The end of the year is almost upon us, and I find myself fifteen (yes, fifteen) reviews behind schedule here at ye olde blog, and with two freelance projects on the go for the holidays, it looks like I won't be getting caught up until the new year. So instead, here are the books that really stood out for me this year. The list is not in any particular order.

The Waterproof Bible, by Andrew Kaufman
Clever, light in tone, and yet broad in its emotional appeal, I had more fun with The Waterproof Bible than with any other title this year. I'm definitely going to track down All My Friends Are Superheroes. It was so short that I lingered longer than perhaps I should have, not wanting to let go. Always a good sign. I've got a review of this in the works for the blog.

Cities of Refuge, by Michael Helm
This one was almost a given for me, as Helm's sophomore novel, In the Place of Last Things is my favourite Canadian novel of all time. Despite the brutal sexual assault at the centre of the novel, Cities of Refuge manages to be a more cerebral, and more subtle, book than his first two. It works for Helm here, but I hope it's not indicative of a shift in his overall approach, as his ability to balance intellect and the rough-and-tumble of overt physicality is a large part of what makes The Projectionist and In the Place of Last Things so incredibly strong. Also, while there's nothing particularly flashy, it felt to me like Cities of Refuge had more invested in its language than nearly everything else I read this year, rarely dipping into Canadian Lyricism, nor confusing flat-eared informality with an individual voice. I'll be reviewing this here hopefully right after new year's.

Zero History, by William Gibson
I actually did review this one, in Quill & Quire, but you'll have to go here to find it. After the slowness of Spook Country, Gibson was back at his best here, both in terms of the techno-thriller genre, and his ideas.

Girl Crazy, by Russell Smith
This caused a lot of controversy, and I don't really want to get much into it until I can write a full review in the new year, but I will say this: Smith has addressed in a very direct way, without necessarily condoning them, some aspects of male sexuality that are extremely difficult to discuss openly and honestly.

Bedtime Story, by Robert J. Wiersema
This is another one that I reviewed for Quill & Quire, so if you want my full take, mosey on over. But I will say that Wiersema reminds me a lot of Stephen King (in a good way).

Sarah Court, by Craig Davidson
You can read my full Quill & Quire review here, but one thing not mentioned in that review was that I found Sarah Court so intense that I literally lost sleep over it. Highly recommended.

It's a very straight white male list, isn't it? That wasn't really on purpose, and there's some part of me inside that makes me think I should apologize for something, but in the end I don't really give a damn about that sort of thing. Even though I read more new books this year than I have in a long, long time, I still didn't read very many, and these were the ones I liked best. Period.

Had I been able to finish it, I'm sure that Bragi Ólafsson's The Ambassador would have made the list. I'm about halfway in, and I'm loving every word, but I don't feel right including a book I haven't finished reading. Likewise Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be?, which I have been looking forward to for ages.

Honourable mentions for books I read this year, but were not published this year, or at least not first published this year, go out to Amy Jones' What Boys Like (review pending), Stacey May Fowles' Fear of Fighting (full review), Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski (full review), and of course Ray Smith's Century (full review).

I know I'm jumping the queue a bit—my next review was supposed to be of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, and I'm already a dozen books behind—but I just finished this book tonight, and I really need to get this one out right away. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a fan of cyberpunk fiction, as evidenced by my recent rereading of William Gibson's work. I've also enjoyed every ECW book I've ever read, right back to Yashin Blake's Nowhere Fast, which I reviewed for The Globe and Mail in the summer of 2004. When I heard that ECW was going to be publishing science fiction and fantasy novels, starting with a cyberpunk novel, I knew I had to check it out. I asked for an ARC (an uncorrected proof, or advance review copy, for those not in the biz), and they sent one along. Given all that, I almost feel bad about what I'm about to say, but I agree with blogger Martin Lewis, that fantasy and science fiction reviewers must raise their game.

This is the worst book I've ever read. Ever.

Unfortunately that's not hyperbole. There are so many problems with this book it's difficult to know where to begin. The plot is incredibly busy. There are clones, and something called "v-space", which is a kind of virtual reality construct accessed via surgically implanted computer parts, similar to those found in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. There are mega-corporations that are in conflict with governments, travel to off-world colonies via wormholes, and an alien blood from another plane of existence that grants humans immortality when they dissolve a sample under their tongues, via a virus tailored to each individual's DNA. And all of it in 258 pages. It's just far, far too much. I know the rule taught in every creative writing class on earth is "show, don't tell," but Stanton doesn't take nearly enough time for even basic exposition, and so there are concepts and plot points, important ones, that come and go so quickly that they make no sense at all. There's a massive power struggle going on, for example, between a non-profit group called the Eternal Research Institute (which is also a kind of government unto itself, possessing its own police force, among other things), the various mega-corporations and governments that fund it, and the amorphous, poorly-defined governmental/corporate body that rules the Cromeus colonies on the other side of a wormhole called the Macpherson Gate. Now the plot is stupidly complex without that power struggle, but somehow, somehow, it also hinges on that conflict in a way that I can't quite make sense of. Unfortunately nothing, not a goddamn thing, about who the powers other than the ERI actually are, or what they hope to achieve, is ever adequately explained. It's all just hinted at with a bunch of knowing glances, nods, winks, and dialogue that's got a dramatic tone but is functionally meaningless. In fact, nearly every single aspect of the plot is dealt with in exactly the same way. One or two of these plot elements could be taken in hand, stripped down, cleaned up, and salvaged, turned into something meaningful and coherent, but that is perhaps the best thing I can say of the plot, or indeed the book as a whole.

Reconciliation, which is apparently the first book in a whole series, is virtually impossible to follow when Stanton tries to inject any action, tension, or conflict. The quieter moments are easy to follow, but they are dull and cliché-ridden set-pieces, often seeming to have no real purpose other than to slow things down, or to reiterate ad nauseam how the protagonists are "the best" at whatever it is they do, or how they trust no one, or to display intensely juvenile relationships with members of the opposite sex (actually, the representations of intimacy and sexuality in Reconciliation can be downright creepy, as Rix, the 20-something-but-acts-like-a-fourteen-year-old son of Mia and Zakariah, actually has sex with a clone of his aunt). The pacing winds up being schizophrenic at best.

For a novel that relies so heavily on high technology, computer network technology in particular, and its integration into society, Stanton knows shockingly little about it. Even less than Gibson did when he wrote Neuromancer back in the early '80s, and that was almost nothing. Almost every reader of science fiction is willing to accept a little of what Charlie Stross calls "handwavium," the one or two impossible things that the author will wave their hands over and pretend are possible just to keep the plot coherent or, more often, prevent nitpicking from undermining thematic structures or philosophical/social metaphors. As long as we don't feel like we're being fed pages and pages of bullshit because the author just doesn't know any better, we're generally okay with it. Stanton just doesn't know any better. He argues in favour of "v-space" because webcams are too bandwidth intensive (apparently not realizing that the bandwidth required for even a small persistent virtual world that is accessed regularly by millions is astronomical compared to webcam feeds, never mind one on the scale of "v-space"). He attributes rendering errors within the virtual environment to "feedback," a word that is utterly meaningless in such a context, and suggests that viruses are spread and file systems corrupted when users come into contact with each others' "energy" in virtual space, which is such astonishing horseshit it's not even worth explaining why it's wrong. In this regard Reconciliation is not just ignorant, it is sometimes offensively so, especially since Stanton is writing for an audience that will almost certainly know better. An hour on Wikipedia probably could have given Stanton enough solid research material to present a more plausible explanation for his "v-space," and the mechanics thereof.

I'd like to discuss language for a moment. Most of us know, almost instinctively, that we choose what words to use based on how they operate on two levels: the denotative, and the connotative. The denotative level is the simple one; it's all about the literal meanings of words. The words "beautiful," "gorgeous," and "hot," when used in the context of, say, describing a young woman, all mean roughly the same thing; looking at her gives the speaker pleasure. However the connotations of those words are all dramatically different. "Beautiful" and "gorgeous" are both fairly formal, and "beautiful" can often be linked to filial affection (so I can tell my cousin, on her wedding day, that she looks "beautiful," and it will be an appropriate compliment), while "hot" is informal and explicitly sexual, and potentially also carries overtones of objectification. Words have social and emotional baggage they drag around with them, which is why choosing the correct word is so damned important in fiction (and even more important in poetry). Part of what makes writing an art is making effective, and sometimes surprising or provocative use of words on both levels. I've even heard of poets who rhyme the meanings of words (both denotative and connotative) rather than their sounds. Pretty awesome, right? Yeah, Stanton doesn't get it. The sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word writing in Reconciliation is atrocious at best, displaying, as Martin Lewis has said about another writer, "[s]tunning incompetence at all aspects of writing." It is just a mess. There were times, when reading this book, that I felt pity for the copy editor and embarrassed for the author. Stanton seems completely oblivious to the idea that words operate on a connotative level as well as the denotative, and as a result he is constantly using words that, based on the context, imply things he clearly doesn't mean. There are whole sentences rendered meaningless by his wildly inappropriate diction (one of my favourites was when he used "regalia," which carries with it associations of hyper-formality and ostentation, when he was un-ironically referring to low-paid technicians in grubby jumpsuit-style uniforms). Stanton also frequently uses words whose denotative meaning is wrong for what he's trying to say, like someone who has heard a word but only sort of knows what it means, yet continues to use it regularly (like, to choose one of the least glaring examples, his use of "monogram" when he actually meant "logo," or even "wordmark," a wordmark being a standardized typographical representation of a company name, a kind of logo subtype, while "monogram" refers specifically to the stylized representation of an individual person's initials). Stanton seems stuck in the trap of "the elegant variation." Mark Sarvas writes an excellent blog that goes by that name, and I'm going to steal his definition:

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler's (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer's overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn't permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

I could probably find a half-dozen examples of "the elegant variation" (or one of the other diction problems I mentioned above) on every single page. Every. Single. Page. But that doesn't stop Stanton from repeating certain words to an absurd degree (I think he officially used up his lifetime allotments of the words "grace," "graceful," and "gracefully" by page 150, as apparently his characters are only capable of moving "gracefully" or "with grace" or, on special occasions, "with ease" or even "with graceful ease"). Stanton also uses far, far too many adjectives and adverbs. If you were to cut out the unnecessary ones, and I mean only the unnecessary ones, I bet you could shave almost a hundred pages from the book. I'm not even a little bit kidding. I would quote some representative passages, but as I'm reviewing this book from an ARC (which means there's still some minor typographical errors and such) that wouldn't be entirely fair, and there's also a legal warning on the back cover telling me not to.

Finally, there is simply too much Jesus in this book. That's probably the wrong way to put it, but there it is. Stanton obviously has religious leanings (he's apparently regularly published in periodicals such as ChristianWeek and Christian Communicator), which in itself is not an issue worth mentioning. There's any number of religious writers whom I respect, and whose work I enjoy, and their religious beliefs are entirely irrelevant to me. What makes it a problem here is that the world of Stanton's novel seems to embody a kind of Sunday school theology. The world of Reconciliation is almost exclusively one of thieves, assassins, politicians and fixers, yet the strongest language I can find in the book are the words "bum" and "butt." Nobody ever lies, or says anything insincere, and despite regular statements to the contrary, everybody trusts almost everybody else. There are references to drinking and drugs (though not, if I'm remembering correctly, illegal drugs), but I don't recall anyone actually using those things. Christian metaphors and symbols are everywhere, and they are painfully obvious, though I think Stanton was actually trying to be subtle. Religion is almost never mentioned, but everyone seems to think in specifically Christian spiritual terms, but without any of Christianity's rich history of exegesis and philosophical inquiry. In fact, at the end of the book, one of the characters achieves immortality (as in, she has the alien virus in her system) through an act of faith—after seeing someone sacrifice themselves—that is a pretty explicit, if clumsy, allegory of Christian salvation. This religious influence is unfortunate, because it doesn't serve the story; the story serves it, and the book, which is weak in so many other ways, is weakened even further as a result.

I was really looking forward to seeing what ECW would offer as their first science fiction title, since I really respect their publishing program, but Reconciliation was disappointing in the extreme. I cannot fathom how (as the author bio tells me) Stanton's work has managed to be published in so many venues in so many countries, and translated into so many languages. Canada needs good publishers to take genre work seriously, but Reconciliation was a project more deserving of a vanity press, and ECW will need to do much, much better than this if their science fiction and fantasy line is going to succeed.

The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation was my first selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (I promise).

This is just a quick note to let you know that my review of Globe and Mail columnist Micah Toub's memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks, appears in the October issue of Quill & Quire (print only), available on newsstands now.

I thought I'd bring a couple great interviews with William Gibson to your attention. The first is from the Vice blog, and the second (and better) one is in Wired.

While I'm at it, I should let you know that my review of his latest novel, Zero History, appeared in the September issue of Quill & Quire (print only), which should still be available on select newsstands throughout the country.

When I told Adam Greenfield on Twitter that I had never read any Ballard, but that I had Concrete Island lined up to get my feet wet, his advice was "Go thou back and acquire Crash," so I could get the "distilled" Ballard effect. Crash won't be an option for probably another month or more (and I absolutely loathed the Cronengberg film, so despite Adam's insistence that the film is "immaterial," I'm still reluctant). Concrete Island will have to do for now. And besides, it's a fascinating premise.

The premise is this: Richard Maitland, an adulterous middle-class asshole (yeah, I have no class prejudices at all, do I?) is distracted on his drive home from a rendezvous with his mistress and hits a concrete barrier near an expressway ramp. He goes off the road and onto a large traffic island, where his wrecked Jaguar is hidden from the cars driving past. Maitland doesn't make it out of the crash in one piece; his leg is injured, and when he finally comes to, he gets hit by another car while trying to flag down some help. After that he's too weak and too badly injured to climb back out, trapped in a quasi-urban no-man's land for days.

I'd heard that many gritty, contemporary science fiction authors were heavily influenced by Ballard, and I can definitely see it here. The texture, the level of detail is clearly echoed in William Gibson's work, for example, but so is the attention to social codes, things like brand names, vocabulary, clothing. Concrete Island isn't one of Ballard's science fiction novels, but it shows many of the same concerns as a lot of science fiction, especially if you think of science fiction as a narrative strategy rather than simply a genre.

Maitland isn't alone on the island, but he's there for several days before he realizes it, suffering from fever, starvation, dehydration, and a variety of other difficulties related to the crash. He tries in vain to signal to passing motorists, at one point even lighting his car on fire to create smoke, all to no avail. He begins to see things, or to imagine that he sees things, the island becoming a reflection of his inner self. And it ain't pretty. It's interesting—and more than a little disturbing—to watch as he abandons ethics entirely and uses his superior ability to read and manipulate social codes to dominate (in part, by making false appeals to their moral sensibilities) the "native islanders." Perhaps most disturbing is that, though never a particularly moral or ethical man (he was an adulterer, after all), at the end of the novel, Maitland doesn't even to return to that original state. It's difficult not to think of him as a psychopath or a sociopath, and it's frightening to imagine what he will do once he returns to society.

Next up is Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson.

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.