zero history is the final novel in William Gibson’s trilogy that started with Pattern Recognition. Hollis Henry is back from book two, Spook Country. I wouldn’t presume to review the work of Mr. Gibson. Here are a few of his words that got some highlighter:

“It was like being on the bottom of a Coney Island grab-it game, one in which the eclectically ungrabbed had been accumulating for decades. He looked up, imagining a giant three-pronged claw, agent of stark removal.” – pg 9

“His attempted smile felt like something froced from a flexible squeeze-toy.” – pg 10

“An overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world’s hidden architectures.” – pg 18

“We do brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general.” – pg 21

“Addictions (start) out like magical pets, pocket monsters.” – pg 53

“His limbic brain was grooved for this, like the tracks of the wheels of Conestoga wagons, worn ankle-deep in sandstone.” – pg 55

“It was, some newer part of him thought, amazed, like having a Nazi tank buried in your back yard. Grown over with grass and dandelions, but then you noticed its engine was still idling.” – pg 56

“No good, said the other voice, causing his shoulders to narrow , bone and sinew tightening almost audibly.” – pg 57

“…the souless suction of sequential hotel rooms.” – pg 58

“Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.” – pg 93

“Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.” – pg 93

“Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belong to phones.” – pg 103

“Something was unfolding within him. Like a brochure, he thought, rather than the butterfly he imagined to be the more common image. An unpleasant brochure, the sort that lays out symptoms all too clearly.” – pg 123

“…structures aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened.” – pg 133

“All the while scrawling graffiti on the secret machineries of history.” – pg 154

“We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.” – pg 177

“She watched as he sank instantly into whatever it was that he did on the Net, like a stone into water. He was elsewhere, the way people were before their screens, his expression that someone piloting something, looking into a middle distance that had nothing to do with geography.” – pg 179

“When you want to know things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.” – pg 212

“Gear queer” An obsession with the idea not just the right stuff, but the special stuff. Equipment fetishism.” – pg 213

“…a bright green exercise suit, one of those silky two-piece outfits sometimes still worn here out of nostalgia for an extinct American style of triumphal ghetto criminality.” – pg 230

“The hydraulic driver whooped three times in rapid succession, as though recognizing one of its kind across a clearing.” – pg 311