Comments on: Reviewlet: Spook Country by William Gibson

By: FraidOfTheDark (was: Gadget)

FraidOfTheDark (was: Gadget) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:47:22 +0000

I can also recommend Pattern Recognition. It’s a fairly short book – but my word is it hard work!

Gibson is a master of packing a lot of very rich description into a very small space. Reading PR was a bit like chewing a really chewy steak, but with my eyes.

By: Ysharros

Ysharros — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:02:17 +0000

The protagonist is actually more of a … pattern recogniser (hence title among other things) — what’s trendy, what will be, stuff like that. Used by advertising but not *of* advertising. The tone reminded me a fair bit of Idoru, if that helps.

By: Zoso

Zoso — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:25:17 +0000

Splendid, I’ll definitely pick up Pattern Recognition; the whole “sounds like advertising” objection is an entirely illogical instinctive thing, probably listening to too much Bill Hicks at the time or something…

By: Ysharros

Ysharros — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:25:55 +0000

Pattern Recognition is great! One of his best in my book (pardon the pun), and it’s only very indirectly about advertising. I read the Neuromancer trilogy when it came out and was, at the time, blown away, though I’m not surprised that they probably seem a little weird now.

Will pick up Spook Country soonest.