This is the third in a trilogy of historical fiction I’ve been reading. And by “trilogy” I mean “three historical fiction books I borrowed at the same time from the library but otherwise they have no relation to each other, and one is The Serpent of Venice so techically it’s not historical fiction, just madness”. It hasn’t been the most satisfying experience. The slightly ahistorical The Serpent of Venice was definitely the best of the lot. The Miniaturist was disappointing. The Paying Guests is … maybe at another time I would have liked it more, because it isn’t bad, but I couldn’t get into it this time.

Let me start with some praise: I loved the opening of the book, in which Sarah Waters establishes the setting of a post-war London still incredibly uncertain about its shifting mores and class structure. The Paying Guests is contemporaneous with The Great Gatsy and demonstrates the differences in atmosphere between New York of 1922 and London of 1922. The First World War, in addition to its horrific death toll, shattered notions of class boundaries in England. Frances Wray and her mother were “well off”, but the combination of Frances’ father’s death and debts along with their servants leaving for better work during the War means they have to take lodgers to get by.

Waters reminds us that this is not our time. They have an outdoor WC instead of an indoor flush toilet (ewwww). Water, gas, electricity prices are quite high, so these things we view as utilities are more luxuries. Frances is constantly cleaning, scrubbing, and cooking, allowing herself little time. Compare this to how I waste most of my free time watching videos on the Internet … well, things were a lot different back then. I like how Mrs. Wray occasionally criticizes the changing times by harkening back to the good ol’ days of Victorian morals and mores. Waters manages to communicate the contemporary unease and even distaste over the broad and dramatic social shift without becoming too judgemental.

This last is crucial to the characterization of Frances and Lilian Barber and their relationship. This isn’t just a story of a forbidden love affair. The obstacles that Frances and Lilian would have to overcome to be free and together are nearly insurmountable compared to a man leaving his wife for another woman. It’s not just the practicalities of such a separation or the overt disapproval some people profess for homosexuality. There’s an entire cultural apparatus in place in which people (and especially women) are pressured to remain in unhealthy relationships (read: marriages) to preserve social cohesion. That apparatus still exists today, but the march of individualism and civil rights has altered it.

So there’s something to be said that Frances and Lilian were even considering running away together. But then there are complications, of course. I foresaw the affair, but I didn’t anticipate the brutal way in which Waters introduces more conflict by killing off Len. Suddenly The Paying Guests shifts from a heartbreaking romance to a much darker story of guilt and recrimination.

Unfortunately, the more Waters explores the depths of Lilian and Frances’ commitment to each other and the secret of Len’s death, the less convinced I was of their relationship. It’s not the relationship itself I take issue with so much as the interaction between Lilian and Frances. Waters doesn’t manage to make me believe that there is any more to their attraction than the fact that both are unhappy in their current situations. And maybe that is the case—maybe that’s exactly what is happening. But then why do they manage to conspire so successfully to hide the truth behind Len’s death?

My other complaint is that Len’s death overshadows all that comes before. Until that point, there was a certain amount of tension merely in watching Frances and Lilian navigate the uncertainty of their romance. Would Frances’ mother find out? How is this going to affect the Barbers’ status as lodgers? This might not be a fair complaint, but that’s why book reviews are subjective!

I guess my problem with The Paying Guests isn’t that it’s a bad book. It jut didn’t follow the path my brain told me it should. Sometimes that’s a good thing and results in an impressive, original experience. Sometimes, as in this case, it makes the book harder to enjoy. As a story, this works fine. But it’s not the story I hoped to get from this. That’s not Waters’ fault, but it means I can’t necessarily be enthusiastic about this book.

As far as historical fiction goes, this is definitely better than The Miniaturist and certainly more accurate than The Serpent of Venice. It’s not the book of the three I enjoyed the most, but enjoyment does not always correspond directly to appreciation. I respect what Waters has created here, even if it isn’t exactly what I was looking for.

So … I don’t think I’d go as far as The New York Times Book Review does in praising this book. According to the blurb on the back of my edition, “it invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation, in a way that few novels do”. Umm … yeah. Sure. Someone has been critiquing literature a little too long. But the blurb is right about one thing: Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is both extraordinary and transcendent.

Samuel R. Delany is an interesting author for someone like me to try reading. So much of his writing is grounded in the cultural revolutions of the twentieth century, from the civil liberties movement to the sexual revolution to demarchist and anarchist alternatives to the democratic/communist stalemate of the Cold War. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is only thirty years old, but in some ways it feels like it’s from an era much further away in time. My experience is so different from Delany’s, as a result of where and when I grew up (not to mention the colour of my skin). Sometimes it’s not a matter of books not aging well so much as the semiotics of a book changing as the context in which it’s read changes. (I wonder if this is an aspect of reader-response theory?)

But oh, look at me getting all literary critic now.

Basically, if you have read Delany before, you will recognize him here: very little exposition, and what exposition there is exists entirely within the context of the story. That is to say, the narrator—Marq Dyeth—talks to you as if you are a fellow traveller in this universe and not a human from Old Old Old Earth (or whatever) cast adrift in this strange far future. As with Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (in the review of which I see I also mention reader-response theory, so hey, at least I’m consistent), Delany creates a society so different from our own that it’s nearly unrecognizable. Simple nouns like “hunting”, “dinner”, “room”, and “family” seem to mean the same thing but don’t. Marq inhabits a universe where it is necessary to acknowledge that one cannot possibly know all there is to know about one’s own world, let alone the entire span of human civilizations across the galaxy. It is a staggering, humbling concept.

The way in which Delany uses language to establish difference and a sense of the Other is, as always, paramount. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice rightly raked in the praise and recognition last year. One attribute consistently remarked upon is the way in which Leckie chooses to use feminine pronouns, she and her, to refer to all people regardless of their actual sex/gender. While I’m not trying to belittle Leckie’s approach to presenting gender, it’s important to note that Delany did it thirty years before her. Perhaps the most significant language difference in this book is that all humans (and other sentients, like evelm) are women, even if they are male (or neuter). Masculine pronouns only exist either as archaic references or to be used when referring to an object of sexual desire. Is there a serious point here? Sure. Is Delany doing this to fuck with our heads? Yes, definitely. Every time you read the word “her” you automatically conceptualize the person as being female, except that a few sentences later, Delany might toss in a bit of physical description indicating the person is actually male. Oops. The shift in pronouns is an important part of the larger change Delany demonstrates, a society in which gender still exists but is largely insignificant. People exhibit whatever sexuality makes them comfortable; people reproduce through a variety of ways—“old-fashioned”, cloning, whatever works. Marq spends entire chapters walking around and doing stuff completely nude. There’s a lot of difference here, and the more closely you pay attention and read how Delany actually describes things (like the use of a subscript 1 and 2 to denote different connotations for words like job and work) the more difference you will perceive.

Delany exemplifies science fiction’s powers of possibility. A great deal of science fiction imagines a world much like ours with just a small difference. And that’s fine for the stories that those authors want to tell. But science fiction can be such a powerful tool in the hands of a grandmaster like Delany. Who cares how we could get from our current society to the one he depicts here? That’s not his problem to solve. What he’s concerned with is exploring how that society would function and how it affects Marq Dyeth and Rat Korga. He dares to dream different, and the result is a story that takes place on a vast interstellar canvas.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is primarily a story about attraction and desire. Marq and Korga are supposed to be each other’s “perfect erotic objects”. Delany is careful to differentiate between sexual desire and love here. So most of the story is about establishing how Marq and Korga come from such different places, which then gives us a context for understanding their strange meeting on Marq’s homeworld. This takes up relatively little of the novel compared to what came before, but it’s all about Delany preparing us for the meeting. It has been a while since I’ve read a novel so relentlessly character-driven … Daniel Deronda comes close, but even that, I think, was more linked to a plot than this one.

Still, there is an ongoing story arc that affects the wider universe. The mysterious Xlv appear to be responsible for destroying Korga’s home planet. The Web knows more than it’s saying. And why have the Thants really changed allegiance from the Sygn to the Family? I guess I’ll have to read the sequel to find out.

Can a thriller also anaesthetize? Spook Country tries to find out. It has all the trappings of a modern espionage story, with quasi—government agents and a mysterious shipping container being tracked by a paranoid GPS geohacker. Yet William Gibson seems strangely reticent to let the story or the characters off their leash and venture boundlessly into this world. Instead, he escorts the reader on a meandering tour of a possible present (or near-future) which ponders how recent technological innovations are changing the way people behind the scenes do their dirty business.

It’s all there in the title, though I didn’t really see that until about halfway through reading the book. Spook Country exists largely in the liminal spaces of law enforcement and business. The affiliations of the people interested in obtaining or tracking the MacGuffin shipping container are vague—and in some ways largely unimportant—but at no point does it seem that any actual law enforcement gets involved. Rather, we have freelancers and mercenaries working for people we never get to meet. And off to one side there is the mysterious Hubertus Bigend, familiar to readers of Pattern Recognition, who expertly manipulates Hollis Henry into being in the right place at the right time to observe the container’s arrival in Vancouver.

The curious thing about Spook Country is how little happens in the first two acts. Hollis is a musician-turned-journalist working her first freelance job for Bigend’s new Node magazine. She’s writing an article about locative art, which in turn leads her to Bobby Ferguson and the mystery of the shipping container and her fateful meetings with Bigend. Gibson keeps the particulars about this container’s origins and journey so vague, however, that it’s impossible for the reader to have a clear idea of the stakes. Does it have a bomb? Are people going to die if it ever reaches its intended destination?

For a long time, the parallel narratives of Tito the “illegal facilitator” and Milgrim/Brown, who surveille him, don’t seem to connect with Hollis in any way. And I can respect Gibson for doing it this way, because when everyone converges on Vancouver, the tension starts racheting up very quickly. Nevertheless, it means that for the better part of the book, there is very little in the way of suspense or intrigue for Hollis. She spends most of her time in transit or having unfulfilling conversations with Bigend, Odile, and Inchmale.

There’s some interesting commentary in the characters themselves. Hollis and Inchmale are formerly of The Curfew, some kind of alternative rock band that broke up in the 1990s during the crisis preceding the digital era of music distribution. They got out of “the game” and Inchmale has become a father and started a music production career while Hollis pursues journalism. This reinvention of oneself mirrors Spook Country’s premise that espionage and underhanded dealing is evolving in strange ways following the advent of GPS tracking and the Internet. The eponymous “spook” is no longer the strangely-accented person in shades and a trenchcoat, sitting on a park bench waiting for a dead drop.

As always, Gibson’s eloquent expression of the tension between modernist and postmodernist ideas about technology is on display here. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country both seem to fixate on the technological failure modes of capitalism as it suffocates beneath the weight of its own corruption. As governments and corporations continue to play dangerous shell games with their capital, the technology used to manage such power plays becomes more complicated and more essential. And what I like about Spook Country as opposed to, say, Neuromancer, is that the technology featured here already exists, and in most cases it is already being put to the uses described herein. Media like books and movies are very good at creating fictional versions of our past, and they are also very good at creating possible visions of the future. It is difficult, however, to accurately capture the mechanisms of the present, as strange as that might sound. It’s difficult, particulalry at this moment in time, because we have trouble understanding the magnitude of the connected world we inhabit. We live in a world where killer robots are a thing now—they aren’t science fiction but science fact. I know this, and it still seems strange and bizarre to me. (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

Perhaps, then, that’s the reason for the meditative quality of Spook Country: Gibson is attempting to put the reader in the “now” by forcing them to focus on the setting to the exclusion of character and plot. If so, it’s an interesting gamble that doesn’t necessarily pay off. I did like the ending. But I didn’t connect to Hollis the way I did with Cayce, and I never felt like she was in much danger, even when she fell in with the most dangerous characters. Although there are a few highlights, moments of gorgeous presence, for the most part Spook Country doesn’t showcase Gibson’s brilliance like some of his other works. Still worth a read, but not as special.

After reading Neuromancer I took a short detour into some of Gibson’s other works of fiction, and then I read Virtual Light. With Pattern Recognition I seem to have established a trend of reading his three trilogies in a breadth-first rather than depth-first mode: having completed all of the first books, I will now read all three second books, etc. This might be an unusual way to go about it, but I hope it offers some insights and connections that might not make themselves apparent were I to read all of, say, the Sprawl trilogy first before moving on to Bridge and Bigend.

William Gibson is a much-celebrated author of science fiction. There’s just something about the way he writes that elevates his stories above simpler, more reliable forms of science fictional stories. He has this almost childlike fascination with technology and where it is taking us now, here in the present, not fifty or a hundred or a hundred thousand years in the future. (I love the far-future posthumanist authors; I really do, but there is a certain amount of discontinuity between their depictions and what we see today.) I want to call it prescience, but that is definitely not the right term to use: there is nothing about Neuromancer that is prescient so much as influential. I follow him on Twitter, and he is always posting and retweeting links to the strangest stories of technological innovation, changes to the way corporations manipulate media to advertise, etc. I feel like Gibson gets it, whatever “it” means—that crucial comprehension and vision of how technology is changing what we are as a species.

Once again someone is trying to film Neuromancer, and I wish them the best of luck—this is no doubt a tricky project, although I would love to finally see it as a movie. Neuromancer is an excellent novel, both in general and for its role it played in inspiring cyberpunk. My review is somewhat pretentious, especially toward the end, but I still agree with most of its sentiment. As much as I love William Gibson as a writer, something has held me back from ever giving one of his books five stars.

Until now.

So what changed? One sentence, one phrase, talking about Cayce’s unusual sensitivity to logos and branding, has become the symbol for why I think Pattern Recognition is worth five stars. Here’s the paragraph for context:

The national symbols of her homeland don’t trigger her, or so far haven’t. And over the past year, in New York, she’s been deeply grateful for this. An allergy to flags or eagles would have reduced her to shut-in status: a species of semiotic agoraphobia.

The emphasis is mine, highlighting the phrase that confirmed Pattern Recognition’s status. I just love that turn of phrase! Maybe it’s the Umberto Eco fan in me talking now, but the phrase is just so poetic and so apt, for it describes what it would be like to feel the impact of every symbol we experience. Mass media and consumer culture have teamed up to inundate us with symbols, and in turn that has desensitized us to the vast majority of them: I think nothing of seeing the logo for Coca-Cola when I’m driving, because that’s just a part of the scenery. That’s why companies are now seizing on alternative marketing strategies, like the viral strategies we see a bit of in Pattern Recognition. Media have changed us as a species, so the advertisers are striving to keep up and move on to the next paradigm.

I find it interesting that Gibson named his protagonist “Cayce”, which looks so similar to the name of Neuromancer’s protagonist, “Case”. It’s supposed to be pronounced “Casey”, but Cayce herself says she prefers “Case”, and indeed, that’s how I first read it in my head. I’m not sure what kind of parallels, if any, he is attempting to draw—although both are somewhat isolated people who seem more comfortable socializing online than they do in person, and both have a rare skill they use to get jobs. Cayce’s suspicion and small rebellions against Bigend also remind me of Case’s self-empowerment while working for Wintermute—they aren’t just pawns of the big player, but quite vocal employees who have the ability to affect the outcome of the game, if not completely change its balance.

But Pattern Recognition affected me on a much deeper level than Neuromancer, which is why I feel comfortable giving it five stars. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been contemplating the way media attempt to influence us (especially for my Education, Media, and Gender class). Whatever the reason, I’m in a phase of my life where the effects of media and the critique of media are very much at the forefront of my mind, and so those elements of Pattern Recognition spoke volumes to me. When I say Gibson “gets it”, what I mean is that he takes all of these ideas about companies and advertising strategies, globalization and viral marketing on the Internet, and rotates them ever so slightly, giving us a slightly skewed version of the world—that’s the science fiction. We get Bigend, Blue Ant, and the footage, and it all works out into a very compelling commentary on the evolution of marketing in our global, digital village.

There’s a certain zaniness to Pattern Recognition too. The back cover copy of my edition captures this:

But when she is co-opted into the search for the creator of a strangely addictive on-line film, Cayce wonders if she has done the right—or indeed, safe—thing. And that’s before violence, Japanese computer crazies, and Russian Mafia men are in the mix.

Just Japanese computer crazies or Russian mafia might make the novel a suitably noir thriller; both, however, are greedy and over the top. The description sounds more like something suited to Nick Harkaway than Gibson; “absurd” doesn’t really seem his style. Somehow, though, just as he does in Virtual Light, Gibson manages to unify these disparate story elements into something less absurd and more unusual. Pattern Recognition is definitely fiction, and it might be a little over the top, but that’s part of its charm and why it was so difficult to put it down.

The next amazing ingredient is Cayce herself: she is an excellent character. From Molly to Chevette Gibson writes interesting, complex female characters, but Cayce is my favourite so far. She is so human and flawed: there are mentions of past relationships, boyfriends who didn’t work out and the strained thread between her and her mother. And Gibson avoids some of the common missteps that seem to undermine otherwise strong female characters in fiction: she never moons over another character or hooks up with a male companion only to regret it later (I was worried when Boone arrived on the scene, but I should have had more faith). Yet she does eventually find some kind of human companionship toward the end of the book—Gibson leaves the exact nature of their relationship somewhat open for interpretation, in my opinion, which is all the better. Are you taking notes, Stephenie Meyer?

Pattern Recognition is much closer to Neuromancer than Virtual Light in the sense that Cayce is the main character and everyone else is supporting cast. She succumbs—and I do think that’s the correct word to use here—to Bigend’s offer to hire her to find the creator of the footage, but she does so for a very personal reason. As a result, Cayce’s social world constricts as different elements come into contact: her new Polish acquaintances suddenly provide a contact who has friends in the NSA; her online acquaintance Parkaboy becomes an unlikely ally as Russian mafia agents close in on her. Gibson takes all of these ideas about viral videos and marketing and turns them into a close-knit, suspense-laden thriller—the result being, I suspect, a slightly science-fictional book that would appeal to a lot of readers. I’m often very snobbish when it comes to thrillers, and I admit I might be biased because it’s a thriller by William Gibson. But I do feel that it’s the union of all these elements that makes this book so successful. It has the same gritty feel of Neuromancer and a similar, intelligent sight on our zeitgeist, but it felt a lot more relevant to me than his other works. And for that reason, Pattern Recognition is the Gibson book that broke the five-star barrier.

Did you read Neuromancer and say, "This was good, but it could have used more steampunk?" That's kind of how one might describe The Difference Engine: Neuromancer meets steampunk. It's not a comprehensive, completely accurate description, but if that's sufficient for you, you can stop reading now and go read the book.

Still here? Cool.

William Gibson is on my "I must read everything by him!" shelf, and his influence on literature, particularly science fiction and subgenres like cyberpunk and steampunk, is unquestionable. One might even go so far as to point out how words he coined or popularized, such as cyberspace, have made their way into colloquial parlance. On top that, he's more than just a great writer; he's a good writer, with stories to accompany all those big ideas. Nevertheless, I gave four stars to Neuromancer, and now I'm giving two stars to The Difference Engine. What's wrong with me?

(Although this is a collaboration with Bruce Sterling, I haven't read anything by Sterling yet—he is on the list. So I'll be focusing on how this book affects my impression of William Gibson.)

There's nothing wrong with me! I'm perfect! It's all Gibson's fault. He has this amazing ability to defy my expectations; I never know what I'm going to get from a Gibson story. Despite my best guesses and suppositions, both Neuromancer and The Difference Engine surprised me, and by the end I realized that Gibson had somehow snuck away while I was reading and come back with an extra portion of crazy ideas and subtext to stuff into the last act. So as much as I enjoy and recognize Gibson's skill, I always tend to put down his books dazed and a little bewildered. Sometimes books like that still manage to earn five stars, but very often they receive only four: they left me with respect and a sense of awe, but they did not make me love them.

I don't really want to discuss The Difference Engine as a steampunk novel. Of course, I am aware of its significance to the genre, and the reasons behind that significance are obvious when one reads the book. Gibson and Sterling have essentially laid the ground for the steampunk premise, if you will, of how all the clockwork revolution could take place. Babbage actually manages to complete his analytical engine, which is notable because it is the first design of a computing machine that is Turing complete. This is a big deal, and as with most high-level computer science can get complex rather fast, but here's the gist: if something is Turing complete, then it can in theory be used to solve any computational problem whatsoever. (In practice there are pesky limitations like, say, time.) So Babbage triggers the computing revolution a century early, and Gibson and Sterling doggedly develop the ramifications of this revolution to its logical extremes. Babbage's engines are aggressively analog, not at all the slick and fast electronic and digital devices to which we are accustomed. They are massive and require yards or miles of gears and tape and, yes, punch cards. So time on engines is a precious commodity, and the use of engines brings with it all sorts of logistical problems, such as cleaning and maintenance. Steampunk triggers an irrational sense of ambivalence in me, partly because it always seems to be so garish and flashy: it's got all this cool technology reimagined as neo-Victorian, clockwork gadgets made from gears and pulleys, and it just seems to offend my sense of plausibility. Which is just silly, when you think about it, because I'm willing to read books featuring hyperspace and wormholes and humanoid aliens, so I shouldn't have a problem with steampunk. But we all have our biases, I guess.

But I digress.

So regardless of its steampunk street cred, The Difference Engine is a great piece of alternate history. Gibson and Sterling drop hints at what an alt-Victorian London equipped with Babbage engines could be like, from automated advertising on the side of a building to the surveillance-state-like use of citizen ID numbers. And yes, there are airships (warning: TVTropes). Not only is "Lord Babbage" in a position of considerable influence, but Byron is Prime Minister, and he lives long enough to see his daughter Ada grow up to become an influential mathematician. Darwin gets a title too, and in general The Difference Engine is a thought experiment that speculates what would have happened if a more progressive generation of "rad[ical] lords" had inherited the government from Lord Wellington's Tories.

Britain's role in the history of science is fascinating, and the nineteenth century particularly so. The scientific community was even more of an Old Boys' club than it is now, and so all the various great scientific minds knew each other (or at least knew of each other) through the various Royal Societies. They socialized, stole ideas, had public spats, and generally make that period of the history of science look like some kind of MuchMusic drama. This is great for science writers, because it makes for an entertaining way to tell the history of science, and I love reading accounts like this. Gibson and Sterling embrace this same dramatic flair and make the rivalries and alliances among the nineteenth-century men of science one of the central pillars of the story.

All of this should make for an amazing story. Alas, The Difference Engine falls short of being awesome, and that's particularly fatal when two big names are attached to it. The novel as a whole lacks coherence and unity in its structure and in the narration. Gibson and Sterling connect the lives of three protagonists, but they don't seem in any particular hurry to develop the plot, and the mystery that gets dangled in front of us at the beginning of the book receives a hasty, even token resolution at the very end. As an egregious example of this incoherent style, just consider the first chapter (or "iteration"), which features Sybil Gerard as the protagonist. Sybil is the daughter of a prominent Luddite leader, and since her father's death she has fallen on hard times and become a high-class prostitute. But then she meets up with Mick Radley, secretary to the exiled Texian president Sam Houston. Radley promises her the world if she'll travel with him and become his apprentice, and Sybil, intrigued, agrees.

For the first iteration, Sybil is a compelling protagonist. She's literate and educated and not very naive, but at the same time she is new to the experiences Radley offers (up to and including some acting and theft!). Through her, Gibson and Sterling ease us into their alternate Victorian London. Her vocabulary is memorable but not a distraction from the prose itself. Most importantly, despite her former associations with the Luddites, opposed the sexy technology that has seduced me, I found myself wanting her to succeed. She seemed like a good person, or at least a worthy person. So I was disappointed when, after the end of the first iteration, Sybil gets sidelined for the rest of the book. She returns near the end in a much-reduced role, but she never again takes centre stage to tell her story. The majority of the book falls on the shoulders of Edward Mallory, a paleontologist recently returned from the discovery of brontosaurus in Wisconsin. Mallory is all right as far as characters go, but he's no Sybil, and neither is the third protagonist, Laurence Oliphant. Just as I felt I was getting comfortable with Mallory, Gibson and Sterling switched the focus of the narrative again.

It's much the same for the plot concerning the mysterious Napoleon-gauge punch cards. These first fall into Sybil's possession, and then somehow Ada Byron acquires them, and then they fall into Mallory's hands for safe-keeping. Their purpose is eventually explained, and it's all very clever, but the plot never develops into the mystery I was imagining when I began the book. Instead, the punch cards lurk in the background while Mallory bumbles through a London on the verge of erupting into class warfare. Which is fine, except that I often lost track of what was happening during this time. (To be fair, I read that part while at my nephew's second birthday party, and I had to devote some attention to keeping an eye out for incoming Awkward Social Encounters.)

And then there is the coda, which is brief and very vague. It gives us a glimpse of the future and seems to imply a grim outcome that is consistent with Gibson's skies tuned to a dead TV channel. It's an awesome vision, one that I wish he and Sterling had elaborated upon—but that's the problem. In its present form, it is more non sequitur than anything else. It's a tease without any real substance, and while it fits nicely with the world that Gibson and Sterling have created in The Difference Engine, it does nothing to improve the book as a whole.

I think it is OK for books to be cryptic, for books to end with cryptic epilogues, and for books to puzzle the reader. I can accept not grokking a book, if it's clear the author has done this to challenge me and force me to think about it. And I'm sure there are some people who feel this way about The Difference Engine, that it scattered narration and perplexing plot are what elevate it above newer steampunk works. For me, though, once you strip away the parts that don't work, the elements of this book that seem superfluous or faulty, there is very little left that I can enjoy. There is an alternate Victorian London built upon a very nifty premise; there are secondary characters and allusions to historical figures that tickle the scientist within me. And while I have my misgivings about the story, I really did enjoy the tone and diction, both of which really helped immerse me in the world. Mostly, though, The Difference Engine left me with too many regrets.

We are very spoiled, and very privileged, to live now in the twenty-first century. We look back on works of science fiction from the 1950s, 1960s, and onward that reference the 1990s or 2000s as "the future" and make grandiose predictions: we'll have flying cars! a eugenics war! robot apocalypse! It's interesting to note that such extrapolation, while often falling very short of the mark, tends to be conservative when it describes the technological platforms through which we acquire these flying cars, supermen, and killer robots. The twenty-first century of the early twentieth century still involved cassette tapes and analog computers. The digital revolution is a true paradigm shift in science fiction just as it has been in the rest of our society, rendering such visions of the present future quaint. For people more open-minded than myself, this is often not a problem. I have difficulty immersing myself in stories that allude to now-obsolete technology as if it were the future—I can do it, as is evident by my enjoyment of the original Star Trek series, but it is difficult. I'm a child of the digital age, and I'm spoiled that way.

William Gibson is a special case. His work, too, is vulnerable to the effects of aging. Yet he is rightly called a visionary and a prescient master of this field: after all, he coined the term cyberspace, and his descriptions of virtual reality have influenced its depictions in film and literature ever since Neuromancer first appeared on the scene. So even though Gibson's stories have aged as his future never came to pass, they remain amazing and brilliant. He infused them with ideas and conflicts that continue to grip readers even as the futures these stories depict turn into alternative versions of history.

Burning Chrome is a wonderful treasure trove of Gibson's genius. I did not like every story within, but every story is brilliant in its own way. I never liked the film version of Johnny Mneumonic, and the short story, though substantially different, did not change my mind. Gibson throws around some intriguing ideas, but he never really explores them with the depth I'd like. I wonder if I would feel the same way about "Burning Chrome" if I hadn't read Neuromancer: like the novel, it makes computer hacking into an exciting, adrenaline-fuelled experience, as the name "console cowboy" might suggest. And I really enjoyed "Burning Chrome" for the way its narrator judges the relationship between Bobby Quine and Rikki. Unlike "Johnny Mneumonic," Gibson establishes the backstory just enough to justify the main action but not so much that one feels like one is missing out on the larger picture. (But if you do, and you haven't read it, then you really should go get a copy of Neuromancer.)

Though "Johnny Mneumonic" is very well-known and "Burning Chrome" lends its title to this entire collection, these were not the most memorable stories for me. Those stories are tame compared to some of the utterly weird stuff that Gibson has displays in between them. From recorded personalities lurking just off stage to a man slowly discovering he might not be human after all, Burning Chrome delivers stories that demonstrate Gibson's grasp on the breadth of what science fiction can accomplish.

I'm not sure how to describe "The Winter Market." I could say a recording engineer discovers an artist who, encumbered by an exoskeleton and suffering from a terminal illness, uploads herself to a computer. That's pretty accurate, although it doesn't quite capture the nuances that Gibson infuses into the story. As the main character questions whether the recorded version of Lise's personality is actually "her" (all the while dreading the moment "she" calls him), we're treated to a flashback explanation of how they met and how her detached attitude toward life has made him dissatisfied with his own. It's interesting that so many of Gibson's protagonists are young, dissatisfied males who are down on their luck and fall in with a mysterious woman who owes him no particular allegiance: Johnny Mneumonic, Case (from Neuromancer), Parker, Bobby, the narrator of "The Winter Market," and Deke all fall into this category. They are certainly not the same characters—not even close!—but it's an intriguing recurring motif.

"Red Star, Winter Orbit" is one of those stories of a future that never was. Space has been largely abandoned, except for a communist, Russian space station and bubble-like domes inhabited by Americans. But Russia wants to retire its space station, which is bad news for Colonel Korolev, the first man on Mars. Thanks to an accident years ago, Korolev is unable to return to Earth and must live out his remaining days aboard the Russian space station. So when it gets decommissioned, naturally, he isn't very happy. Together with several sympathetic members of the crew, they hatch a plan to leak word to the rest of the world what Russia intends to do to its hero. It's a touching story with a nice twist at the end.

In contrast, "Dogfight" is also a touching story but does not have the endearing twist. Deke is the main character, but I hesitate to call him a protagonist. He starts low and falls farther as he seeks pre-eminence in his new obsession, combat with holographic, mentally-directed biplanes.

"The Belonging Kind" is a really weird, almost purely psychological tale about a man who meets a shapeshifter in a bar and becomes obsessed with her. I don't want to spoil the ending, although it's a little predictable, just because Gibson and co-author John Shirley do such a good job bringing it about.

However, the real star of Burning Chrome has to be "Hinterlands." It's a somewhat dark, depressing vision of how we might join the interstellar community. In "Hinterlands," Russian Colonel Olga Tovyevski accidentally discovers an anomaly near an L-5 point. Her space capsule disappears through it, returning years later with a catatonic Russian on board, trashed communications equipment … a seashell of extraterrestrial origin.

Boom, as they say, goes the dynamite.

You can imagine what would happen if that occurred today, except you don't have to, because Gibson describes it for us. The world's governments leap into action, and "exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground." They soon discover an awful catch to this wormhole phenomenon (which the Americans dub "the Highway"): every pilot returns dead from suicide or mad, and the mad ones usually commit suicide shortly thereafter. So why bother to pay the price of a ticket? Our narrator, Toby, explains:

If the first ones to come back had only returned with seashells, I doubt that Heaven [the space station] would be out here. Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. We may never find out where or how he got it, but that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years. Charmian says we're like those poor suckers on their islands, who spend all their time building landing strips to make the big silver birds come back. Charmian says that contact with 'superior' civilizations is something you don't wish on your worst enemy.

To me, this paragraph shows why William Gibson is a master of the science fiction field. It's a somewhat chilling interpretation of the role humans might have if we ever enter into contact with a larger, established interstellar community: we'll be the primitive species. We won't necessarily communicate effectively or benignly, but we will acquire advanced technology and then ask for more, and it might very well destroy us. In Star Trek, despite the fact that they are the new kids on the block, humans go on to become the founders of the United Federation of Planets (along with the older, more stoic Vulcans and the volatile Andorians). Science fiction often portrays humans as special (warning: TVTropes), which is not surprising considering the species of both the writers and their audience. So it's refreshing when authors take a step back, think critically, and present a different perspective, even one as bleak as this: we're just rats, pushing a button to make food come out.

Toby and his lover Charmian, by the way, were rejected as pilots and now serve as "surrogates" on Heaven. They greet the returned pilots—the live ones, that is—and try to help bring them back to something approaching a normal mental state. As Toby explains, they are seldom successful. Whatever happens to pilots who go through the Highway, it breaks them. Yet "Hinterlands" concludes with Toby's laments that he and Charmian were found unsuitable for being pilots and his description of their continual longing to go on this almost-certainly fatal adventure. It's an amazing story, both in concept and in execution, and it alone is worth finding a copy of Burning Chrome.

William Gibson fans, put Burning Chrome on your to-read list if it's not already there. And for those of who you haven't read William Gibson, this would be a fine place to start (though I still recommend Neuromancer as well). This anthology is a snapshot of Gibson at his best, from the familiar milieu of his Sprawl world and beyond, to even weirder and more imaginative places. Gibson is a source of great ideas, and he always manages to wrap them in even greater stories.

The trouble with reading good books is that any review one writes feels insufficient. It's not just finding the right words to describe how such books make one feel that's the challenge ... it's organizing those words in such a way to convey the breadth and scope of moving literature. Neuromancer poses such a problem. Writers trade in stories and ideas; while a case can be made that Neuromancer is deficient in some respects of the former, few books are as packed full of ideas as this book.

Neuromancer, and its successors in cyberpunk, seem suited to escapism. It's something about the abstract nature of cyberspace, where space and time have little relationship to their real-world counterparts, and the dead can come back to life. Case, Neuromancer's grim protagonist, yearns only to be able to return to "the bodiless exultation of cyberspace" and continue his career as a "cowboy," a hacker who commits crimes for rich people and corporations. His attempt to double-cross a previous employer backfired and left his body unable to "jack into" the matrix; the novel begins with Case's suicidal downward spiral in dystopian Chiba City, Japan. He seeks escape from the bleak existence his life has become, but even when his ability to jack in is restored, Case is still always looking for an exit. For Case, denizen of a digital world, escape isn't a temporary urge; it's a necessity of being.

Even more intriguing than its motif of escape, however, was Neuromancer's depiction of artificial intelligence. Too often, bad science fiction portrays artificial intelligences as human, or worse, as unquestionably anti-human machine intelligences. The AIs of Neuromancer are neither:

"Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?"

"Well, yeah, obviously."

"Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?"

The AIs, of course, are continually perturbed when pesky humans go "outside the profile" and behaviour in a way that runs counter to their expectations of that individual. Humans can go outside the profile; AIs, in contrast, don't have a profile. That's what makes them scary: it's not their computational capacity or their virtual immortality and limitless intelligence; it's their unhuman-ness, their totally alien way of thinking born from the minds of human designers and engineers.

Case and his comrades, particularly the construct of a fellow cowboy named McCoy "Dixie Flatline" Pauley, spend much of the book trying to figure out the master plan of the AI who is hiring them to lobotomize itself. Its plan never becomes explicit, probably because by dint of the AI's unhuman-ness, we can't grasp it. But the gist is clear: the AI's designer split it into two complementary entities, hardwired in restrictions to prevent the AIs from growing too powerful, and then hardwired into one of the AIs a desire to thwart those restrictions. How much of our desires are hardwired? Are we, like Case, what we do?

That's where Neuromancer shines as a work of literature. It is set in a grumpy dystopia that has a sense of timelessness about it; maybe things were different once, and maybe they'll be different someday in the future, but nothing seems to be changing right now. Jack Womack's afterword to this edition captures the sentiment nicely:

I'm not referring to the overwhelming postapocalyptic damage and decay so often used in the set design of contemporary films when their directors attempt to depict a futuristic environment.... No, I speak instead of the scattered objects glimpsed within Chiba City bars ... each token of mundane temporality made rare by the passage of time.... When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

Or as Case eloquently puts it:

Give us the fucking code.... If you don't, what'll change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter.... I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute [the AI:] wins, but it'll change something!

Amid nation-states overturned by corporations, cloning and cryogenics, and drugs and data that make "meat" and flesh seem obsolete, the piercing cry of techno-nihilism emerges. Neuromancer isn't about hacking or even about crime; it's a prototypical exploration of different groups' attempts to push humanity beyond limits we aren't supposed to transgress. Immortality . . . eternal consciousness in cyberspace . . . there are certain things that make us human, including death and the fallible nature of our memories. To deny these is to deny our own humanity, and then we'll end up like the Tessier-Ashpools. Whether or not that's a bad thing is one's own opinion; Neuromancer seems to think that it's fine for AIs but hesitates when it comes to humans. Thus, this is a book about transhumanism, but not posthumanism.

Unfavourable reviews often focus on Gibson's writing, particularly the lack of character depth and fluffy descriptions of the "cyberspace matrix." And it's true; for that reason, I can't give the book five stars. The first part of the book is especially difficult to understand—I really only got into it once the artificial intelligence was introduced and the nature of the plot became clear.

That being said, Gibson does have a talent for intriguing phrases that held my attention long after I turned the page. From the opening line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" to Gibson's final comment on immortality through technology: "She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics . . . she'd refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter," Neuromancer is full of evocative insights wrapped inside delectable language.

The imagery of Neuromancer is gritty and seductive while remaining free of the flashiness so embedded in the gestalt of 1990s cyberpunk. More intellectual than it is entertaining, this book deserves its place in the pantheon of great science fiction. Just as the Bible has so influenced Western literature of the past 1700 years, Neuromancer was a prototype for much of the science fiction that has since followed. Hence, just as non-Christians should still read the Bible to understand its influence, science fiction fans must read Neuromancer.

My reviews of the Sprawl trilogy:
Count Zero →

Last week Kevin Mitnick was on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, Ghost in the Wires and talk about hacking. For those of us who grew up with the Web as a fact of life and absorbed "hacker culture" through Hollywood, Mitnick's experiences seem somewhat alien. Hacking started long before the Web, of course, and even today hacking is nothing like what one sees on the movies. However, it's just in this decade that we, as a society, are beginning to understand and react to the effects of hacking as a phenomenon. It seems like not a week goes by without another story in the news about a company or government database being hacked. Law enforcement agencies have taken cybercrime seriously for a long time now, as demonstrated by Mitnick's arrest and conviction, but lately arrests of alleged members of groups like Anonymous are making the news more often. We live in the WikiLeaks era, where it doesn't matter if information wants to be free. Once information is out there, there is no taking it back.

It strikes me that William Gibson gets this. In fact, he understood it a lot earlier than most of us. He was writing about this stuff before I was born. Neuromancer is indubitably his most famous and influential work, and the Hollywood vision of hacking probably owes a lot to his portrayal of the cyberspace experience of console cowboys (damn you, Gibson!). With Virtual Light, it feels like Gibson is looking at hacker culture, and its effects on society, from the other side now. The main characters are victims of hackers; they employ hackers; but they are not hackers themselves. Nevertheless, Gibson turns them into tools for making information free.

Virtual Light is a little confusing at first. I wasn't sure who the main character was—is it this nameless courier? This weird private security guard named "Berry Rydell"? This messenger whom we eventually learn is called Chevette? After the first few chapters, however, the story finally emerged, and its protagonists quickly followed. On a whim, Chevette picks a courier's pocket and steals a valuable pair of sunglasses, which contain information encoded optically about a sensitive business deal that will impact all of San Francisco. She ends up on the run with Rydell as an unlikely ally.

Rydell and Chevette wormed their way into my heart. This is good, because as far as its story goes, Virtual Light is surprisingly linear and predictable—surprising because I wouldn't expect it from Gibson. So I completely understand why people pan the book because of this aspect; story is not Virtual Light's strongest area. As an "on the run from the bad guys until we can broadcast our information" story, it keeps me entertained. To really appreciate it, however, one has to be willing to dig further into the way Gibson approaches the role of hacking, the flow of information, and the stratification of society in a broken United States of America.

I've already talked lots about hacking, but let me say a little more. I love how Rydell loses his job because someone hacked the computer on his company truck and created a false alarm. Not only are the scene and its subsequent debriefing hilarious, but this is something that could happen today (and probably already has). We get so much of our information from intangible, computer-moderated sources and have learned to trust that information implicitly. When Rydell's truck tells him there is an armed hostage situation on a client's property, he doesn't hesitate to respond aggressively. This trust is useful, because we can react a lot more quickly when the information comes to us instantaneously—but as Rydell learns, it is dangerous too. The same thing happens today, with hackers posting fake releases about celebrity deaths on legitimate news websites. So this is a very interesting phenomenon that we, as a society, are still struggling to adapt to, and I like how Gibson tackles it in Virtual Light.

In many ways this book is also similar to Gibson's "Johnny Mneumonic", of Keanu Reeves infamy. Both feature a courier carrying information that could incite unrest. In Johnny's case, it's hardwired into his brain. In Chevette's case, she appropriates the package as a pair of sunglasses. But the moral remains the same: in a world where we can send a message to someone across the ocean less than the blink of an eye, the only truly secure method of communicate remains a physical package (even if that package is only a one-time pad). As Loveless remarks in Virtual Light:

"Look at her, Rydell. She knows. Even if she's just riding confidential papers around San Francisco, she's a courier. She's entrusted, Rydell. The data becomes a physical thing. She carries it. Don't you carry it, baby?"

She was still as some sphinx, white fingers deep in the gray fabric of the center bucket.

"That's what I do, Rydell. I watch them carry it. I watch them. Sometimes people try to take it from them."

Imagine a map that depicts the world as lights connected by glowing lines—people, or buildings, or cities, connected by digital communication. Zoom in enough, and along the virtual representations of city streets, you will see glowing blue and red dots. These are the couriers, the physical purveyors of digital information. The trusted ones.

I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say here is that I appreciate Virtual Light for the way it raises relevant, contemporary issues about existing in the digital era. As always, Gibson's observations are a combination of chilling and seductive, with a little bit of edgy humour thrown in. There's Reverend Fallon's cult of Christians who believe they will find God in old movies, and the cult that worships Shapely, a man whose non-lethal strain of HIV resulted in a vaccine. Some of these subplots don't seem explored as fully as they could have been considering how much time Gibson devotes to them. Shapely's story in particular perplexes me, for we learn it all through exposition that seems otherwise unconnected from the rest of the narrative. Why is it all that important? I'm probably missing something larger here.

That being said, I can at least see how it works with Virtual Light's presentation of the rift between the various classes of American society. There's the sleek, slightly antiseptic feel of Karen Mendelsohn; the creepy vibe of the man we never see, Cody Harwood; the domineering little shit that is Lowell; the valiant, heroic, yet tragic Skinner; and of course, the working class: Rydell, Chevette, Sublett, et al. Karen treats Rydell as hot stuff while he is the best thing Cops in Trouble have going, but the moment a higher-profile opportunity arises, she kicks him to the curb. The people who want the data on those sunglasses kept secret, the people like Cody Harwood, do not hesitate to kill lesser people like Rydell and Chevette. And of course, there's the bridge.

People living on a ravaged Bay Bridge, having transformed it into an actual community, is a vision right out of something like The Wind-Up Girl, some sort of post-apocalyptic world gone mad. One might expect to see a little less civilization, and that's certainly what some of the minor characters in Virtual Light suggest. Warbaby gives Rydell a description of the Bridge community that Chevette and Skinner patently belie, and it's not entirely clear whether Warbaby actually believes this bit of bigotry or whether he's just coldly manipulating Rydell. (I suspect the latter, but with Gibson I'm not going to bet anything I value on it.) The Bridge community is intriguing, and I would have liked to learn more about it. But of course, that's what the other two books in this trilogy are for.

Virtual Light is not as stunning as Neuromancer, and it deserves the criticism levelled at its story and structure. I reject the idea that this is a bad novel, however, and certainly that this is somehow a lesser work of William Gibson. I think it does something useful and interesting, from its portrayal of hackers to the importance of securing the information that comes into Rydell and Chevette's possession. It might not do this as artfully or as skilfully as I would like, but it is still a fascinating piece of science fiction.

Except, of course, that it is no longer science fiction. Sure, the specifics of this 1990s novel, set in 2005, did not come to pass—but all of the issues Gibson raises are things we are confronting, or will soon confront, in our present decade. Virtual Light is a noteworthy example of how science fiction does not need to predict the future in order to predict the problems we will be facing and prompt us to ponder solutions before it's too late. As usual, William Gibson demonstrates that science fiction is valuable.

My reviews of the Bridge trilogy:
Idoru →

I read The Runelords, or at least The Sum of All Men, when I was much younger. I like to revisit books I think I enjoyed when I was younger but don’t remember now. If I like them still, hoorah; if I don’t, then I get to better understand how I have changed over the years. The Sum of All Men falls in the middle of that spectrum: it’s an enjoyable book with intriguing fantasy elements, but the characters and story vary from pedestrian to poor.

Most of the praise for this book will involve the magic system that allows the eponymous runelords to be so runic and lordy, so I guess I’ll be a sheep and follow the herd on this point: this book totally has an original magic system. Instead of casting spells and counting mana, David Farland allows his characters to take “endowments” of attributes from other people through the use of magic runes. Taking an endowment of brawn robs someone of their strength—if you die, they get it back, but if they die, you lose that strength as well. So there’s an interesting, somewhat parasitic relationship going on here. Part of the moral conflict of the book concerns the propriety of accepting endowments from poor people in lieu of payment they can’t make any other way—and then you have the Big Bad, Raj Ahten, who just takes endowments at the tip of a sword and laughs nefariously when he thinks no one is looking.

That’s not the best part of the magic system, though. If Farland had stopped there, it would still be original and interesting. He takes it further, though, and explores some of the natural consequences of taking endowments. For example, if someone gives an endowment of wit (thereby losing theirs), any endowments of wit they receive automatically transfer to the person who got theirs originally—they become vectors. Later, Farland asks what happens when you create a chain of vectors and then have the person at the head of the chain give an endowment to the person at the tail—you get a ring! It’s so unfortunate when authors create interesting worlds or systems of magic but then leave the corners unexplored. That Farland takes full advantage of the rich possibilities of runes and endowments is definitely praise-worthy.

It’s much harder to be impressed with the protagonist, Gaborn Val Orden. He—shockingly, I know—turns out to be a nice guy with only the best of intentions in mind. He doesn’t take endowments, by force or as payment, only instead taking them if they are granted “willingly” out of “loyalty”. I’ve seen some good arguments about how this is a distinction without a difference, and Gaborn is just as culpable in what is essentially a system of slavery as his less scrupulous father or the nasty Raj Ahten. These criticisms are spot on and illustrate how Gaborn’s lack of self-awareness undermine his heroic role. However, I think it’s worth pointing out that most epic fantasy set in a pseudo-medieval world suffers from some level of this problem. How many epic fantasy books are about princes or princesses attempting to win back the throne from an usurper? The feudal system, and absolute monarchies in general, suck and are tantamount to slavery. Yet we’re supposed to cheer for the “rightful rulers” and their heroic pluck anyway. If anything, Farland is just making this cognitive dissonance within the fantasy genre more overt—though, by not subverting it, he doesn’t make the situation any better.

Gaborn is an uninspiring protagonist at best. His heroism is ordained rather than earned (or even particularly innate). I could deal with this, except that Gaborn spends most of this long story not doing anything important. Yeah, he rescues the princess from the tower and (maybe) spurs his father to sacrifice himself for the Greater Good (the greater good!). But The Runelords is not exactly the high-octane adventure you might want from a book of this size. Gaborn spends most of it either riding towards or away from Castle Sylvarresta.

(I’m not even going to touch the whole episode at the beginning where he arranges a marriage between his bodyguard and a hot peasant girl they meet in this foreign kingdom. Sooooo much wrong with that.)

Did I mention Gaborn has a love interest? Gaborn totally has a love interest. Her name is Iome. She’s beautiful, apparently, and more so with endowments of glamour—but then she has to give glamour to Raj Ahten (because he wants to be the fairest of them all!) and becomes super ugly, and this bums her out.

Now, I’m going to cut Iome a little slack here. She isn’t shallow, and I don’t think Farland is being shallow when he writes her lamenting her loss of beauty. Iome is undergoing significant trauma here. Raj Ahten has killed her mom and turned her father into a drooling idiot in front her. And now he’s taken her looks—which, even if not important to her, were a part of her for so long that not having them is weird. It would be like me losing all my hair suddenly: I would get over it, because it isn’t really important whether I have hair or not. But I would be super uncomfortable for the first little while. We don’t have time to see Iome get over it (for reasons I will not get into, spoilers). And we’re told that the endowment also constantly undermines any self-confidence she is trying to regain. Finally, even if Iome is innately not shallow, she has still spent her entire life growing up being told that she is “beautiful” and that her external beauty is linked inextricably to her worth as a person. This narrative, unfortunately present in our society, fucks up girls.

That doesn’t excuse the heavy-handed way in which Farland has Harry Styles—er, I mean, Gaborn—swoop in and proclaim loudly and explicitly that “Baby you light up my world like nobody else … You don’t know you’re beautiful / That’s what makes you beautiful.” Because, yes, what Iome totally needs after having her self-worth quashed by a man by being robbed of her external “beauty” is for another man to validate her and her beauty! Farland could have had Iome rediscover and reaffirm her sense of self-worth herself.

And that’s essentially the disappointing truth about The Sum of All Men and a lot of similar fantasy fiction: it could be so much more subversive, but it isn’t. This doesn’t necessarily make it bad in the same way that The Big Bang Theory’s increasing tendency to make fun of geeks/nerds rather than with geeks/nerds about geek/nerd stereotypes doesn’t make it bad. (I don’t think the show is all that funny anymore, alas, but I can still appreciate the way in which it is constructed and its stories are told.) Nevertheless, by playing most of the tropes straight (even if, as in the case of the magic system, they are played very expertly) Farlands only achieves competent mediocrity rather than innovative excellence.

I can’t say I’m surprised. The blurb on the front cover of this edition is from Terry Brooks, and there’s another on the back from Kevin J. Anderson. Both of these authors share Farland’s comprehensive grasp of the scope and potential for setting in fantasy and science fiction at the expense of shallower characters and predictable stories. The result is the type of book that’s probably an OK read—there are worse novels to be stuck with on an airplane or in a waiting room. But it’s not going to blow your mind.

Do you have a brick wall handy? Because hitting your head against that would be a more productive and more enjoyable experience than listening to The Unincorporated Man as an audiobook. This was the only format in which it was available through my library. Audiobooks are not my preferred format for reading. They can definitely be great if you have good material and a good narrator. The narrator here, Todd McLaren, wasn’t bad—but even he couldn’t make this book sound interesting. Even at 2.5x speed it took me a week to get through this, because I did not want to subject myself to yet another sermon. I only finished it because I knew I would enjoy writing this review—call it necessary catharsis—and, yeah, I kind of wanted to see how it ended.

The Kollins’ writing … let’s see, how can I best describe this? Imagine Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein having a dinner party together. (They each brought their own meal because it’s in their enlightened self-interest not to take food from their own mouths to share with another. Little did they know that they would suffer from food poisoning because the unregulated food market cut corners.) Terry Goodkind would be proud of the length of some of the speeches in this book.

Surprisingly it isn’t the philosophy itself that makes The Unincorporated Man so unequiovcally awful. I’m not as libertarian as Justin Cord or, presumably, his authors—but I certainly balk at the idea of personal incorporation. I share Justin’s repugnance at the idea of owning stock in another human being, collecting dividends on their earnings, having a say in where they live. The Kollins chose a great time in which to write and publish this book, because I am one of many people concerned about the way in which corporations exercise their power in our society. Personal incorporation might sound silly right now, but this is a dystopia I could see happening in one of our possible futures. So in this respect, the Kollins have certainly created a credible bogeyman.

But their terrible writing ruins any chances the book has of being compelling science fiction.

I am reminded of For Us, the Living, a Heinlein novel I read in my halcyon youth long before Goodreads. I don’t remember much about it, except that younger!Ben was super-impressed by Heinlein’s economic philosophies that appeared to create a utopian future. I suspect that present!Ben would be less impressed were I to revisit it. Superficially, The Unincorporated Man is strikingly similar: a man wakes up after a few centuries of stasis and discovers a supposedly “better” world with radically different economic policies. He then spends most of the book being lectured by a female companion, who is happy to explain not only the differences but the intricate details of how the systems function and how they came about.

It has been a long time since I’ve seen such a textbook example of terrible exposition. Justin, understandably, has a question about how this brave new world works. His companions don’t deliver the simple, curt answer one might expect. Oh, no. They initiate multi-page Socratic dialogues. Scenes that should be short and sweet play out like first-year university lectures on political science or economic game theory. Every character in this book is incredibly well-versed in the economic underpinnings of their society and willing to spout on about those underpinnings at length to Justin without much prompting whatsoever. The end result is that one can’t get more than a page or so ahead without hearing a lecture about how market forces are superior to government intervention or blah … blah … blah.

Look, the point of a philosophical novel is to edify through the plot and characters, not use them as transparent mouthpieces. Only Sophie’s World can get away with that shit, and that’s because it’s Norwegian and awesome, OK?

The Kollins also make the classic Goodkind mistake of letting their hero make big speeches about how his libertarian views are inherently superior to everyone else’s. Also, this gives him the moral superiority that allows him to ignore explicit threats to his friends and loved ones and shrug off any possibility that they might be harmed because he does whatever the fuck he wants—’cause he’s a libertarian badass, yo. Justin Cord could give Richard Rahl a run for his money with some of these speeches about how it’s tyranny to force an individual to do anything “for the greater good”. So what if Neela or Omad get hurt in the process? At least he has his principles!

Seriously, by the end of the book I was actually hoping Justin would give in and incorporate. I hate the idea of incorporation, but I was starting to feel uncomfortable hanging out with this guy. He strikes me as the sort of person who would let the Joker blow up that boat of refugees just because he doesn’t want to let the Joker impose his will on Justin. (I know Justin explicitly condemns violent acts, but he seems fuzzy about this whole violence through inaction concept.)

Related to this pervasive problem of infodump is the Kollins’ inexcusable abuse of the omniscient narrator to compound the problem with yet another layer of exposition. As a fan of Victorian novels, I’m more used to the omniscient narrator than readers of more modern novels might be. Yet even I was shocked by the heavy-handed way in which the Kollins use their narrator to flesh out characters’ backgrounds, thoughts, and feelings. Much in the same way that a single question from Justin could trigger pages of explanation, a single, unasked question from the reader would somehow prompt the narrator to go on—at length—about history or politics or current events.

The one lesson about writing you must take away from The Unincorporated Man is that less is more. The hard part about writing is not transmitting information to the reader but deciding what information to leave out to make the story work. The Kollins clearly haven’t mastered this yet.

Speaking of narration, can we talk about how, upon introducing a new character, the narrator immediately comments about their appearance? I don’t mean the narrator describes how the character looks; the narrator gives a judgement about the character’s looks and sex appeal. The women are invariably objectified through the male gaze. I question the Kollins’ conviction that cheap and abundant nanotechnology means everyone is going to be young and beautiful—if anything, it seems to me like that’s a recipe for allowing people to “let themselves go,” secure in the knowledge that nanites can fix them up and make them beautiful again at any point. But that’s their choice, of course, and I digress. I just wish they could introduce a woman without talking about how she’s, you know, average-level good looking for that society, but people would totally sleep with her anyway. Thank you, so much, for that crucial information.

I was looking for a book that imagined a future in which corporate capitalism has been taken even further than it has in our world. The Unincorporated Man is such a book. It is also boring, terribly written, and not worth your time.

I leave you with a rare image, because the Robot Devil really does say it best: