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Zero History (G.P. Putnam’s Sons $31)
A few years ago there was a spate of films about people who could see just a few minutes into the future. That's a sensation familiar to readers of William Gibson's novels, especially his latest, Zero History (G.P. Putnam's Sons $31), third in a sequence of novels that began with Pattern Recognition (2003), followed by Spook Country (2007).
In Zero History, a marketing whiz named Hubertus Bigend has corralled an eccentric, anti-social, mathematical genius, Bobby Chombo, to serve as an 'aggregator.' His synthetic analysis of economic and social factors has the potential to provide Hubertus with the ultimate competitive edge, literally of all time.
In a world where global markets are electronically integrated in real time, a head start of a few minutes, even a few seconds, would be the ultimate in insider-trading. Chombo's calculations can afford Hubertus with a lead-time on the present of seventeen minutes. As Bigend says, when asked if that's enough, "Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven seconds, in most cases.";
The Holy Grail of brokers, wheeler-dealers and marketing magnates like Hubertus Bigend is that brief myopic moment of clairvoyance, just a glimpse into what Gibson calls "the order flow,"; or "the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it.";
The aggregate includes even the shadowy grey and black markets in drugs, rare commodities and forbidden technologies that thrive in the dark back alleys of capitalism, a subject that has been a signature theme in Gibson's writing.
In Zero History, Chombo's aggregate of the order flow is what director Alfred Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin-the secret information or object whose possession drives the plot without actually being part of the action.
Chombo is a relatively minor character. Gibson is much more interested in the characters developed in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. These include Hollis Henry, ex-rock star who retired to write a book on 'locative art' and whose modest fortune has since been erased by the ubiquitous 'market forces' currently destroying our mutual funds and RRSPs; Hubertus Bigend cruises the world's oceans in his surplus Soviet ekranoplan, a ground-effect vehicle with an interior renovated by Hermes; and Milgrim, a young man whose addiction to anxiety-suppressing drugs has left him with such sketchy sense of self. He has become a man with "zero history.";
A blind person's other senses are said to become sharper in compensation for the loss of sight. With Milgrim, Gibson offers the provocative suggestion that a loss of personal history-a sense of one's self as the aggregate of personal memory-might be replaced by a heightened affinity for "pattern recognition,"; a talent that could be more useful in a semi-cyberworld that is already part digital.
Bigend has paid to have Milgrim detoxified, weaned off his anti-anxiety drugs, in order to exploit his gift for pattern recognition in industrial/commercial espionage. Milgrim's assignment is to track down and recognize a distinctive and highly desirable blend of denim clothing produced as a "secret brand"; only obtainable by those in the know from containers that appear briefly and mysteriously at outdoor flea markets and other ad hoc souks of the post-modern world.
Bigend wants to penetrate the anti-corporate culture of the secret brand and gain control of the coveted cloth in order to secure contracts for supplying military clothing that will inevitably spin off into civilian fashions. Inevitably, assorted thugs and goons from the underworld of global capitalism have designs on both the denim and on the predictive services of Chombo.
Have you got all that?
As in his earlier novels, Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light etc., Gibson excels at evoking baroquely detailed visions of a not-too-distant-future, a world enriched by co-existence with its own avatar, Cyber-world. (Apparently he's even appeared as himself as an avatar in the cyber-world game, Second Life, to publicize his books, which makes him the Hubertus Bigend of authors.)
Though Gibson has been described as a writer of science fiction, his novels are actually less fantastic than most of Kurt Vonnegut's and mercifully not marred by the smug self-congratulatory and patronizing humour that gets tedious in Vonnegut's work. The Dadaist collage that is Hollis Henry's hotel room in an exclusive London club, for instance, isn't one iota weirder than a designer's apartment I saw on one of those real estate shows on the Home & Garden TV channel the other night.
Back in 1978, in an essay about Walter Benjamin entitled "Under the Sign of Saturn,"; Susan Sontag observed, "The genius of surrealism was to generalize with ebullient candour the baroque cult of ruins; to perceive that the nihilistic energies of the modern era make everything a ruin or fragment-and therefore collectible. A world whose past has become (by definition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques, invites custodians, decoders and collectors."; The juxtaposition of culturally coded 'collectibles' from the recent past with technologies only imagined on Star Trek forty years ago isn't a vision of the future; it's your living room right now.
(I took a break from writing this article to watch an IBM computer named 'Watson' compete on Jeopardy against the TV game-show's two all-time champs. Watson beat them like a pair of borrowed mules and I went back to using a 500-year-old technology, the mechanically-printed book. It didn't seem like a terribly radical juxtaposition until I thought about it.)
Some critics have taken shots at Gibson's novels for being too strong on technology at the expense of character. Admittedly, his fondness for caricature and whimsical names is somewhat Dickensian, but so is the scope of his work. He's been quoted as saying he believes we're entering a new Victorian Age of polarization between the Haves and Have-Nots in the Global Village. So it is a not-so-brave (and not always so new) world he describes.
Despite the mock-thriller plot, Zero History is very much a character-driven novel whose real story is the gradual re-emergence of Milgrim's personality. From a detoxed vacant near-cipher, a man whose past has become obsolete, he grows through his attachment to Fiona, a rebel-girl motorcycle courier, and begins to make ethical decisions that are no longer subject to the agendas of Hubertus Bigend and favour the shadowy subversive culture of "secret brands"; and alternative capitalism.
Maybe it's just us, with our personal and professional websites, blogs, Facebook pages, Second Life avatars, talking and texting constantly on Blackberries and iPhones, who have become too strong on technology at the expense of what used to be called character. And William Gibson is just the guy holding the mirror.
978-0399156823
-- review by John Moore
[BCBW 2011]
In Zero History, a marketing whiz named Hubertus Bigend has corralled an eccentric, anti-social, mathematical genius, Bobby Chombo, to serve as an 'aggregator.' His synthetic analysis of economic and social factors has the potential to provide Hubertus with the ultimate competitive edge, literally of all time.
In a world where global markets are electronically integrated in real time, a head start of a few minutes, even a few seconds, would be the ultimate in insider-trading. Chombo's calculations can afford Hubertus with a lead-time on the present of seventeen minutes. As Bigend says, when asked if that's enough, "Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven seconds, in most cases.";
The Holy Grail of brokers, wheeler-dealers and marketing magnates like Hubertus Bigend is that brief myopic moment of clairvoyance, just a glimpse into what Gibson calls "the order flow,"; or "the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it.";
The aggregate includes even the shadowy grey and black markets in drugs, rare commodities and forbidden technologies that thrive in the dark back alleys of capitalism, a subject that has been a signature theme in Gibson's writing.
In Zero History, Chombo's aggregate of the order flow is what director Alfred Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin-the secret information or object whose possession drives the plot without actually being part of the action.
Chombo is a relatively minor character. Gibson is much more interested in the characters developed in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. These include Hollis Henry, ex-rock star who retired to write a book on 'locative art' and whose modest fortune has since been erased by the ubiquitous 'market forces' currently destroying our mutual funds and RRSPs; Hubertus Bigend cruises the world's oceans in his surplus Soviet ekranoplan, a ground-effect vehicle with an interior renovated by Hermes; and Milgrim, a young man whose addiction to anxiety-suppressing drugs has left him with such sketchy sense of self. He has become a man with "zero history.";
A blind person's other senses are said to become sharper in compensation for the loss of sight. With Milgrim, Gibson offers the provocative suggestion that a loss of personal history-a sense of one's self as the aggregate of personal memory-might be replaced by a heightened affinity for "pattern recognition,"; a talent that could be more useful in a semi-cyberworld that is already part digital.
Bigend has paid to have Milgrim detoxified, weaned off his anti-anxiety drugs, in order to exploit his gift for pattern recognition in industrial/commercial espionage. Milgrim's assignment is to track down and recognize a distinctive and highly desirable blend of denim clothing produced as a "secret brand"; only obtainable by those in the know from containers that appear briefly and mysteriously at outdoor flea markets and other ad hoc souks of the post-modern world.
Bigend wants to penetrate the anti-corporate culture of the secret brand and gain control of the coveted cloth in order to secure contracts for supplying military clothing that will inevitably spin off into civilian fashions. Inevitably, assorted thugs and goons from the underworld of global capitalism have designs on both the denim and on the predictive services of Chombo.
Have you got all that?
As in his earlier novels, Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light etc., Gibson excels at evoking baroquely detailed visions of a not-too-distant-future, a world enriched by co-existence with its own avatar, Cyber-world. (Apparently he's even appeared as himself as an avatar in the cyber-world game, Second Life, to publicize his books, which makes him the Hubertus Bigend of authors.)
Though Gibson has been described as a writer of science fiction, his novels are actually less fantastic than most of Kurt Vonnegut's and mercifully not marred by the smug self-congratulatory and patronizing humour that gets tedious in Vonnegut's work. The Dadaist collage that is Hollis Henry's hotel room in an exclusive London club, for instance, isn't one iota weirder than a designer's apartment I saw on one of those real estate shows on the Home & Garden TV channel the other night.
Back in 1978, in an essay about Walter Benjamin entitled "Under the Sign of Saturn,"; Susan Sontag observed, "The genius of surrealism was to generalize with ebullient candour the baroque cult of ruins; to perceive that the nihilistic energies of the modern era make everything a ruin or fragment-and therefore collectible. A world whose past has become (by definition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques, invites custodians, decoders and collectors."; The juxtaposition of culturally coded 'collectibles' from the recent past with technologies only imagined on Star Trek forty years ago isn't a vision of the future; it's your living room right now.
(I took a break from writing this article to watch an IBM computer named 'Watson' compete on Jeopardy against the TV game-show's two all-time champs. Watson beat them like a pair of borrowed mules and I went back to using a 500-year-old technology, the mechanically-printed book. It didn't seem like a terribly radical juxtaposition until I thought about it.)
Some critics have taken shots at Gibson's novels for being too strong on technology at the expense of character. Admittedly, his fondness for caricature and whimsical names is somewhat Dickensian, but so is the scope of his work. He's been quoted as saying he believes we're entering a new Victorian Age of polarization between the Haves and Have-Nots in the Global Village. So it is a not-so-brave (and not always so new) world he describes.
Despite the mock-thriller plot, Zero History is very much a character-driven novel whose real story is the gradual re-emergence of Milgrim's personality. From a detoxed vacant near-cipher, a man whose past has become obsolete, he grows through his attachment to Fiona, a rebel-girl motorcycle courier, and begins to make ethical decisions that are no longer subject to the agendas of Hubertus Bigend and favour the shadowy subversive culture of "secret brands"; and alternative capitalism.
Maybe it's just us, with our personal and professional websites, blogs, Facebook pages, Second Life avatars, talking and texting constantly on Blackberries and iPhones, who have become too strong on technology at the expense of what used to be called character. And William Gibson is just the guy holding the mirror.
978-0399156823
-- review by John Moore
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on March 10, 2011 in By David.
