Sunday, September 21, 2003  

Pattern Recognition

I just finished reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, ostensibly for the first meeting of the Grand High Council book club (as someone pointed out, if you're creating a book club from members of your email list about a nerd-centric comedy show, you are through the looking glass), and I cannot adequately describe how overwhelmed I am with how Goddamned Good it is.

Gibson's always one of my favorites; he's one of those rare gifted writers who can pack such despair and loneliness into a sentence that I'm nearly breathless after every page, and he can do it while weaving one hell of a good yarn, to boot. I've always considered him to be an evolution of Dashiell Hammett, and he continues to write grindingly stark hard-boiled fiction with an added layer of soul and depth.

But this book is on a completely different level, both in terms of craftsmanship and of theme, which, let it be said, is a complex and heartrending exploration of art and soul and money in a techno-literate world.

I'm not going to turn my blog into a book report, but let me just get this out of my head: what I noticed most is that Gibson's still writing pretty much the same kind of story he always did, but somewhere in the last 15 years or so, the world's caught up to his imagination. This story's filled with the same archetypes he's used since Neuromancer, but instead of "console cowboys" and Yakuza types, he's got Google and the Russian mob, filling the same niche in the story, but being, obviously ever more plausible, because, well, they've finally gotten here, thankfully in time for him to write this book.

He's the kind of writer that at once inspires me equally to begin pouring words into my notebook and to throw my hands up in despair because I will never, EVER, be that good.

I'm just saying that the next Neal Stephenson fan who chats me up is going to get an earful about who's REALLY the alpha dog writer.