Two more about William Gibson

Two things:

1. After I saw William Gib­son 2 weeks ago, I described him this way to Court­ney:

He looks a great deal older than the last time I saw him. But that’s prob­a­bly because he lives faster than the rest of us.

She told me that was blog-​​worthy, so there it is.

2. Also, I have been read­ing my signed copy of Spook Coun­try. It’s great. In one of the later chap­ters, he just throws this out there:

She remem­bered Inch­male describ­ing Stock­holm syn­drome, the fond­ness and loy­alty one could sup­pos­edly come to feel for even the most bru­tal cap­tor. She won­dered whether she might be expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing like that, here. Inch­male thought that Amer­ica had devel­oped Stock­holm syn­drome toward its own gov­ern­ment, post 9/​11. (My empha­sis.)

Fuck.

William Gibson

I have had a strange rela­tion­ship with this man.

Orig­i­nally, I knew of the hype. He was on the backs of all the other books I read, so I fig­ured I should read him eventually.

I finally did. Before I went to Japan, I bought Neu­ro­mancer. I liked it as art. It was con­fus­ing to me, though, I couldn’t really fol­low the plot. I liked the themes and imagery, how­ever, and I was com­pelled to buy more.

So I went to a book­store with eng­lish lan­guage books. There was a british ver­sion of All Tomorrow’s Par­ties there, and I bought it. I think this is where I went wrong.

I read it, the whole thing. Since it’s the third book in a series, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. That’s under­stand­able, but at the time I just fig­ured that Gib­son wrote obliquely, in terms of plot.

I was fine with this. But I saw it as a weak­ness. Part of me won­dered why every­one cared about him so much. I went on with my life.

Years later, I read Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion. It was the best thing I had read in a long time.

What was it? What had he done to get so much bet­ter? Was it the set­ting? Was he bet­ter the closer he got to our world?

Actu­ally, now that I’m read­ing Vir­tual Light, I’ve real­ized that I just read things in the wrong order. Vir­tual Light is also amazing.

Now I love him. I read his blog and it’s com­fort­ing. He seems like an old friend — really more like a trusted pro­fes­sor. A father fig­ure of sorts.

Also, in Vir­tual Light, I think he pre­dicted that Ahh­nold would get into pol­i­tics. It’s hard to say for sure, but I think it’s there.