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William Gibson Blew My Mind & I Bet He'll Do It Again
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William Gibson reads from his new book Spook Country tomorrow night at Vroman's. William freaking Gibson. A lot of people get pretty highbrow on Gibson, talking of sci-fi politics and his visionary take on the future of technology and culture. I simply stagger about in awe when I remember that he wrote Neuromancer and blew my mind with his depiction of our eerily possible future. The man created the word "cyberspace" for crying out loud.
I've not read any William Gibson since and I'm feeling a little low for it. The venerable Ed Park for the LA Times details what we'll miss if we don't read Spook Country poste haste:
Sentence for sentence, few authors equal Gibson's gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile -- people and products are nailed down with a beautiful precision approximating the platonic ideal of the catalog. An ex-bandmate now wears a " 'Bladerunner' soccer-mom look," a "Bluetoothed bouncer" patrols a bar and, when Gibson registers a "delirious surge of graffiti, a sort of street-fractal Hokusai wave," the phrasing is itself a delirious surge of pleasure-center prose."
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