spook Country - William Gibson

Recently finished reading Gibson's Spook Country, the second Bigend book. Found this one less intriguing than the first (perhaps because the protagonist, former cult band member Hollis, resonated less with me than did Cayce of book 1). Anyway, this book expands our understanding of Bigend's many schemes, and the way in which (seemingly) limitless capital allows him to explore the newest forms of information sharing, and exploit them for commercial purposes. Much as I imagine major CEOs already do, if they're savvy. The book does posit a novel artistic use of cyberspace and the GPS grid, which I won't give away here. Food for thought, as always, and the satisfying blend of exciting new ideas and interesting personalities interfacing in technology and which is Gibson's hallmark.

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Another brilliant book by Gibson, and the first in the Blue Ant/Hubertus Bigend trilogy. The likable but neurotic protgagonist, Cayce (pronounced "Case"), is a coolhunter - a precog who uses her sensitivity to brands and logos to serve as a consultant to major franchises, helping them make branding choices based on what she senses will become trendy or not. In her spare time, Cayce and her online otaku friends obsess over "the footage" - segments of breathtaking, unearthly films scattered across the net, discovered a fragment at a time. Cayce's life changes when an exceptionally powerful employer hires her for a special consulting job, and draws her into a web of intrigue, Soviet mafia, and mystery...

I also really identified with Cayce, and many of her reflections resonated with me, such as, "Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless?"

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History

All Tomorrow's Parties - William Gibson

I have been consuming Gibson in a strange and disjointed fashion over the past 3 years, picking up random books in his trilogies and reading them out of order. Maybe because I never stop thinking about Gibson's universe (!), this has not reduced my enjoyment of them in the slightest.

ATP follows Laney in the final stages of his drug-induced transformation, in which his uncanny nodal apprehension is perfected even as his body completely degenerates. Laney has sensed that a pivotal change is poised to occur in the universe, with the node centered around the enigmatic celebrity Harwood and idoru Rei Toei, and the new nanotechnology "fax machines" entering all Lucky Dragon convenience stores. As usual, a synopsis is unsatisfying for Gibson's stories, which sound absurd when summarized in this fashion, yet are immensely, masterfully believable.

I truly believe that Gibson has his finger on the pulse of our own history, much like Laney, and this is why his "future" is so powerfully present.

Highly, highly recommend.

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One

WOW! My bookclub's most recent pick was Ready Player One, and I read this thrilling 372-page sci-fi novel cover to cover over the last several hours. Talk about a page-turner! I won't give away the main quest driving the plot, but suffice to say, it is action-packed and awesome.

The experience of reading this book was very self-indulgent for a cyberpunk nerd like myself -- it is a book about otaku, for otaku, and it has the works: a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone with enough money for a visor and "haptic gloves" escapes the filth and squalor of our used-up Earth via a full-dive VR universe called OASIS; brilliant teen hackers; a soulless corporate entity in full villain mode; and, in an unusual twist on your typical sci-fi novel, endless real-world references to obscure sci-fi, video games, and everything 1980s.

The British newspaper The Observer says that the otaku is "the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects." In Ready Player One, and in many nerd subcultures IRL, a player's ability to amass vast knowledge of game-related trivia is a sought-after mark of authenticity, and a status symbol within the group.

In one early scene, our ridiculously erudite, but chronically poor and therefore low-level hero, Perzival, spars with the braggart I-r0k in a VR chat room, about what it takes to be a "gunter" (egg hunter, or elite gamer):

"Poseur."
"Poseur? Penis-ville is calling me a poseur? ...This chump is so broke that he has to bum rides to Greyhawk, just so he can kill kobolds for copper pieces! And he's calling me a poseur!"
..."That's right, I called you a poseur, poseur." I stood up and got in his grille. "You're an ignorant know-nothing twink. Just because you're fourteenth-level, it doesn't make you a gunter. You actually have to possess some knowledge."

As Perzival's friend Aech would say, "Word."


This novel is recommended for everyone, but especially if you like:
- Stephenson's Snow Crash
- Sword Art Online (anime TV series)
- Gibson's Idoru

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

Stephenson has rapidly become one of my very favorite, if not all time favorite, authors. Snow Crash is so incredible - Stephenson's vision of the future is a rarity in its clarity, depth, and originality. The overpopulated earth has become a trashy wasteland, and the technological/economic elite have essentially moved to a digital existence, most often "goggled in" to the virtual reality of the Metaverse, where your avatar can move around and conduct business in the same way as on earth. Hackers, especially the samurai-sword wielding protagonist (named Hiro Protagonist), have the upper hand in a landscape they can control. However, the intersection between man and machine, embodied particularly in the hackers' binary-acccomodating neural pathways, has led to the dangerous potential for computer viruses to infect the user's mind. This unique vision has even more resonance given Google's recent announcement that they are developing glasses which will project a virtual reality and other information over the real world. This novel's astounding scope encompasses the exploration of memes, Glossolalia, drugs, viruses, and religion, which are depicted as being basically synonymous. A wonderful page-turner!

Neal Stephenson - Reamde

In Stephenson's oeuvre, Reamde, despite its 1056 pages, is light reading. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The man is a master of plot construction, not in terms of technical complexity but rather in terms of sheer engagement: he gets those pages turned. The novel's most striking feature is its action sequences, in which Stephenson shows off his impressive gunfight-choreography chops.

The novel's cyberpunk elements center around the computer game T'Rain (the fictional successor to the online hegemony of World of Warcraft), whose most salient characteristic its elaborate economy, based on a virtual-gold standard whose integrity is ensured by an elaborate geological simulation which determines the location of deposits of ore within the game world. The game is designed to exploit, rather than be exploited by, the existence of "gold-farmers," or kids in China who perform repetitive in-game actions (or grinding) in order to harvest virtual items and currency that they can then sell to rich Westerners - a real phenomenon in games like WoW. Stephenson's picture of how this all works is really quite ingenious, and somehow constitutes both a more sophisticated version and elaborate parody of early cyberpunk depictions of the function of virtual spaces in the global economy, like Stephenson's own depiction of the "Metaverse" in Snow Crash.

A series of elaborate coincidences embroil the creator of this game, the draft-dodging black sheep of a gun-toting Idaho clan, and his adopted Eritrean refugee niece in a globe-trotting hostage plot involving Islamic terrorists and Russian organized crime; all of which is much too complicated to even begin to explain here. Suffice to say that the entire thing is incredibly entertaining, and the characters are extremely well-written: I thought that the terrorist Abdullah Jones, a suave Black American convert, was a particularly intriguing figure.

In Reamde, Stephenson dials down the whole "novel of ideas" business and writes a fairly straightforward thriller that delivers exactly what it promises and in fine style. The Stephensonian themes are all here, but muted and lighthearted in a way that I think is actually a very good artistic move, especially following the somewhat more ponderous (but very good) Anathem. If nothing else, the book makes me wistful for a world in which the rest of the bestseller list was even a fraction of Reamde's quality.

I would recommend the book, but read the essential Stephenson first: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon.

Stephenson's Novels

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• Interface (1994) 
• The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
• The Cobweb (1996) 
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• The Baroque Cycle
• Quicksilver (2003), volume I
• The Confusion (2004), volume II
• The System of the World (2004), volume III
• Anathem (2008)
• The Mongoliad (2010–2012)
• Reamde + Colin's review (2011)

William Gibson's Count Zero

Count Zero, although at times confusing, is another Gibson masterpiece. The world he envisions is Tolstoyan in its richness, fullness, and complexity. He is strikingly creative and his vision of the near (although technologically distant) future is dark, grimy, and dangerous without being oppressingly alarmist. Gibson's characters ring true and his literary grasp is impressive, and far improved from Neuromancer - he convincingly weaves together multiple narratives to reveal a complex and fascinating picture of cyberspace and its potential. In this work, Bobby, aka Count Zero, is an aspiring cyber cowboy (or "hotdogger") who gets swept up in the veiled machinations of an incomprehensibly wealthy entity named Virek. ("Entity" because Virek's body is a pool of molecules in an enormous vat, and he "lives" in the matrix.) The story follows Virek's attempts to locate the maker of mysteriously haunting collage boxes through various hitmen and an art collector. The book's themes, largely introduced in Neuromancer, include AI, systems theory, the synthesis of man and machine, and the spatial nature of cyberspace. The religious potential of the matrix is also fruitfully explored. A real page-turner and a must-read!

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History

William Gibson's Idoru

In this utterly wild and brilliant book by William Gibson, two characters' narratives intersect to reveal the story of a famous rockstar - Rez of the band Lo/Rez - who is determined to marry an idoru, or virtual celebrity, despite the objections of his P.R. team and devoted, massive, scarred bodyguard Blackwell. Set in the near (but technologically greatly advanced) future, the intersecting narratives are from the perspectives of Chia, a fourteen-year-old Lo/Rez fan and skilled hacker from Seattle, and Laney, a hacker with an uncanny ability to detect "nodal points" in data. The theme of emergence is evidenced at the meta- as well as macro-level, wherein the individual stories interact to create a totality which far exceeds the sum of its parts. The tale is a true page-turner, and rife with crazy characters and novel ideas. Definitely worth reading!!

**Update**

Helpful info from Colin: Gibson's 3 Trilogies (turns out this is book 2 of one of them - oops)

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History