#zerohistory

[submarineforest]

- "potent icon of existential dread" #FromTodaysReading #WilliamGibson #ZeroHistory #JawsOfLife #FortyTwos (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/By6KpGWlups/?igshid=1ldjk5an5xkh5

[submarineforest]

- "I thought they were valuable because they worked" #FromTodaysReading #FortyTwos #WilliamGibson #ZeroHistory #drugs (at Lakeview, Chicago) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxyD8ich0xv/?igshid=1e64matwv2mi

[shakespeare-and-blue-roses]

Zero History - William Gibson

William Gibson confuses me. I think that’s why I like him, honestly, because so few books come along that I have to pick apart and read multiple times to understand. One of the reasons is that Gibson spends little to no time worldbuilding. He drops hints about his scenes as he moves you through the story, and you have to keep up with him. I like books that challenge the reader. If you don’t push yourself once in a while, that’s almost as bad as not reading at all. But I like being sucked into the world and having to dig for understanding.

Zero History is a little easier than some of Gibson’s other books because it’s mostly set in a modern day world with some extra technology here and there. Books like Mona Lisa Overdrive are built in a completely different world and Gibson just drops you into his story and expects you to keep up.

I was still confused by Zero History, but like I said I did better this time. I only lost it around the time that things really started deteriorating for the main...six characters, I think. After that there were too many subtleties to keep track of, at least on a first read, but I’m determined to someday revisit this and find out just how deep the corruption runs.

[vampirefiction-blog]

 "...Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas."   "For what?"   "The new Mitty demographic."   "I'm lost."   "Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another."   "Gear-queer?"   Bigend's teeth showed. "We had a team of cultural anthropologists interview American soldiers returning from Iraq. That's where we first heard it. It's not wholly derogatory, mind you. There are actual professionals who genuinely require these things -- some of them, anyway. Though they generally seem far less fascinated with them. But it's that fascination that interests us, of course."   "It is?"   "It's an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. Equipment fetishism. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity."   "Sounds like fashion, to me."   "Exactly. Pants, but only just the right ones. We could never have engineered so powerful a locus of consumer desire. It's like sex in a bottle."   "Not for me."   "You're female."   "They want to be soldiers?"   "Not to be. To self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for, or at least associated with. Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything remotely like what they were designed for. Of course that's true of most of the contents of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those places. But the level of consumer motivation we're seeing, the fact that these are often what amounts to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That's new. I felt like a neurosurgeon, when this was brought to my attention, discovering a patient whose nervous system is congenitally and fully exposed. It's just so nakedly obvious. Fantastic, really."

Probably the best part of William Gibson's Zero History.