Book Review: New in Print

Zero History

by William Gibson
Putnam, 416 pp., $26.95

The words "William Gibson" and "fashion" don't often end up in the same sentence. Don't worry, the innovator of cyberpunk didn't get hooked on America's Next Top Model. If he has undergone any evolution, it's that the onetime king of modern sci-fi is becoming less Ray Bradbury and more John le Carré, with another novel about mercurial businessman Hubertus Bigend and his meta-PR agency, Blue Ant. Bigend is an enigma, and deliberately so – how else can you define a man whose favorite suit is a color that cannot be reproduced electronically? As the master string-puller of quasi-prequels Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Bigend has been a big, jovial, Belgian black hole, identifiable only by how he affects those caught by his gravity. His new fascination with military and faux-military garb brings a couple of Spook Country natives – faded rock star Hollis Henry and paranoid ex-junkie Milgrim – back within range of his event horizon. Like Bigend, Gibson is searching for what Hollis dubs the secret machines of history. Through the business mogul, Gibson continues his dissection of what makes modern culture tick: Not cash or product, but leverage, image, and information. It's delightfully impenetrable: Like Hollis and Milgrim, the reader is trying to crack a code, and Gibson has buried parts of the encryption keys throughout the three-novel sequence. As frustrating as that can be, the breakneck pace conceals fascinating hints about what sets those secret machines in motion. In this perfectly timed meditation on modern culture and up-to-the-minute economics – post-imperial, midrecession, eternally militarized – Gibson draws together the war fantasies of First World street kids in camo gear and billionaires who think they're security consultants. Meanwhile, his grasp of technology as a tool of culture (electronic wizardry that required bespoke mil-spec hardware in earlier books can now be done with an iPhone) remains flawless. Gibson has crafted a masterful novel of modern industrial espionage, where old-school dead drops have been replaced by private Twitter accounts.

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William Gibson will be signing copies of Zero History Wednesday, Sept. 15, 7pm, at Barnes & Noble, 10000 Research #158, 418-8985.