If you like Gibson, you will probably like this. It is a return to sci-fi after his most recent set of three books set in the nominal present (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History).
I loved those last three books of his, though I gather that I am in the minority on this.
This new one is quite nice. I will say that you are dropped in without much regard for explanation of what is going on, what these slang terms mean, what technology is active, etc. The charm of it is figuring it all out through inference.
There are two story lines, and one of them is set largely in the rural South of the U.S. This is a welcome change from Gibson’s usual urbanism. He also makes liberal use of a common sci-fi trope that (I think) he has not really addressed before.
Beyond this, it’s hard to talk about it without revealing spoilers. Most of the mainstream media reviews spoil it anyway. But be aware: after this post, spoilers are probable!
I might pick it up, I wasn’t that impressed by Pattern Recognition - and God, it seems even more dated than Neuromancer now - and never made it to the end of Spook Country. I’m glad he’s returned to SF.
Just starting to read this. Need to wait for evening that I am rested and alert because I am finding it difficult to get hold of. A little too much made up language and unknowable scenarios for reading after 14 hour work shifts. But I have loved Gibson through all of his explorations of different topics, so I’ll keep going.
Thanks for the heads-up, I didn’t know he had a new book out. To be honest, I didn’t care for anything he’s done after Idoru, but I may give this a shot.
I didn’t know it was out but I will give it a read! Thanks for letting us know!
I certainly loved the Sprawl trilogy the most and I feel that his work is sloping gently downhill, but I guess being introduced to the Sprawl trilogy so young gave them a sort of romance for me. It seems almost as though the further he goes along the closer the books mirror reality. He went from amazing but implausible to plausible but mundane. Not that his recent works are truly mundane but relative to his original setting.
The themes have been solid throughout and I’d love to see where this book lies on that spectrum.
He was asked at one point why his latest books were set in the present instead of the future and he said that technology had caught up to the type of stories he wanted to tell.
And I wonder how much influence his earlier stories had on that technology.
And here’s the follow up to that review; this contains comprehensive detailed spoilers of pretty much every last thing, so don’t click! (Unless you must.)
Just finished this book after it sat on my shelf for a long time. The book did feel like a return to familiar ground in some ways (little people getting caught up in events beyond their control). But the time travel aspect caught me off guard. Any idea of the dates involved? All it says in the book is that the London location is 70 years later than the southern US location.
We aren’t told but my guess is that the time at the US location must have been around 10 to 20 years from the present. Reasons:
A lot of familiar tech is pretty much the same (internet, cars, air transportation, mobile phones and guns).
A lot of society is very much the same (chain stores and restaurants, priest/politicians, teams of lawyers, antique pickers who walk around)
The cool tech (like haptic tattoos for the military/bad drugs) are probably not far off from today’s tech.
Oh whoops, I forgot - the invisibility suits that they had in the USA. They were the only thing that seemed a bit too far out of the technology of the times. But who knows, right?