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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Zero History (2010)
William Gibson
Impression published on Friday, 2010-09-10 | Novel | 4 stars
With Zero History, William Gibson--hero of high-brow 20th century sci-fi--has finally graduated from the "Fantasy/Sci-Fi" shelves to the "Fiction" shelves, if not to the "Literature" shelves.
I say so because this novel, which constitutes the completion of the London trilogy that began in 2003 with Pattern Recognition, is at once both symptomatic and donative: it is "donative" in that it constitutes an important watershed for the literature to which it is native and it is "symptomatic" in that it is a direct consequence of that same literature.
And when I say "symptomatic" and therefore "a direct consequence", I mean those things in a very superficial way: after the last page of story, when the curtain drops and the maestro emerges to name and thank his individual sources, he nominates a rogue's gallery of futurists and tabloid reporters* and, for the first time in his career as a novelist, inventories their individual contributions, revealing that the pith of the preceding novel came, so to speak, "off the shelf".
In so doing, Gibson--whose dust jacket informs me that he is "our great poet of crowds" because of his uncanny ability to "conjure the numinous out of the quotidian"--turns his post-script acknowledgements into a final plot reveal as well as a very remarkable career moment: Gibson's signature convolution, trademark semiotic pageantry and unique gift for juxtaposition, this time around, was crowd-sourced at something-approximating-random from the Internet.**
And so Zero History, the literary work, is finally revealed to have been a direct consequence of a literature its author--who, it bears repeating, gave us the concepts of "cyberspace" and "the Matrix"--labored for decades to create. The fact that these Gibson's own ideas have matured, left the nest, lived abroad and have finally come home to become the source material for his latest novel makes of Zero History a bona fide work of literature, transcending "genre" by virtue of demonstrating that Gibson has, in fact, become a sort of perpetual one-man-genre unto himself.
Finally, it turns out that "our great poet of crowds" took the stage only to re-direct our attention to the crowd--representing its constituents in very nearly their own words, where possible--in a sort of "come as you are" debutante ball held to commemorate the inevitable reverse-sublimation of the numinous into the quotidian.
His greatest feat to date.
* Including the ubiquitous, red-caped Cory Doctorow, Doug "Gen X" Copeland, a Jezebel/Gawker blogger by the name of Jenna Sauers, Bruce Sterling and so on.
** Of course, not all instances of crowd-sourcing plot elements or turns of phrase are inventoried here. One tongue-in-cheek reference in the novel to Mall Ninja goes (quite appropriately) uncredited; there is also some very Schneier-esque language about terrorism (and, shortly thereafter, the TSA--Schneier's favorite strawman, circa 2009) that Gibson also does not attribute: "She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries..." (p. 285).
