William Gibson and the never-ending heist novel
A great prose stylist and his oddly limited repertoire
What happened between Neuromancer and The Terminal?
I remember where I was when Bruce Sterling insulted me. I was standing on one of the wide landings on the stairs between the first and second floors in the original Tattered Cover bookstore* in Denver.
The famous science fiction author and futurist didn’t actually insult me personally. (Okay, you guessed that.) He had written an essay about the cyberpunk genre, and in it he included some disparaging lines about some guy who mostly liked William Gibson’s writing because of his prose styling. And I picked up a book in the bookstore and saw it there.
I also liked William Gibson’s writing because of the prose styling, and I felt a bit rebuked.
From my vague recollection (I’ve never been able to find the essay since), Sterling was arguing that Gibson was more important than just his prose, perhaps because he had revitalized science fiction.
(As Sterling put it in a foreword to Gibson’s book of short stories, Burning Chrome, “Gibson puts an end to that fertile Gernsbackian archetype, Ralph 124C41+, a white-bread technocrat in his ivory tower, who showers the blessings of super-science upon the hoi polloi. In Gibson’s work we find ourselves in the streets and alleys, in a realm of sweaty, white-knuckled survival, where high tech is a constant subliminal hum, ‘like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.’”)
But beyond the quality of the science fiction, Gibson’s writing was electrifying and specific and kinetic and shiny.
He spun proper nouns and metaphoric phrases and sci-fi tech-sounding words into fun glimpses into tough worlds. For example, in a couple of paragraphs from his short story “Johnny Mnemonic”:
Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.
Molly had an answer: you hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.
Or in a description in the novel Neuromancer of a hacker seeing through his compatriot’s body (the same Molly from the short story) with a special rig:
The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building’s vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micropore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted.
Gibson’s prose made me want to write.
Trilogies and so on
The majority of Gibson’s oeuvre has come in series.
First there was the Sprawl trilogy, starting with Neuromancer, about a not-dystopian, just-dirty future in which AIs try to become sentient and mirrorshaded street ninjas and hackers play along.
Then came the Bridge trilogy, starting with Virtual Light, about a future California that’s broken into two states and is plagued by celebrities and their digital girlfriends. Or something like that.
Then came the Blue Ant novels, the first of which was Pattern Recognition, set in the present day, which exist in the techno-thriller space more than the sci-fi genre.
And at present we’re in the middle of the Jackpot books, which are time-travel novels without the time travel. Instead of being able to enter the past, future humans from a dystopian Earth are able to contact our time to try to stop the apocalypse—but when they do so, they split our present off from the timeline of their future, in a many-worlds, Everettian way. So far the two books in that series are The Peripheral and Agency.
Beyond all of these, he has a number of other one-off works. There’s his book of short stories, Burning Chrome, which has some of his most haunting and skillful work. (The Winter Market is one of the most disturbing and fun.) There is his collaboration with Bruce Sterling on a what-if-Charles-Babbage-had-really-made-a-Victorian-steam-computer novel, The Difference Engine. And there were some really weird one-offs, like Agrippa, a poem published on a floppy disk that was designed to encode itself after it was read once.
Looking for my electronic MacGuffin
As I got older and read his later works, I realized that there was something repetitive about Gibson’s books. In many of them, the plot involves a MacGuffin of some sort.
In Neuromancer, there are two AIs and computer systems that function as MacGuffins. In Virtual Light, it’s a pair of VR glasses. In Pattern Recognition, it’s a movie being released frame-by-frame on the internet. In The Difference Engine, it’s a special Babbage engine program.
But more than MacGuffins, a plot element that ties almost all of his books together is the final showdown, which generally also functions as a heist. The main characters come together to pull off some feat, which may also include a fight scene of some sort. And this just happens over and over in almost every one of his books.
Gibson is an inventive writer. He had fascinating tech from when he first started writing, some of which he mined from technical manuals and scientific journals and extrapolated. He had interesting ideas about characters, like he had for Cayce Pollard, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition, who is a style expert who has phobic allergic-style reactions to certain brand names. (One character menaces her by showing her pictures of Bibendum, the Michelin Man.) And he grew as a writer, as well, going from using men pining over women as his protagonists to making interesting female protagonists.
He’s been innovative and evolutionary.
But some limitation in his abilities as a writer has shown itself in the area of plot. “Search for the object” and then “join forces to carry out the plan” has sucked him in, over and over. It’s impossible to know why, but it just keeps happening.
And it has made his books boring in many cases. The Bridge trilogy took three books to get to the place that the first book should have gone because the logical consequences of the MacGuffin of the first book seemed to escape the author’s attention, so busy was he having his characters find it and fight for it. The Jackpot books have turned a fascinating sci-fi premise into boring showdowns over vague goals. Several of the Blue Ant books had pedestrian thriller stories come crashing into more interesting characters and settings.
I’m sure that I’m not alone in having been inspired to become a writer by William Gibson. I’m still probably going to read everything he writes, if grudgingly. But some of the shine of the chrome has come off.
A Gibson reading list
Here is my list of which of William Gibson’s books you should try reading.
Burning Chrome—This short story collection has all sorts of stuff, for all sorts of people, and it shows why people like me worshipped Gibson.
The Sprawl trilogy—Neuromancer is the true essential. Count Zero, with its Haitian voodoo AIs and a mercenary regrown in a vat who gets a surprise on a job, is great as well. And Mona Lisa Overdrive is the least of the trilogy, but it has its own good parts.
Pattern Recognition—Cayce Pollard is a great protagonist. She does some fun things. Her weaknesses are interesting. The fact that her first name sounds the same as the last name of the protagonist from Neuromancer is fun. The weird marketing company Blue Ant is entertaining enough in this book. The rest of the Blue Ant books are optional reading.
The Difference Engine—This book is a bit of a mess in some ways, but the world that it creates is as fun as anything. And it is an icon of the steampunk genre that came out before modern steampunk really began.
* The Tattered Cover, as it existed in its first incarnation, was a massive, four-story bookstore that was a place that could send a book lover into sugar shock. Each floor was probably the size of a large regular bookstore. There were chairs and couches everywhere that you could settle into to read for hours. I loved it.
But I almost never bought anything there, since it was all full-price. Instead, I got the things we found in the used bookstores and the DAV, where my mom and I would go on Friday. I still remember my old copy of Dune, priced at $1 at the DAV, with great affection.
I haven't read any William Gibson books, but I do remember the Tattered Cover. That place was the best!