Zero History
I’m reading William Gibson’s latest novel Zero History and it’s a great book. I had just finished reading Spook Country prior to picking up Zero History (i didn’t enjoy that one as much as Zero History, or Pattern Recognition for that matter), and many protagonists from Spook Country return in Gibson’s latest novel, so they feel familiar. I had also read tons of commentary, reviews and interviews with the author before picking up Zero History, which makes for interesting reading, because i’ve been familiar with its themes and general plot way before turning the first page. Reading it now feels like filling in the missing pieces. Having read all the commentary beforehand makes the book seem almost mundane in certain parts, and i don’t mean to denigrate with that because i’m still enjoying it tremendously.
My favorite piece of commentary is James Bridle’s piece on Network Realism, which seems to be quite fitting for my reading experience:
Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.
Zero History is Network Realism because of the way that it talks about the world, and the way its knowledge of the world is gathered and disseminated. Gibson seems to be navigating the spider graph of current reality as wikiracing does human knowledge.
I wonder how this kind of book will age. Which reminds me that it’s been quite some time since reading Pattern Recognition, so i might just as well find out myself once i’m done with Zero History.
The Future of the Book.
The Future of the Book, as imagined by IDEO, looks very shiny but doesn’t seem very practical:
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
The Nelson concept tries to help people properly assess a text by providing context and multiple perspectives. However, this doesn’t really solve the challenges of trust and authority in a world of cheap content distribution and evaporating barriers to entry. Just because the reader is provided with commentary, contrary opinions or statistical data doesn’t mean that he’ll have the time or want to critically assess the accuracy and correctness of a given text.
The Coupland concept seems completely pointless to me. There are some decent, if stale ideas in there, but the inscrutable decision to awkwardly tack this onto the social environment of the workspace ruins the whole concept.
The Alice concept, however, i rather like, even if it’s more akin to a videogame or interactive fiction than an actual book. (via)
