thrillers

In my opinion, Bill Gibson has never written a bad book -- but even so, this is his best work in a long time. He sets his story in the present this time instead of the near future, but the feel of it is much the same. Which, I suppose is part of the point he wants to make; the future is now. Cayce Pollard is a thirty-something freelance marketing consultant with an unusual specialty: By applying her "allergy" to trademarks, she can predict very accurately whether corporate logos and branding will be successful in the marketplace. (Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man are especially toxic.) She's also a "footagehead," one of an international group of avid afficionados who study and endlessly analyze a series of short and highly affecting video clips discovered on the Internet. The two come together when the head of an important London ad agency (with his own agenda, naturally) hires her to uncover the creators of the footage. The third major thread in her life is contemplating the disappearance of her father, a retired CIA-connected security specialist in New York on the morning of September 11th. All these themes and plots weave themselves together in intriguing ways, and in Gibson's classic narrative style. But, aside from the story itself, much of the enjoyment one gets from Gibson's books is a result of his skill at description and simile, all of it highly quotable.

Odd how Gibson fiction is not much good, at the same time, seems better than any other fiction around.
Most fiction is about:
1) Girl does adultery to gain status: Wuthering heights, War & peace, Mme Bovary, (or Tales of Genji, to go back 1000 years)
2) Boy grows up and leaves town : Dubliners, Sons & lovers
3) Hornblower hoists sail, or the SciFi clones of, with space ships and Emperors

Gibson writes flat, detail obsessed studies of people in culture. In the area I am expert in (Cryptography) he actually gets details slightly wrong, so I guess he may be slightly wrong about Vodun, or designer luggage or other areas he details. Somehow it doesnt matter, his air of fascinated resignation, melancholy abstraction, loving attentive indifference, is weirdly compelling (I actually pay money for his work)
He famously defined "cyberspace" on a manual typewriter, so I suppose he wrote this work about branding wearing Kmart boat shoes.
I read it wearing a 1986 pulsar digital watch, the one with the black metal band, with a new faceplate, so no logo.
gbruno.tblog.com

This is the first novel in a long time that made no connection with me at all. I didn't care about the characters, much less like them. I couldn't understand exactly why the characters cared about "the footage" or why they were willing to go to such extremes over it. But I kept hoping that by the end of the novel the author would put it all together and make me see why they cared so much. He didn't, and I was glad that it was over.