Sometimes I post here about books I've finished reading. Other times I share my thoughts early in the reading. This is one of those second times, so keep in mind we're talking about first impressions.
I've started reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, set in an undefined but seemingly very near future. It concerns a series of video clips, known as "the footage", which attracts an obsessive following.
Gibson adapted one of his stories into a movie back in the 1990's, although it wasn't successful. He also, I believe, wrote an unused script for Alien Resurrection. Point is, this feels like a book that wants to be a movie. The narration is present tense throughout, some characters are described as variations on celebrities, and products are all brand new and chic in ways that don't add much to the story but would look cool onscreen. Maybe it's the subject matter. He and Bruce Sterling were more literary in The Difference Engine, albeit not Victorian.
There are interesting ideas, though. Cayce, the protagonist, is a "coolhunter." In real life this tends to mean "market researcher who's rebranded themselves after extensive market research." For her it's a negative, allergy-like reaction. In a smaller detail, there's a Vietnamese restaurant called Charlie Don't Surf, which specializes less in Vietnamese food than in a theme park version of the Vietnam War experience. Little things like that keep me going.
I've started reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, set in an undefined but seemingly very near future. It concerns a series of video clips, known as "the footage", which attracts an obsessive following.
Gibson adapted one of his stories into a movie back in the 1990's, although it wasn't successful. He also, I believe, wrote an unused script for Alien Resurrection. Point is, this feels like a book that wants to be a movie. The narration is present tense throughout, some characters are described as variations on celebrities, and products are all brand new and chic in ways that don't add much to the story but would look cool onscreen. Maybe it's the subject matter. He and Bruce Sterling were more literary in The Difference Engine, albeit not Victorian.
There are interesting ideas, though. Cayce, the protagonist, is a "coolhunter." In real life this tends to mean "market researcher who's rebranded themselves after extensive market research." For her it's a negative, allergy-like reaction. In a smaller detail, there's a Vietnamese restaurant called Charlie Don't Surf, which specializes less in Vietnamese food than in a theme park version of the Vietnam War experience. Little things like that keep me going.
3 comments:
Gibson was among the people I knew in Toronto all those years ago in the days before you were born and afterwards in Vancouver. It's funny you should see this book as a potential movie script because his skill even in those days before he became a writer was in telling stories that were very visual interpretations of things he'd experienced or, more often, imagined. I remember one evening he came to Armadillos just after he'd been to see The Exorcist. The movie had just opened and none of the rest of us had seen it yet but according to Bill he'd spent a significant part of his childhood living in the Georgetown house next door (his family being of Gibson guitar fame and himself the absconded scion). So imagine a semi-darkened room and several of us sitting around sipping whisky and toking a little Moroccan Gold while Bill related the entire plot of the film along with his memories of all the strange goings-on next door and how the malevolent energies seeped through the walls. It was years before I saw the movie myself and found it very tame compared to his version.
I haven't actually read much of his fiction other than Neuromancer and The Difference Engine both of which were okay but I didn't get caught up in his fiction. Neal Stephenson I found more to my taste. However, I can see why you'd find a story that has that particular Vietnamese restaurant as part of the plot.
That must have been an interesting evening with Gibson when he was recounting The Exorcist. He must have gotten more out of it than just a jumpy horror movie and harbinger of a more conservative future. It makes sense that he'd have some experience of Georgetown, since I knew that he grew up in Virginia. I didn't know he was part of the family that made Gibson guitars. If, in fact, he is. People who are smooth and spontaneous speakers tend to be comfortable bending or outright abandoning truth for the sake of the story.
With Stephenson I can tell something is there, although his method strikes me as cluttered, which is kind of an obstacle to me getting into it. Oddly I have much the same response to Jane Austen.
I ought to have put some kind of signal indicating Gibson wasn't related to 'that family' but I see you figured it out without my having to resort to emojis. He was always a teller of tall tales.
Our favorite Neal Stephenson book, the three volume Baroque Cycle, is indeed delighfully cluttered as well as informative, but I've also found difficulty reading Jane Austen for that reason. Patrick O'Brian who wrote the Aubrey and Maturin novels was apparently a great admirer of hers.
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