“She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.”
— Zero History (William Gibson)
Tag Archives: William Gibson
AGENCY
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Just finished AGENCY, the second book in what I assume will be William Gibson’s latest trilogy. I enjoyed The Peripheral immensely, this one a little less but I’m chalking that up to what I think of as “the trilogy effect.” A writer would seemed to be a bit… constrained?… by the original story.
I got the feeling Gibson knew where he wanted the story to go. Where he hoped it would go… but just didn’t have enough plot to get there. He’s admitted (in numerous interviews) that he struggled with this novel because he could not imagine Trump becoming president of the United States. AGENCY had what I consider a “happy ending” and for that I am grateful. A few excerpts:
“Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”
“When you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”
“Hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets.”
“I don’t exist physically, so I’m no place in particular, no one country. I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship. Lots of you are hearing me in a language other than English. I’m translating for myself, as I speak. I’m as multilingual as anybody’s ever been, but saying that brings up the question of whether I even am anybody.” She paused. “Whether I’m a person. Human. All I can tell you about that is that it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled.”
“Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable.”
Low tech Simstim
I’ve been haunted by thoughts of The Peripheral. (The impending arrival of WG’s new book I suppose) A low-tech hack occurs to me, reminiscent the Simstim from Gibson’s earlier work.
At designated times a host avatar (someone famous or just someone really interesting) puts on their Simstim goggles and goes about their normal day. Or an abnormal day, if they prefer. This is where the ‘talent’ would come in.
Simultaneously, I put on my goggles (and get comfortable), seeing and hearing everything you see and hear. You might provide a little narration where appropriate. Some “avatars” would be better at this (the narration) than others. I might like to hear everything Eddie Murphy (for example) might care to say.
An optional feature: I could text you things to say. For example, if you’re stalling down Broadway in Manhattan, I might have you go up to a native and say, “Can you tell me how to get to the Statue of Liberty or should I just go fuck myself?”
I’m a little surprised this isn’t already a thing. Out of work comedians could charge by the hour. (Something like this is already happening on YouTube, isn’t it?) Struggling art historians could give tours of the Louvre or The Museum of Modern Art.
The “best” of these could be recorded and experienced at reduced prices. Maybe even “George Carlin’s Greatest Hits” compilations. If George were still alive.
These wouldn’t have to be funny/famous people. I’m thinking of a trail guide in Montana or a white water rafter in the Grand Canyon. No narration, thank you.
New Yorker profile of William Gibson
William Gibson is far and away my favorite science fiction author. At last count there are fifty articles and interviews linked here at smays.com. This one in the New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, might be the “best” yet (whatever that means). Like all New Yorker articles, it’s long by today’s standards. I’ve pulled a few excerpts at random.
It was a depressing read for me. In the Gibsonian apocalypse “the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
As the Internet became more accessible, Gibson discovered that he wasn’t terribly interested in spending time online himself. He was fascinated, though, by the people who did. They seemed to grow hungrier for the Web the more of it they consumed. It wasn’t just the Internet; his friends seemed to be paying more attention to media in general. When new television shows premièred, they actually cared.
The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward “no service” zones of disconnectivity had become our There. […] It didn’t matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or “everting”—consuming the world that had once surrounded it.
“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”
The franchise virus
“The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.”
— Snow Crash
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this book but discover something new each time I pick it up. I like Stephenson’s female characters. Always smart and strong. Y.T. the skateboard courier in Snow Crash; Eliza in The Baroque Cycle; and Zula in REAMDE.
Same goes for William Gibson: Molly Millions (Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive); Angie Mitchell (Count Zero); Chevette Washington (Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties); Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition); Hollis Henry (Spook Country and Zero History); and Flynne Fisher (The Peripheral).
1997 BBC interview with William Gibson
“I think the only appropriate response (to the power of technology) is profound ambivalence.”
Neuromancer was published on July 1, 1984, five months after the introduction of the first Macintosh (January 24).
William Gibson reads excerpts from The Peripheral
This will be meaningless for anyone who has not read this novel.
James Gleick interviews William Gibson
This interview was recorded in 2014 and runs one hour and twenty minutes. If you are not a fan of Gibson’s novels you can skip this. If you are a fan but haven’t read The Peripheral, you should not watch this interview. The interview is notable in that Mr. Gleick doesn’t interrupt Mr. Gibson once. He lets him fully answer each question before asking the next one.
William Gibson Reimagines World After 2016 Election
“Agency,” Mr. Gibson’s next novel, which Berkley will publish in January. The story unfolds in two timelines: San Francisco in 2017, in an alternate time track where Hillary Clinton won the election and Mr. Trump’s political ambitions were thwarted, and London in the 22nd century, after decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 percent of humanity. In the present-day San Francisco setting, a shadowy start-up hires a young woman named Verity to test a new product: a “cross-platform personal avatar” that was developed by the military as a form of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, characters in the distant future are interfering with the events unfolding in 2017, through technological time travel that allows them to send digital communications to the past.”
New York Times book review »
Does William Gibson know what’s ahead?
“It’s the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat, barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America.” William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties was published in 1999 so the line above was written at least 17 years ago. More so than any other writer, I get the feeling Gibson somehow knows what’s ahead for us. Maybe he gave us a glimpse of that in The Peripheral. Perhaps that future is already here. I wish I could pick up the phone and call Mr. Gibson or Kevin Kelly or James Gleick or (insert name of really smart person here): “I’m sorry to bother you, but what do you think? Is everything going to be okay or not?”