Putnam, January 2012
After nearly 30 years of writing novels characterized by his technological prescience and keen insight into the cultural zeitgeist, William Gibson has published Distrust that Particular Flavor, a collection of essays in which he directly targets these and other matters of personal interest.
In the book's introduction, Gibson recounts his initial forays into fiction writing, a period of trial and error during which he modelled his sentence-writing on the style J.G. Ballard and seriously considering naming his characters after products in the IKEA catalog. These biographical details will of course be gold to readers like myself who have consumed every novel Gibson has written and will continue to, because there is just something about the Gibsonian filter that renders the world like nothing else, and it has something to do with the lens that Gibson casts across art, culture, and technology, and even objects - be they jeans (Zero History) or sunglasses (Virtual Light) - and his utterly incomparable use of language:
"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
After nearly 30 years of writing novels characterized by his technological prescience and keen insight into the cultural zeitgeist, William Gibson has published Distrust that Particular Flavor, a collection of essays in which he directly targets these and other matters of personal interest.
In the book's introduction, Gibson recounts his initial forays into fiction writing, a period of trial and error during which he modelled his sentence-writing on the style J.G. Ballard and seriously considering naming his characters after products in the IKEA catalog. These biographical details will of course be gold to readers like myself who have consumed every novel Gibson has written and will continue to, because there is just something about the Gibsonian filter that renders the world like nothing else, and it has something to do with the lens that Gibson casts across art, culture, and technology, and even objects - be they jeans (Zero History) or sunglasses (Virtual Light) - and his utterly incomparable use of language:
"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
And while there is nothing in this collection of Gibson's nonfiction that can stand up next to the aforequoted passage from Pattern Recognition, there is still much to recommend Distrust that Particular Flavor. Here are just a few of my favorite bits:
"Rocket Radio" - Rolling Stone, June 1989
1989 was too early for most of us to be thinking and writing about "the Net," still when Rolling Stone came calling and asked Gibson to write a "What do you think will happen?" piece, he delivered this short but compelling timeline that stretched from his childhood recollection of the Rocket Radio to his broad inferences about the future of media. The best bit of this piece is a memory, from the end of the Eight-Track Era, of finding a snarled mass of "weirdly skinny magnetic tape" in a bush: a new audio medium (cassette tape), he deduces, "jettisoned in frustration from the smooth hull of some hurtling 'Vette, settling like new-tech angel hair."
"Since 1948" - Autobiography for the Author's Website, November 2002
I read this biography back in 2003 for an interview with Gibson I did at that time (access to the author seemed far more exciting in the pre-Twitter days, before the emergence of the gregarious @GreatDismal). This quotation about Punk is one of the best lines in the book: "I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write."
"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" - Wired, September 1993
"If IBM had ever bothered to possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore."
According to Gibson's endnote, this article about Singapore actually resulted in Wired having been banned from the island city-state. Gibson's descriptions of the hyper-contemporary, totalitarian society constructed atop the Victorian underpinnings put in place by British colonialism are fantastic.
"Rocket Radio" - Rolling Stone, June 1989
1989 was too early for most of us to be thinking and writing about "the Net," still when Rolling Stone came calling and asked Gibson to write a "What do you think will happen?" piece, he delivered this short but compelling timeline that stretched from his childhood recollection of the Rocket Radio to his broad inferences about the future of media. The best bit of this piece is a memory, from the end of the Eight-Track Era, of finding a snarled mass of "weirdly skinny magnetic tape" in a bush: a new audio medium (cassette tape), he deduces, "jettisoned in frustration from the smooth hull of some hurtling 'Vette, settling like new-tech angel hair."
"Since 1948" - Autobiography for the Author's Website, November 2002
I read this biography back in 2003 for an interview with Gibson I did at that time (access to the author seemed far more exciting in the pre-Twitter days, before the emergence of the gregarious @GreatDismal). This quotation about Punk is one of the best lines in the book: "I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write."
"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" - Wired, September 1993
"If IBM had ever bothered to possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore."
According to Gibson's endnote, this article about Singapore actually resulted in Wired having been banned from the island city-state. Gibson's descriptions of the hyper-contemporary, totalitarian society constructed atop the Victorian underpinnings put in place by British colonialism are fantastic.
"My Obsession" - Wired, January 1999
I recall reading this piece in Wired around the same time I was reading All Tomorrow's Parties, the third book in Gibson's Bridge trilogy (with Idoru and Virtual Light), the first trilogy of books I would recommend to anyone new to Gibson's novels. The article's title refers to the author's then budding addiction to eBay and, more specifically, to auctions involving vintage mechanical watches, which Gibson says, "are among the very finest fossils of the predigital age." It's a fascinating bit of narrative that not only walks the reader through the progression of Gibson's temporatry eBay addiction, but truly conveys what he refers to as the "Tamagotchi Gesture," the certain comforting nature of an object such as a mechanical watch, due its pointlessness and the care that it requires. It's beautiful.
There's much more in Distrust that Particular Flavor, 25 pieces in all ranging from conventional articles to reviews of books and music to talks that Gibson delivered before live audiences. Most of these are very short - one to five pages - which I enjoyed less than the longer articles that found Gibson stretching his narrative wings a bit more.
Distrust that Particular Flavor isn't for everyone. Followers of Gibson's fiction will want to lay their hands on a copy immediately, while others will wonder why all the fuss over a handful of old articles. It will be your job then to press a worn copy of Neuromancer, Idoru, or Pattern Recognition into the hands of the yet-uninitiated, stand back, and let the man work his magic.
I recall reading this piece in Wired around the same time I was reading All Tomorrow's Parties, the third book in Gibson's Bridge trilogy (with Idoru and Virtual Light), the first trilogy of books I would recommend to anyone new to Gibson's novels. The article's title refers to the author's then budding addiction to eBay and, more specifically, to auctions involving vintage mechanical watches, which Gibson says, "are among the very finest fossils of the predigital age." It's a fascinating bit of narrative that not only walks the reader through the progression of Gibson's temporatry eBay addiction, but truly conveys what he refers to as the "Tamagotchi Gesture," the certain comforting nature of an object such as a mechanical watch, due its pointlessness and the care that it requires. It's beautiful.
There's much more in Distrust that Particular Flavor, 25 pieces in all ranging from conventional articles to reviews of books and music to talks that Gibson delivered before live audiences. Most of these are very short - one to five pages - which I enjoyed less than the longer articles that found Gibson stretching his narrative wings a bit more.
Distrust that Particular Flavor isn't for everyone. Followers of Gibson's fiction will want to lay their hands on a copy immediately, while others will wonder why all the fuss over a handful of old articles. It will be your job then to press a worn copy of Neuromancer, Idoru, or Pattern Recognition into the hands of the yet-uninitiated, stand back, and let the man work his magic.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
