The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Retired Addiction

William Gibson's Zero History (uncorrected proof)

William Gibson's new novel, Zero History, will be published in September. Confessionally, I read the first few chapters of Pattern Recognition without being drawn in, nor did I read Spook Country. Zero History seems to share a universe with these two, perhaps even complete a cycle of sorts. It's a brilliant piece of fiction, magnetic on the page, sharply observed, deeply witty and driven by an oddly ambiguous sense of peril. What becomes clear reading Zero History is that William Gibson never stopped writing cyberpunk: The real world simply caught up with him.

Here are a few short passages:

* * *

"How is she?" Milgram was having one of those experiences of feeling, as he'd explained to his therapist, that he was emulating a kind of social being that he fundamentally wasn't. Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis's eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he'd never learned.

* * *

"...What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omnipresence, that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces.... Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility, a kind of psychic tactical equipment, that he had installed during training. The Army put him through schools, that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters."

* * *

"Were you ever a model?"

"No," said Hollis.

"I was," said Merideth, "for two years. I had a booker who loved using me. That's the key, really, your booker. New York, L.A., all over western Europe, home to Australia for more work, back to New York, back here. Intensely nomadic. George says more so than being in a band. You can cope, when you're seventeen, even when you've no money. Almost literally no money. I lived here, one winter, in a monthly-rent hotel room with three other girls. Hot plate, tiny fridge. Eighty euros a week 'pocket money.' That was what they called it. That was to live on. I couldn't afford an Orange Card for the MŽtro. I walked everywhere. I was in Vogue, but I couldn't afford to buy a copy. Fees were almost entirely eaten up before the checks found me, and the checks were always late. That's the way it works, if you're just another foot soldier, which is what I was. I slept on couches in New York, the floor of an apartment with no electricity, in Milan. It became apparent to me that the industry was grossly, baroquely dysfunctional."

"Modeling?"

"Fashion. ..."

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