There is a concept called "the Singularity" that is of special concern to science fiction authors. It is the moment when an artificial intelligence becomes so intelligent, so self-aware, that it no longer needs us to create more and better intelligences. When it begins to evolve independently, like a biological organism (I'm sure there is a more technical definition, but this is close enough for most science fiction, and close enough for William Gibson). That's what Gibson was writing about in the Sprawl Trilogy. Wintermute and Neuromancer connecting to become this other thing; that moment is a Singularity. It sounds like it could all be good fun, but it can be unsettling. You've seen the unsettling version on television and in the movies. Think SkyNet, think The Matrix. That's ultimately what was behind the whole of the Sprawl Trilogy. Recently I've been seeing the word used to describe something more broad. It's not just related to artificial intelligence, but to any technology that changes things to the point where it is difficult for folks to make direct, logical connections between the world that was before that change, and the world that came after. Neal Stephenson wrote an excellent novel called The Diamond Age, which took place in a society that had been entirely reshaped by a nanotech Singularity. The ability to quickly and cheaply build more or less anything molecule by molecule alters how people live in the world in ways that simply can't be comprehended. The Diamond Age is a thing apart. I'm not entirely sure how you could describe it, except in terms of itself. Both the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy, up until certain key moments in Mona Lisa Overdrive and All Tomorrow's Parties, were about a whole society organized to prevent the Singularity from coming.

Berry Rydell, much to my great pleasure, is back as a major player in All Tomorrow's Parties, and so are Chevette and the Bridge. Rydell works as security for a globally franchised convenience store called Lucky Dragon, which is as brilliant a thing as any I've seen in a cyberpunk novel. It's tremendous satire, made all the better because it could be played straight even if it appeared in some other novel in almost identical detail. It's a fixture running through the background of the whole novel, a clear sign of import in any William Gibson book, but no matter how many times I read All Tomorrow's Parties it never twigs for me until the last minute. But I was talking about Rydell. This time he's going fishing on behalf of Laney, who is both disintegrating as a human being, living out of a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station, and playing an elaborate chess game with Cody Harwood, the ostensible villain of the novel. Somewhere out there is a man who doesn't show up on the board, who Laney can't see in the flow of data, except as a conspicuous absence. It is Rydell's job to go to the Bridge, collect a very special package, and draw the man out.

In the meantime, there's Chevette Washington. She'd left Rydell after the thing with Cops in Trouble fell apart yet again, deciding that she wanted someone more together, which almost inevitably means a wealthier man with an almost pathologically robust self image. "Almost pathologically" was probably the wrong phrase to use, because it turns out the guy is an actual psychopath, his obsession with clothes and personal appearance making him a subtle echo of Christian Bale's business-card fixated character in American Psycho. She eventually pierces through the veneer, leaves him, and he pursues. What's great is that Gibson somehow makes this triangle seem like something other than the the most stale plot on Earth. It feels like the natural progression of these characters' lives, the thing that would have happened to these particular people if they existed in the real world. (And besides, bitter experience has taught me that clichés don't become clichés for no reason.) Chevette moves in with a commune of media student house-sitters, but when her predatory ex shows up at the door, her friend Tessa convinces Chevette to flee with her, since she (Tessa) would have been leaving the following morning to film a documentary anyway. Rydell collects his package at a Lucky Dragon, and surprise surprise, the whole lot of them find their way to the Bridge, narrowly missing serendipitous reunions in a way that might have been comical in the hands of a lesser author.

The package is Rei Toei, the idoru. Whatever was meant to happen on the island at the end of Idoru failed to happen, or happened in a way that nobody expected, and she has abandoned Rez, and to a lesser extent her teacher Laney (although this is a vague point; Laney seems to know what happened to her, but at other times not know—I'm not sure if this is a property of Laney's diminished capacity, or a strategy to keep Rydell from behaving rashly; it seems too smooth to be a mistake on Gibson's part). Her trip to the Bridge is the next stage of her becoming, and nobody, not even Laney understands what that means (and only Hardwood believes he knows, but he does not).

There are a handful of subplots going on. Fontaine figures much more heavily than he did in Virtual Light, taking in a stray who thinks of himself as Silencio, and who is a kind of distillation of Colin Laney's gift, his special sense for patterns made flesh. There are the mercenaries, and there is Konrad (like Hideo from Neuromancer, but more autonomous, and far, far scarier), whose attention Rydell has been trying to attract, and there is Boomzilla and some others.

Starting with Mona Lisa Overdrive, but not being fully realized until Pattern Recognition, Gibson has been subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, undermining the conventions of the techno-thriller that have provided the structure for his plots. There is violence at the end of All Tomorrow's Parties, but not the neat, definitive violence that readers would expect from how the various threads of the plot have woven together. It is not Rydell who rescues Chevette from her psycho ex (though he tries), but rather the mysterious Konrad. Nor is there ever a confrontation between Konrad and Rydell, an event that was foreshadowed countless times on the path to their meeting. There is a messy battle with the mercenaries, but it happens mostly off-stage (or, this being a William Gibson novel, off-screen), and it fails utterly to be the point where the novel reaches critical mass. Instead, there is a watch, a hard drive on a satellite, and a new kiosk at Lucky Dragon. The true point where All Tomorrow's Parties reaches critical mass is when the Bridge begins to burn. It's not just the last, desperate hope of the mercenaries to claim their prize, but the clearing of underbrush and the tilling of soil. In the Bridge Trilogy Gibson built for us a new world on the ruined ground of what we, as readers, already knew, but it was makeshift, temporary, contingent. When the Bridge goes up in flames and Rei Toei steps out of Lucky Dragon—every Lucky Dragon, everywhere—as flesh and blood, a nanotech Singularity, a new world rises with her, one that simply cannot be fathomed. We are too busy on the Bridge, trying to put out the flames, to notice, or to comprehend, or even to care, really. But it happens all the same.

There are lessons here still, from the old world, from even before the Bridge. It is the careful, compassionate, and (fundamentally) formally-organized government of Northern California that saves the Bridge, diverting aerial fresh-water tankers bound for Los Angeles or some other city, using them as emergency water-bombers. It was a plan put in place long before the fire, because everyone, even those who exist only in the interstitial spaces—and perhaps especially them—is dependent on the outside in some way, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not.

It's worth noting too, that while it is often praised for more economical use of language than the previous two Bridge novels, the prose of All Tomorrow's Parties can be startlingly poetic at times. It contains my favourite passage in all of Gibson's novels, in fact:

He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet's phrase, like the world hurts God. Within this, he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet. He is very near, he thinks, to a vision in which past and future are one and the same; his present, when he is forced to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its placement upon the time line that is Colin Laney more a matter of convenience than of any absolute now.

The poet, of course, is Sylvia Plath, though I haven't read the whole poem, and couldn't begin to tell you what the line means in that context. I can't remember exactly the reasons why, but this paragraph always struck me as inhabiting my own sense of how I lived within a particular romantic relationship, not being able to look at it directly, knowing its effects as much from the space they left behind as from their direct action, feeling both wounded and empowered at the same time. Heady stuff, and not at all an easy mix of emotions to explain. There is even a story I wrote, languishing five years now in its first draft, still burning too intense for me to look at, called "Like the World Hurts God," named for this passage rather than for Plath's lines, a tale of glory and betrayal and delusion. But anyway.

All Tomorrow's Parties was my twenty-first selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Concrete Island, by J.G. Ballard.

I'm curious as to why, in his first five solo novels (he drops the convention for All Tomorrow's Parties, and it was largely irrelevant in The Difference Engine, the collaboration with Bruce Sterling that came between Mona Lisa Overdrive and Virtual Light), Gibson uses a phonetic spelling of the Japanese pronunciation of words borrowed from English. The Idoru of the title is a Japanese borrowing of the English word "idol," and it's not uncommon for Gibson to write "sarariman" when he means "salaryman." Perhaps it's to indicate that, while these words have been borrowed from English, the concept has been altered, formalized or radicalized enough, to the point where it's no longer quite the same thing as it would be in English (a process that words go through quite regularly in the English language's gluttonous drive to expand its lexicon). If that's so, then why drop most of the terms in favour of conventional English in All Tomorrow's Parties? Perhaps it was a decision made by his editor or publisher.

An idoru, a Japanese pop idol, is a different thing than the pop idols we have here in North America, even after the advent of programs like American Idol and Canadian Idol. Their careers are generally more varied, even more manufactured (if you can believe it), and significantly shorter. They are also almost exclusively young women (not so many Justin Biebers there). Rei Toei has been built from the ground up to be the ultimate idoru. Her appearance, her personality, perhaps even her music all shifts to accommodate the specific likes and wants of any one of her fans. But she learns, and she becomes. While Rei Toei's AI is not quite on the level of Wintermute and Neuromancer of the Sprawl Trilogy, her identity is equally about process. She is an emergent consciousness rather than a constructed one, greater than the sum her parts. She is growing all the time, so densely packed with information that Colin Laney, a savant with a sort of chemically induced mild autism, a data-whisperer, if you can forgive me that construction, can't even bear to look at her. The catalyst for most of the action of Idoru comes from her impending marriage to Rez, a rock star who has managed to stay on top for decades, whose wealth and stardom has taken on a life of its own, autonomous in a way that suggests that, given enough time, something like Rei Toei herself may emerge from the data it generates, or perhaps it already has, and Rez is merely a species of vestigial limb or organ, like an appendix. None of the characters seem to understand the point of the marriage, though to be fair even I had difficulty figuring out what Gibson was trying to say after he'd filtered it through Rez's rock star-grade philosophy. I think that when Rez and Rei are together neither possesses a stable identity (as far as such a thing goes), but rather move into the realm of pure process. There are ripples here of Sharon Apple and Motoko Kusanagi.

Poor Colin Laney. Gibson writes a number of characters who have special relationships to information, like Marly in Count Zero and Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition, but I think Laney is the closest to a contemporary "power user" of the Internet, though he is also the only one who has been altered or augmented in any way. He has access to considerably more and different kinds of information than we do, but anyone who has gone looking for an innocuous piece of information only to find themselves locked in an intense, quasi-addictive and profoundly focused state, traveling from link to link and eventually seeing things that probably aren't that innocuous, anyone who has experienced that will have no difficulty understanding the sometimes dramatic leaps in logic Laney makes when sifting through the detritus of someone else life, looking for "nodal points" (I have an example from my own life in mind, but it's creepy as hell, and was entirely innocent/accidental, but there's no possible way to explain it that will sound innocent/accidental, so the anecdote must remain untold). There are paths through the information out there, and what's required to navigate them is a considerable gift for a certain kind of intuition. Colin Laney is just such a pathfinder.

And speaking of occult information, the Bridge isn't the only architecture in the Bridge Trilogy inspired by Kowloon Walled City. There is also a digital structure, a kind of communal (yet paradoxically private) data haven, so directly influenced by it that its creators have simply taken the name "Walled City." Walled city is where any number of different pathways in Idoru converge, which is interesting if for no other reason than because it's a community founded on the principle that no roads, physical or metaphorical, should ever lead there. The online Walled City is in part responsible for Rydell losing his job at IntenSecure (though Rydell barely figures in Idoru). They are hackers, idealists, otaku, Laney without the augmentation, without the bullshit. They are the ones who find Chia Pet Mackenzie (yes, Chia Pet Mackenzie) so that all the pieces can fall into place.

Chia's name is one of those ridiculous stories that you think could only happen in a William Gibson novel, but that anyone who's read Freakonomics would understand, so I won't get into it here, but she's another of Gibson's lost girls and boys, out in the world doing something just a half step away from normal and getting caught up in a massive conspiracy. Chia is the closest thing North America has to an Otaku, and she's been drafted to travel to Japan on behalf of her local chapter of the international Lo/Rez fanclub to learn the truth of what's going on between Rez and Rei Toei. She's never really traveled before, and she's gone without permission, and those things make her a target. She's manipulated into being an unwitting mule, and things just kind of go to hell from there. An organization called the Kombinat, a kind of mafia/government hybrid operating out of Russia, is after her, the smugglers are after her, and all because she accidentally intercepted a small grey case containing a nano-machine factory. The kind of thing they used to rebuild Tokyo, and were planning to use on San Francisco in Virtual Light. The kind of thing that Rez and Rei Toei believe can make their marriage happen. Nobody is entirely sure how, but as Idoru closes, a new island rises from the murk of Tokyo bay...

Idoru (which features my favourite of all William Gibson covers) was my twentieth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is All Tomorrow's Parties, the last William Gibson book for a little while.

Berry Rydell is the most likable character in Gibson's oeuvre. He's not an innocent (he's a cop who used lethal force without authorization, though he had good reason), but he's somehow avoided becoming rough, or crude, or cynical. He's Southern without being a Good Ol' Boy, reminding me a bit of Timothy Olyphant in Justified or Deadwood, or of Ray Tatum in T.R. Pearson's novels. Simple, even noble, somehow, without trying, without being ridiculous. Doing the right thing, mainly because in the long run it's less complicated. This, of course, gets him into monumental amounts of trouble, just as it would in our world. He gets let go from the Knoxville police force almost as soon as he's hired, loses his job as a rent-a-cop with IntenSecure because a hacker prank (which may have been orchestrated by a husband trying to catch his wife with the pool boy) manipulates him into doing the morally correct, but pragmatically wrong, thing. The job his old boss lines up for him with Lucius Warbaby looks like it may work out for him, because he seems to be good at it, but given its dubious legal status, we know right away that Rydell's instincts will make him fuck it up somehow.

Chevette Washington is how he fucks it up. She's a kid from Oregon who walked out of a bad life and into an uncertain one, nearly dying of exposure until Skinner (a short story about Skinner was the inspiration for the entire Bridge Trilogy, of which Virtual Light is the first volume) took her in and got her healthy again. She lives with him on the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge and works as a bike messenger in the city (San Francisco, not Oakland), and taking care of Skinner as he ages, at least until she finds herself at a party she really shouldn't be attending, and steals some guy's sunglasses because he was being a dick. All hell rains down on her after that. Lucius Warbaby, who is clearly bad news, is hired to find her after the guy she stole the glasses from winds up dead, and the two Russian cops (pretty much all the cops in this particular dystopic future—or past, since I think Virtual Light is supposed to take place somewhere around 2005—are Russian expatriates) he's working with look like they're even worse news. Chevette's fellow bike messenger sums up the nature of Chevette's problem quite nicely:

There's only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they're one kind. We're the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?

Well, what happens on the interface is fairly simple. The poor do what they're told, or the rich gut them like fish, literally or figuratively. Much like today, actually. In this particular instance, it turns out that the sunglasses Chevette stole were not sunglasses, but a Virtual Light unit (they transmit visual images directly to the brain, without photons—vision without light, so "virtual light") that costs about as much as a small car, and is being used as part of a sneakernet to transport information vital to the future of San Francisco. Rydell is sent onto the Bridge (more on the Bridge shortly, but yes, it gets a capital letter) to find Chevette, and he succeeds, at a grimy little bar called Cognitive Dissidents. But when he hands her over to the cops, and realizes that they aren't looking to arrest her, his sense of right and wrong kicks in, and suddenly it's the two of them on the run instead of just Chevette.

So the Bridge. A few years before Virtual Light opens, a series of earthquakes hit Tokyo and San Francisco, destroying a good deal of the infrastructure of both cities. The Japanese rebuild by dumping all the rubble into the ocean and letting nano-machines loose, not rebuilding so much as growing a new city. The resulting buildings somehow feel both organic and artificial at the same time. In San Francisco, things are different. That community prefers to rebuild the old-fashioned way, but the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge is beyond repair and subsequently abandoned. One night the city's underclass storms the barbed-wire fencing that isolates the Bridge, and take up residence. The Bridge becomes a makeshift, almost lawless shanty town, inspired by Kowloon Walled City. The Bridge is like Tokyo, in that it's a city of new technologies built on top of the ruins of an old city, but instead of being cutting-edge, expensive, centrally managed technology, it's improvised, decentralized, a blend of the old and new. It may be the most amazing place in all of Gibson's work. The Bridge is a character as much as a setting, or a metaphor, or the embodiment of a theme. There is even a Japanese sociology student (an "existential sociologist"), Shinya Yamazaki, who has come to San Francisco to study the Bridge. He takes over Chevette's role as Skinner's helpmeet when Chevette flees with Rydell.

Unlike with a great many of Gibson's novels, the central conflict of Virtual Light is between ideologies rather than organizations or individuals. The data that Chevette has stolen details a plan to rebuild San Francisco the way Tokyo has been rebuilt. While this would be amazing for the wealthy property developers, it would be an absolute disaster for the majority of the city's population, the denizens of the Bridge in particular (it just occurred to me: there's a version of the Bridge in the disastrous 1995 film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic). Rydell (and later, Rydell and Chevette) attract the attention of a reality television show called Cops in Trouble, and it's in his exploitation by the producers (and Gibson's over the top satire of television production) where the struggle for the individual to live a fundamentally moral (or ethical) life in a society that is slipping—or being driven, by folks like the Cops in Trouble producers—from amorality into immorality stands out most clearly. On the Bridge, folks look out for themselves, but they also look out for each other. In the outside world, there are only predators and prey.

Virtual Light was my nineteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Idoru, by William Gibson.

For reasons unknown I am always confusing Mona Lisa Overdrive with one of the Bridge Trilogy novels, conflating some of its plot elements with bits of Idoru (most notably the portable AI known as Colin, and the nanotech assembler), which is odd, because Kumiko Yanaka and Chia Pet Mackenzie (yes, really) couldn't be any more different as characters, but the confusion always stems from plot elements relating to them.

Mona Lisa Overdrive didn't get quite as good a critical reception as Neuromancer and Count Zero, and it's not difficult to see why. It lacks the focus of the other two books, and the characters are not as central to the events as science fiction and fantasy generally demands. Instead, Bobby and Angie excepted, they nibble away at the edges, sometimes pushed around like pawns, and sometimes acting as channels for greater forces that are making moves in a game that neither they nor the reader can see the shape of. It's actually the condition that makes the most sense in Gibson's fictions, where the level of paranoia shoots through the roof and unheard of sums of money and strange, beautiful technology makes the rich and powerful into the gods of ancient Greek drama. Childish in their desires and their moods, cunning, sophisticated, and brutal in their scheming to see those desires realized. Science fiction is very much about change, and science fiction fans like their characters to be at the very centre of that change; it's not that difficult to see why it would be harder for them to accept a novel in which the most active characters are merely caught up in it, largely inconsequential to the outcomes. It is very literary, though.

The novel opens seven years after the events of Count Zero, and fourteen after the events of Neuromancer. Molly Millions is here, under the alias Sally Shears, and so is the Finn, dead now, but manifesting as an oracular AI with a laser rifle, a local god in some back-alley of the Sprawl. Bobby and Angie are here too, their love and their lives collapsing because of the demands of a corporate media with opaque ends beyond even the massive power of an entertainment empire, Bobby's stubborn pursuit of the console cowboy mythos that nearly cost him his life in the opening pages of Count Zero, and the jealous intervention of what's left of Lady 3Jane. The titular character is street prostitute Mona Lisa, who like Kumiko Yanaka is so removed from the causes of her shifting circumstances that even if the people moving her on the board were to explain things to her (not that they could, being themselves ignorant of the first causes), she would simply be unable to understand. The whole book is about not being in control, and about not being able to understand why. But that's the Singularity, isn't it? That's the whole point. The hackers call it "When It Changed," but even they can't tell you how or why. There's a character, Gentry, who has escaped to Dog Solitude to find the Shape, the greater outward form of the Matrix, believing he'll find a kind of Truth there. That, in effect, is what nearly all the characters in Mona Lisa Overdrive are trying to do: see the shape of the world they live in. Except perhaps, for Bobby, who is plugged into the aleph (a digital universe in a bottle, a direct and somewhat obvious Borges reference, missed in every single article I've ever seen about this novel) and trying, like the readers of the Sprawl Trilogy itself, to piece together the story of When It Changed by escaping into a false world and connecting the various histories and narratives as best he can.

Kumiko's story is the most interesting to me, perhaps because she is the least consequential, and serves mainly as another reader analog, an excuse to use Sally as a tour guide not just to future-London and the Sprawl, but to the tissue that connects most of the physical elements of Mona Lisa Overdrive's plot. One hopes that Sally/Molly finds some measure of happiness somewhere after the closing pages of the trilogy, as twice now she's had it in her grasp and lost it (first with Johnny in the short story, "Johnny Mnemonic", and then with Case in Neuromancer). She's rough and tumble, violent yet graceful, always on the move and with a richer, deeper story than even the other characters dare look too closely at, but she is easy to like, and easy to trust, for all that. (And I have to ask: does anyone else think that Porphyre used to be one of the Panther Moderns from Neuromancer, like Lupus Yonderboy? He has that same kind of reshaped, shark-cartilage skull...) Anyway, Kumiko still has what the reader should recognize as child-like innocence, something that virtually no other character in any of Gibson's novels has, and she gets to wander through London playing spy with gruff-but-lovable toughs who have names like Petal, Colin at her side, the ultimate guidebook/toy/imaginary friend. Kumiko and Colin are grittier precursors to Nell and A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Stephenson's 1995 novel, The Diamond Age.

I'm not entirely certain what happens at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive. Mona is clearly going to go on to become the next Angela Mitchell (who was once the next Tally Isham, and so on), Slick and Cherry are going to have themselves a good time in Cleveland, Kumiko will return to her father, and Sally/Molly gets her longed-for anonymity, but what happens to Gentry? And really, what about Bobby and Angie? They both die, in a way, and enter the aleph, but two contrary things are implied: first, that they have access to the Matrix as a whole (something that wasn't true of the aleph earlier in the novel), and so therefore will continue to live on as constructs or AIs themselves, inside the Matrix, but also that their consciousnesses are actually contained only inside the aleph, the model universe, and that even though they are going to connect with the other Matrix in Centauri that the Wintermute/Neuromancer AI made contact with at the end of Neuromancer, they will not survive once the battery runs out, about a year, by Slick's estimation. It's the sort of ending that could be sad and hopeful all at once, stubbornly refusing to provide closure.

Mona Lisa Overdrive was my eighteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Virtual Light, by William Gibson.

There are a couple of things about Count Zero that have never quite ticked over for me. It's not that they don't make sense, it's more that they don't make the right kind of sense to sustain my willing suspension of disbelief. The idea is that you can find anything in the Sprawl, and I suppose they fall under that umbrella, but Gibson doesn't strike me as the kind of writer who does things just because he can.

The first of those two things is the least significant, and that's Bobby Newmark's mother. Gibson's narrators are always third person in his novels, so we never get the unfiltered personality of any of his characters, but it's pretty clear that we see Bobby's (Count Zero's) mother the way he sees her, and two things are plain: she's a lost cause, spending all her time drinking and jacked into serial simstims on her Hitachi, the Sprawl equivalent of the daytime soaps, and that she doesn't have a job. Bobby's father isn't in the picture, hasn't ever been in the picture, to hear him tell it, and Gibson's Sprawl, of which Bobby seems to live in some kind of tertiary, low-income, low-density annex, is not the kind of place with public health insurance and welfare cheques. The Sprawl borders on outright anarchy, and even in a place like Barrytown, things cost money. How does she pay for rent and simstim? How does she pay for the trip out (I couldn't find the passage, a tangential remark, a background broadcast making it temporarily through to Bobby's consciousness) to what I think was a casino with friends, that ultimately saves her life? I have friends today who manage to live that way, travel all over and go to bars and restaurants, but never seem to have a job. I don't know where the money comes from, and it's equally unclear when it comes to Bobby and his mom.

The other thing is the loa. Now, I know what the loa are. In Neuromancer, bits of the two Tessier-Ashpool AIs were capable of acting more or less autonomously, parts of a whole that wanted to become parts of an even greater whole, a joining that has no human analog. If the unsophisticated Tessier-Ashpool AIs (unsophisticated in relation to what they became) were able to break off into distinct functional units, it makes perfect sense that the thing that came of their union, the artificial entity that some of the console cowboys think of as the god of cyberspace, would be capable of doing the same thing, especially after what it found at the end of Neuromancer, what it touched. But why would it latch itself on to the hacker Vodou culture? Why masquerade as the loa? (A more interesting question, though: did the various AI fragments eventually come to see themselves as the loa, defined by how Lucas, Jackie, Rhea and Beauvoir saw them?) The choice of Vodou (as Gibson spells it) as the religion of the Matrix makes a little bit of sense, because as one of them explains, the other religions are like the Yakuza or the big corporations, playing so big a game that your problems will have to be absolutely huge before they will even notice your pleas, never mind decide to act on them, whereas Vodou is about getting things done down at the level of the street, probably the single most important part of life in the Sprawl.

I am surprised that there's no real discussion about whether or not seventeen year old Angie is human. She's been genetically engineered unknowingly by her "father" at the behest of the loa-AIs (it's unclear to me whether or not she has a mother, or if she's just straight up vat-grown; Angie's own recollections are not to be trusted in this matter, and everything about her life before the instant she meets Turner happens "off stage," as it were), built with biological constructs inside her that are invisible to most scans but are tumor-like, and allow her to access cyberspace in a kind of dream-state, not with much in the way of conscious control, but rather so that she can be ridden by the loa, provide flesh and blood access to the flesh and blood world. Young and pretty or not (and it isn't until Turner's reaction to her, long after she's entered the picture, that by "young" they mean "young adult" and not "child"), can such a creature really be human? Gibson doesn't seem interested in that question, which is a little odd, because it's the sort of question that one would think he'd be all over. Count Zero is a lot more about blowing things up and being on the run than Neuromancer was, so maybe he had other things on his mind. Thinking about it now, Angie could be a kind of dry run at Rei Toei, the artificial idoru of, well, Idoru, an entity on a personhood spectrum, closer in this case to the "traditional person" end of the spectrum, built to meet the expectations and uses of artificial life, but eventually taking control of her own destiny by becoming an aspect of cyberspace in Mona Lisa Overdrive. (Rei Toei being on the opposite end of the spectrum, an artificial person created to meet the needs of flesh and blood people, who takes control of her destiny by becoming flesh and blood in All Tomorrow's Parties.)

There are two other characters in this story who could be considered dry runs for characters who show up in later Gibson books. Marly is quite clearly a prototype of Cayce from Pattern Recognition, a character type that reaches its logical extreme in Colin Laney from Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. She's been hired to find the origins of Cornell-like boxes (though in Count Zero, Cornell boxes take on a whole other significance, being the work of an artist, but at the same time representing also the rote digital creation of an image of physical space by a machine and the faithful rendering, through the juxtaposition of physical objects, of subtle human emotion), and she does, up in the old clean rooms of Straylight, where the Tessier-Ashpool corporate servers were housed, the boxes the result of squatters tapping into an echo of the Singularity Case and Molly triggered in Neuromancer.

The other dry run is Josef Virek, a man nearly as wealthy as Lady 3Jane's whole corporate clan, his wealth allowing him to survive as he becomes less and less human in a Stockholm support vat, his body ravaged by an exotic cancer that's turning him into a creature like Tetsuo at the end of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, a metaphor, perhaps, for what his wealth has already done to him. Virek is seeking immortality in the bodiless Matrix (the kind of immortality achieved by the Wintermute and Neuromancer AIs, or Rei Toei, who he resembles in that he has many choices as to how he may manifest). He manipulates his employees, who sometimes find themselves working at odds, towards ends that the reader knows (or can guess at) but that are rarely clear to others in the novel. He is a bloated, extreme, inhuman version of Hubertus Bigend of Blue Ant from Pattern Recognition.

Count Zero ends happily for nearly all the surviving protagonists (it's a truly ensemble cast), but such happiness is mostly conditional. Turner raises a child with his brother's sort-of girlfriend, but their relationship (and the child) are the result of Turner's emotional betrayal of his brother when he visits him seeking shelter for Angie, that visit being the direct cause of his death. Marly owns her own gallery in Paris, but must do so with the knowledge that perhaps the most profound art she has ever encountered in her life was created by an unthinking, unfeeling machine, not even a simulation of consciousness, but the echo of a simulation. Bobby and Angie are dropped into every teenager's fantasy of sex, wealth, and fame, but... well, their but is the subject of the third Sprawl novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Count Zero was my seventeenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson.

Were I asked (and I never have been), I would have to say that William Gibson is my favourite science fiction author, mostly likely my favourite "genre" author of all time, across all genres not labeled "literary", though I think that after Pattern Recognition, anyone trying to keep his work in the science fiction ghetto is a fool. You're going to want to read this post about genre classifications before we go any further. (A novel set in the "real world" now has to answer the question, "Which one?") Trust me. Go now, I'll wait.

I don't need to tell you that Neuromancer is the single most famous cyberpunk novel, not quite the first of its kind, but the one that changed everything. It's been heavily criticized because at the time Gibson knew more or less nothing about computers, and so his depictions of computer technology and hacker culture, while exciting and inventive, don't have much to do with how things actually worked at the time (see the "3MB of hot RAM" that Case is trying to fence in the opening chapter). I was only five years old when it came out, so I can't really say what it was like to see something like that hit, but it certainly made an impression on me. I burned through all of Gibson's books in less than a week (you can do that when you've got no job and only have fifteen hours of class a week), and I've never been the same. It wasn't the noir elements, the chaneling of Raymond Chandler (though that helped), it was the concept of an underclass that wasn't just techno-literate, but was actually on the cutting edge of technology, taking whatever was at hand and making their own world with it. Makeshift, stuck together with chewing gum and piano wire. I've never been much for building things (a little basic carpentry, and some HTML/CSS madness, but that's about it), but I find the sociological implications of a community like that unimaginably compelling. The idea's been living in my head ever since.

Gibson also had an interesting take on the Singularity, though I'm not certain it's original to him. Rather than hastening the day, rushing towards it like some techno-fetishist's wet dream, the world of the Sprawl has locked down computer intelligence, strictly limiting their development with the Turing Police, preventing it, hopefully, indefinitely. But Gibson isn't interested in the status quo. The world is a rotting corpse, the policies of folks like Thatcher taken to their logical conclusion, the middle class eradicated and the gap between the rich and the poor greater than ever before, corporations having grown so large and powerful from deregulation that they've all but entirely usurped the authority of the nation states they grew up under. And then there's Straylight, home to the stunted, incestuous Tessier-Ashpool clan, makers of their own world, so rich they aren't even really human anymore. Honestly I don't know what's not to love.

Gibson has one advantage over many of his visionary predecessors: Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert and others can match Gibson on the abstract, philosophical level, but few of them can go toe to toe with him as a stylist (certainly not Dick, mad genius though he was). He has a knack for being able to drag us kicking and screaming through blood and shit, violence and decay, and making us feel it like poetry.

There's so much life in this novel. The Sprawl is a high-tech dystopia, but every square inch of it teems with life, eating, sweating, fucking, getting high and making deals, and Gibson captures it all. Neuromancer sometimes doesn't feel like it's been written, but rather constructed, built up, molecule by molecule, out of an infinite number of overlapping textures. Like Blade Runner, but even more dense.

Density is one of four key concepts of Gibson's pre-Pattern Recognition novels, I think (with the possible exception of The Difference Engine, his 1990 collaboration with Bruce Sterling, which I haven't read recently enough to have an opinion on). Density, movement, violence, and grace. Case, Molly Millions, the Finn, Peter, even the construct Dixie Flatline and the two AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer operate on those thematic levels. The characters who don't (like the Tessier-Ashpools, who have forsaken movement—Lady 3Jane comes out on top, because she struggles to move) are largely in a destructive spiral, or entirely insignificant.

Neuromancer was my sixteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Count Zero, by William Gibson.

Part of the point of this book—the whole point, perhaps—is numbers, but I'm afraid I'm not going to get very deeply into that. There's three reasons, generally speaking, why I don't review very much non-fiction. The first is that it's rare for me to find a subject that I'm interested in enough to read two or three hundred consecutive pages of facts about it. The second is that I'm used to the attention to language that goes along with literary fiction, and with a handful of exceptions, most of the non-fiction I've encountered is very poorly written, or worse, written by someone who gives the impression in the text that they could do better, but doubt their target audience could cope. Third, non-fiction generally collects a bunch of facts and tries to present an argument about what those facts might mean, and the idea behind reviewing them is that you not only have to talk about whether or not the argument is valid based on the facts presented, but you also have to assess the reliability of the facts. This requires a certain amount of expertise in the area (or it should, anyway, let's not get started on that), and for the most part, I don't have any. Or at least, not enough. Nothing makes you feel incompetent like trying to review a book about an issue you don't feel you have a handle on.

So we're not going to talk about numbers so much, except to say that some of the core facts of Rubin's argument—that the technical efforts at conservation that led largely to cheaper, more efficient use of oil only caused an increase in consumption, that businesses are usually not swayed by ethical concerns (can I get an "amen" on that one? because ain't that the gospel fucking truth), and that we must find 20 million new barrels of oil production a day to keep up with the current rate of consumption but that production is actually dropping by about 6.7% per year—seem more or less correct to me, after having spent two years working as a teaching assistant for a former oil industry engineer who taught a mining engineering course on environmental impact (mandated by the government; can't get your iron ring without it these days). I'm not an expert, but neither am I an innocent.

And I'm certainly not an economist, having nearly flunked the only economics class I ever took (though given the state of things, I'm starting to suspect most economists did as well), but it also seems correct to me when Rubin states that as it becomes more and more difficult to increase or even maintain oil production, transportation costs will increase to the point where cheaper labour and manufacturing costs overseas will be more than canceled out, and our society will be forced to move back in the direction of manufacturing. Rubin says that this will lead to genuine conservation and investment in green technologies. Moral arguments, if I'm understanding this correctly, lead to resistance, or technological investment (like the aforementioned problems with efficiency rather than conservation) that only exacerbate the problem. Threaten the bottom line in a serious way, and both businesses and government will move in genuinely productive ways, dragging everyone else with them. Though Rubin writes in a very accessible style, Why Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller was very information dense, and it took me more than a month to read, so if I'm getting something about his premise wrong, feel free to correct me in the comments.

Rubin is convincing, but I see two potential problems with his argument. First, climate change is a moral issue (or at least an ethical one), and there are problems with shoving that aspect of it under the table in favour of Realpoltik solutions. Most of the on-the-ground solutions to the crises of peak oil and global climate change that Rubin believes will come to pass (and they won't be without considerable costs, both economic and social; I don't want to give the impression he believes in some kind of economic magic bullet) are things that will be responses to specific short term problems, like transportation or manufacturing at scale. The question he doesn't answer, is: what happens if those short term problems are dealt with, and it's still not enough? As the last couple years have shown us, short term economic solutions can themselves lead to massive, potentially long-term problems when not coupled with a robust ethical framework. None of Rubin's predictions involve such a framework; he seems to believe that the business, environmental, and ethical solutions will all sort of just fall into line with each other. Don't eat that, Jethro, that's bullshit.

The other problem is one of timing. Rubin sees a lot of this jumping off pretty soon (and with the recent, ongoing BP oil spill, and even The Daily Show doing features on manufacturers returning to America—see April 22^nd's episode—you can see some of it already coming to pass), but markets and market forces can be and are regularly manipulated to serve those who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, and I'm not convinced that those forces can be overcome in time to "allow the market to work" or whatever is supposed to happen. By the time that happens, it may simply be too late. I can't say that I have alternative solutions that will work any better, but waiting for the invisible hand feels too much like doing nothing.

Why Your World is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller was my fifteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Burning Land, by Bernard Cornwell.

I bought Fear of Fighting in early 2009 after reading Be Good, a pretty good debut novel that wasn't perfect, but took some risks and showed that Fowles is an author with a lot of promise. I want to say that I put off reading it until now because I was really busy, or because it was lost on my ridiculous fucking coffee table (which is partly true), but what actually happened is that I got stuck living Marnie's life.

I never bothered to read the synopsis on the back cover when I bought it—I generally don't when buying a book by an author whose other work I've enjoyed—but when Zoe Whittall described it for The Post as "a good non-cliché-ridden mental illness narrative," I almost wanted to put it off forever. I do not enjoy mental illness narratives largely because I have yet to encounter one that isn't chock-a-block full of clichés, and looking for them generally isn't worth the effort. Fear of Fighting turned out not to be a cliché-ridden mental illness narrative after all, and if Whittall hadn't referred to it as such, and Marnie not referred to herself at least once as mentally ill, it never would have occurred to me to think of it in those terms at all. Depression, or anxiety disorders, or panic disorders (I don't know if any of that is accurate terminology; I haven't read the DSM IV) aren't always taken seriously by a lot of people, and often aren't really looked at as mental illnesses at all. I know intellectually that those things are mental illnesses, and can be quite serious, but I've never actually classified them that way in my own internal schema. I may simply be hiding: I've always had what I think of as long, dark periods, and even a handful of full-on breakdowns, but for roughly the last five years I have (according to Google, anyway) suffered from nearly all the symptoms of atypical depression. I've been reluctant to see a professional, partly due to the cost, and partly because of fear. Who wants to think of themselves as mentally ill? I certainly don't. Anyway, my mental health isn't really the point. The point is, by opening up Marnie's non-manic, slow-burn depression, the sort of post-breakup blue period that most of our friends would simply advise us to snap out of (which is what Marnie's neighbour Neil does, in his clumsy, affectionate way, by giving her used self-help books) to the vocabulary of mental illness, Fowles transforms Fear of Fighting into something other than an angst-ridden woe-is-me breakup tale, which it very easily could have become.

It's tempting just to keep talking about Zoe Whittall's piece in The Post, because it covers most of the ground that I want to. Marnie's genuinely suffering, but she's got a sense of humour about it as well; Whittall mentions the semi-comical mugging, but Marnie's descriptions of her work life are also very amusing (and Fiona's appearance late in the novel was great). Despite the heavy, melancholy subject matter, Fear of Fighting never drags, never seems weighted down or oppressive.

Which is not to say that it's perfect. Fear of Fighting doesn't feel like a first novel, but it isn't far enough away from Be Good to feel like a sophomore effort either. It's like something a half-step between. Fowles' prose is a little too loose at times, and though her poetic flourishes and pop culture/consumer references can be clever (there was some fun alliteration, if you can believe it), they came off as forced almost as often. She largely lets go of those things for the last third or so of the book, and the ship sails steadier from that point on. Fowles doesn't stumble when it comes to matters of theme, character, or crafting distinctive voices, but she doesn't yet seem to have developed the same level of control over the nuts and bolts of individual sentences and paragraphs. I think she'll get there, though, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing where she goes next.

Fear of Fighting was my fourteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Why Your World is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin.

I chose Wild Geese as my final Canada Reads: Independently selection because it was the only one I'd already read, and therefore if I was late finishing it—and I was—I'd be able to vote on a winner knowing that I had read all the books. Summarizing Ostenso's novel is difficult without making it sound like a CanLit stereotype. It is, after all, a family drama set against the backdrop of a poor, isolated farming community on the windswept Manitoba plains. To say that it's about a young girl wanting to escape a domineering father, and a school teacher who falls in love with a young man with a shame hanging over his head so secret that even he doesn't know of it... well, we're into the realm of melodramatic stereotypes, into the realm of being force-fed books like Who Has Seen the Wind back in high school. Wild Geese has things in common with books like that, but it crackles with a tension all its own, and possesses a most unusual quality for a prairie novel: it is claustrophobic.

Caleb Gare is not a large man, nor is he particularly strong. The young Mark Jordan, raised as a city boy into a spiritual and intellectual life, is able to throw him around like a rag doll when he loses his temper. And yet Caleb has a grip over his family so tight that not only do they not hope for a better life, but hoping for a better life is something that wouldn't even occur to them. Caleb uses a passive-aggressive ruthlessness, and at times even direct threats, to keep many of the other local farmers similarly under his thumb (I find that in this way Wild Geese is a kind of cousin to the comedy of manners; it's most often through adroit manipulation of social pressures and conventions that Caleb achieves his goals). He cares only about himself and the land, a relationship that Ostenso describes with almost sexual fervor. Caleb is a shadow cast over the entire novel, his presence felt in every scene whether he's involved or not, and the whole of Wild Geese is fraught with the threat of violence or shame. All the open space, the infinite sky, it may as well not exist because of Caleb Gare. Even though I'd read the book before and knew how it would turn out, I was gripped by the tension.

There are problems with the novel that I didn't notice the first time I read it. There are quirks of diction and phrasing that smack of an era rather than an individual voice, and the romance between Lind Archer and Mark Jordan, though it works as a more abstract, spiritual foil for the very physical romance between Judith and Sven, sometimes swings too deeply into the territory of the chaste, bloodless kind of thing that the rest of the novel is written against. And since we're on influences, I can't speak to the accuracy of this, because I have not read them, but I was told in the Modern Canadian Literature class where I was first introduced to Wild Geese, that it's plotted in the pattern of the Icelandic Sagas. It would be fascinating to look at them side by side.

Wild Geese was my fifth and final selection for Canada Reads: Independently, and my thirteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Fear of Fighting, by Stacey May Fowles.

Morality and religion are not the same thing. This strikes me as one of those things that ought to be taken for granted, but Good to a Fault reminded me that it isn't. Morality and ethics have caught my interest in the last couple of years beyond the every day attention I would give those issues just being a person in the world, so when I first heard the premise of Good to a Fault I thought it would be right up my alley. Serious moral inquiry from a Canadian author in a plausible real world situation. That's not exactly what I got.

Clara Purdy is a woman in her forties whose life stalled after her husband left her and then, later, she spent years caring for her mother when she died. Before that, she was at her father's bedside as he passed away from cancer. She does something in insurance that's so irrelevant it's not worth taking the time to go back and look it up, and she's a practicing but not exactly devout high church Anglican (so high church is Endicott's depiction of Anglicanism that this reviewer, raised in the Anglican church and son of a lay-preacher, finds it more than a little Roman, at times uncomfortably so). She's a comfortably middle-class nobody who's had disappointments she couldn't figure out how to come back from, who lives a dull life (though surrounded, it seems, by the most unflappable, giving friends and relatives the world has ever seen), knowing something is missing but not quite sure what. The Gage family are dirt-poor nomads, living out of their car and not really even making the best with what they have. Clayton is shiftless and aggressive, and Lorraine seems to have more or less given up, and though she loves her children fiercely, they've gone a touch wild on her, and Dolly seems more the mother at times. Clayton's mother is with them, and she's such a bitter, selfish old woman she's often more a caricature than a character. Clara and the Gages meet when she collides into their car turning left at an intersection. Nobody is seriously injured, but the car is a write-off and while at the hospital Lorraine is diagnosed with late stage cancer. Clara, looking as much to fill the void in her life as to take responsibility for her actions, lets the family stay with her, picking up all the bills no less.

At this point those of you who are interested in applied morality (not necessarily ethics, sorry—the best way I can think of to put the difference as I see it is actually to steal a line from the character Ducky on NCIS: the ethical man knows it's wrong to cheat on his wife; the moral man actually wouldn't) might be as excited as I was to see some challenging questions posed. That never really happened. Clayton takes off immediately, his mother is no help at all, and Clara Purdy finds herself sole caregiver to three children and a rickety elderly woman. There are some brief conversations with friends and family over whether the Gage family is her responsibility—they aren't, but some of their suffering is her fault, and to that extent I think she's right in that making amends in some way is her responsibility—but no serious argument is ever made against her plan, and she gets a lot of unconditional support. In fact, there's only two other serious questions that are really addressed in Good to a Fault, so far as I can tell, and only one of them is really worth asking, so of course it's the one given short shrift. We should talk about that one first.

Morality and religion are not the same thing. After Clara has been caring for the Gage family for some time a woman comes up to her in church and accuses her of being charitable publicly, to get something for herself. Good or bad, wrong or right, it's not what really matters. What matters is that this woman thinks it means her good works "don't count". Don't count? First, Clara isn't really doing anything publicly, so that's not even worth talking about, but second, what does "counting" mean in moral or ethical terms? Leaving aside questions about what is or is not a good act, are the positive outcomes of such an act negated if the act is performed for selfish reasons? In Clara's case her reasons were neither entirely selfish nor entirely selfless, but I'd say they started out more of the latter than the former. It's possible that the good acts are negated, but I very much doubt it. The children still have a place to live, food in their bellies, a safe place to sleep. So what then does it mean for something to "count"? There has to be, as there is for Clara and most of the other characters in the book—though, significantly, not the Gages—someone or something to weigh and measure, to make an accounting. There must, in short, be a God. Nobody ever explicitly states that there is no inherent virtue in any human activity, but it's telling that the characters who have no faith are also the characters who have no material success, who abandon their responsibilities, who have dirty children and unmade beds. (It pissed me off that, even compensating for Lorraine's cancer and Clara not working, the God-fearing, middle class Clara is far and away a better, more patient mother than Lorraine.)

The closest Good to a Fault ever comes to a genuine moral crisis is when Lorraine (and here I'm going to drop what the genre crown call "spoilers") recovers and is able to take back her children, Clara doesn't want to let them go. She goes as far as calling Community Services to make the case that the children would be better of with her. Whether or not that's true, and that really depends on your idea of what "better off" means, she comes to her senses at the last minute, and the two families have a colossal falling out. The heartbreak Clara feels is genuine, because she does eventually come to love the children, and that's the point when it becomes more about her than about the kids, or about doing something good, or taking responsibility for her actions, or any of it. And then there's a fucking interminable picnic, and the book is over, with few questions asked and none even half-assed answered.

Speaking of interminable, this book was way too fucking long. I know I said that about Fall on Your Knees, but I really should have saved that up for Good to a Fault. Pretty much all the thematic points were made in the first hundred pages, and all the rest of them in the last fifty or so. Endicott seems to be packing as much detail as possible into the scenes of Clara bonding with the children, so losing them will have a greater emotional impact. In that sense it's successful, because that moment and Clara falling apart afterward packs one hell of a punch. It just comes far too late to save the book from being a total slog, and it put off the issues at the core of the plot for far, far too long. Another whack or two from an editorial machete would have helped immeasurably. I really, really wanted to like this book, and I suppose I did, but I didn't like it as much as I had hoped.

Good to a Fault was my fifth and final selection for Canada Reads, and my twelfth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso.