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Oh, Christ on a bike yes. I even had my very own 'Estella'...
Update: still in Plant's 0s +1s, which is going slowly as I am lazy with non-fiction, but recently had some very "oh my god" moments, very clever, inspiring stuff.
While I was in New York I also got, partly to compliment the above, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling - basically for those who don't know it's what they call a 'steampunk' novel, actually I think it may have been the first in the genre, and basically it's set in an alternative 1855 Victorian Britain, where Charles Babbage and Ada Byron did build their Engines, and the country is ruled by the Industrial Radical party... Anyway, it's an odd kettle of fish indeed, at times seemingly written in a parody of the 'great Victorian novel' style, and thus apparently somewhat directionless and slow (see: Mallory walks around London aimlessly for pages and pages), but it does build up a sense of creeping dread quite well after a while. However, I still can't shake the feeling that Sterling is essential Gibson's slightly shit little chubby friend, a suspicion not helped by the photo on the back of my copy's jacket, wherein Gibson looks like he's just stepped out of one of his own novels, and Sterling has the kind of leather jacket and mullet combo that was unforgiveable even in the 80s. My shallowness aside, at the end of the day their collaborations just don't excite me in the way that Gibson's solo work does - this book doesn't have the same snap, crackle and pop, or make me turn the pages with the same eagerness, as something like Neuromancer, or the best stories in Burning Chrome.
So, with this in mind, and because there is a copy of All Tomorrow's Parties sitting on my new flatmate WP's bookshelf, I went out and bought Gibson's Idoru the other day - it's the second in one of his typical sort-of trilogies that starts with Virtual Light. Where that one was all about movies, this one's more about rock'n'roll/pop stardom, and I'll be disappointed if ATP isn't about clubbing...
It's funny that at this point Gibson seems to have decided that he's going to be quite shameless about sticking to a certain formula of plot and characters - I think I need a whole thread to outline this, actually - the loser with a talent, the tough and professional guy/girl(s), the naive ingenue on some kind of journey, the shadowy agents of even shadowier organisations pursuing them, the supercool agents of a marginalised underground subculture helping them out, and everyone moving together to a collision that is almost always anticlimactic... But fuck it, he's just so good at it now, and his prose in this one is as glorious as it's ever been. I'm convinced that as he progresses as a writer, he's moving closer and closer to just writing contemporary fiction - something that stops registering as 'sci-fi' or even 'cyberpunk' because the world in which it is set is hard to identify as anything other than our own. There are huge sections of this book that read like that anyway... You know, if William Gibson wrote a travel book, which was just about him wandering aimlessly round various cities, sitting in airports, people watching, I'd buy it like a shot. Love love love WG.
(Oh, and in New York, because it was very cheap, I also got Will Self's Great Apes, which a preliminary examination of suggests is just shit, like a clever-clever Martin Amis style short story - "ah! do you see? monkeys as humans and humans and monkeys? do you see? do you?" - stretched with painful effort to novel size. Bah.) |
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