Books by author: William Gibson

It is a little hard to believe that it has been almost ten years since I read most of Gibson's work ( Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome and Virtual Light). When reading Idoru a couple of years back, I wondered if I was misremembering how good Gibson's work was. I remember being pretty blown away by Neuromancer, but Idoru really wasn't in the same class.

Good news, then. In All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson returns to form. The novel maintains a handful of very loosely related plot lines, all of which come together in the final third. The convenience of the ending would be a problem in many books, but the concept of "nodal points" is central to the novel, and it wouldn't be right to end it any other way. Gibson's prose is razor-sharp in many places, and although it took some time for me to get into the storyline, I was hooked after fifty pages.

I like William Gibson's writing, but this is one of his weakest novels. Makes me yearn a bit for Neuromancer. Still enjoyable, however, for the occasional inventiveness.

Gibson's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, uses detachment from one's soul as a metaphor for the physical and mental effects of jet-lag (she supposes that the soul can't travel as fast as a jet, so it takes some time to catch up with you when you travel). Getting the hang of reading Gibson's prose is not unlike this feeling of disorientation. His descriptions of ordinary things are ornate, colorful, and always a little bit twisted, so that you feel a bit out of place until you get used to his style.

Up until now, Gibson's novels have been set in the future, but Pattern Recognition takes place in present day. The novel follows Cayce as she tracks down the elusive maker of "the footage", a set of disjoint film segments that has garnered a global following in various internet chat rooms and the attention of a wealthy entrepeneur. The mystery itself isn't all that compelling, but the characters are interesting, and there are a few interesting plot elements. This is the first novel I've read that's explicitly set in a post-9/11 world (one of the themes is Cayce's coming-to-terms with the disappearance of her father in Manhattan on that day), and Gibson treats it well. Although I was a little bit disappointed by the conclusion, I was quite satisfied by the journey.

William Gibson may not be getting any more inventive, but with each of his recent novels, his writing has become more consistently excellent. Spook Country is set in the present day (according to Gibson, we're living in the future now—it's just not "evenly distributed"), and it follows three intertwined story lines that eventually converge. There are spy antics, a "virtual reality" that makes sense, and a terrorism plot that I read as a condemnation of George W. Bush. Fun stuff.