Philip K. Dick wrote treatises in aberrant psychology masquerading as science fiction. William Gibson started out writing treatises in aberrant technology under the same guise. Aberration, though, has a way of domesticating itself. It was Gibson who coined the term “cyberspace.” In the years since his first, and still best-known, novel, “Neuromancer” (1984), his fiction has evolved into something quite different. Gibson now writes treatises in aberrant sociology masquerading as . . . well, part of the pleasure they afford is how they elude classification.
Bold fashion statement
Part thriller, part spy novel, this latest piece of Gibson’s trilogy set in the neurotic now holds a mirror to our consumer culture
The two novels subsequent to “Neuromancer,’’ “Count Zero” (1986) and “Mona Lisa Overdrive” (1988) are recognizably science fiction. Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy — “Virtual Light” (1993), “Idoru” (1996), and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (1999) — takes place in a dystopian near future. There’s a fair amount of technological flummery, but mood matters far more than machinery.
Gibson’s latest trilogy is set in an arrestingly anxious present. It consists of “Pattern Recognition” (2003), “Spook Country” (2007), and his newest, “Zero History.” They abandon science fiction altogether, even if the novels retain their predecessors’ fluorescent-lit, gunmetal feel. The trilogy combines elements of thriller, mystery, and spy novel, though the unblinking disquiet of Gibson’s sensibility has far more in common with Don DeLillo than John le Carré. What these novels offer, as Gibson writes of a BBC newscast, is “[e]arly-twenty-first-century quotidian, death-spiral subtexts kept well down in the mix.” Those subtexts are definitely there, though.
Gibson’s heroine in “Zero History,’’ Hollis Henry, was also the protagonist of “Spook Country.” (Having read the earlier books enriches the experience of reading “Zero History,” but isn’t required to make sense of it.) Hollis has been at loose ends for several years, since the break-up of the band she sang lead for, the Curfew. It sounds a bit like a ’90s version of the Velvet Underground, though Hollis is nothing like Nico. Intelligent and restrained, she’s a latter-day version of one of Henry James’s American women abroad (the novel is largely set in London): an Isabel Archer able to fend for herself, a Daisy Miller with access to quinine.
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