Fantastic Metropolis

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003)

I tend to read a William Gibson book as a guided tour of his brain, and of my own. Not so much a story: rather, a chance to spend some quality time with an acute observer of what’s interesting in the clockwork of contemporary life. What are we thinking about that we don’t quite know we’re thinking about yet?

The fact that a Gibson book affects its environment in a Heisenbergian way adds spice to the process. Perhaps, I thought, when reading this for the first time, I should corner the market in Curta calculators, since Pattern Recognition fetishizes them. And their prices, substantial even then, have doubled on eBay since the book came out.

The book is of course now a year old, and we know what we are thinking. Looking back into it, I still find the opening scene fresh and clean: Cayce waking alone in a minimalist London apartment, savoring the few differences left between here and there, anywhere in the world: electric plugs, cars on the wrong side of the road, telephone handsets. An anti-Molly, Cayce wears oversized jeans and pricey simulations of workingmen’s clothing. She belongs to the millennial urban counterculture of people who make much more money than they need and flaunt it so subtly that to the uninitiated it’s invisible.

Cayce is detached but observant. Like Gibson, her livelihood depends on a strange radar for what will be interesting to the cool people some time in the future. Maybe that’s a misconception: maybe, by observing a pattern, or calling attention to an interesting anomaly, she brings it subliminally into some sphere of interest. The act of her observing it causes it to become cool. Heisenberg again.

If you ever wondered what William Gibson was driving at with the damned brand names—Molly’s Zeiss-Ikon eyes, Case’s Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, etc.—well, maybe you weren’t paying very much attention. You get another chance here. Cayce, though allergic to logos, dotes on her Buzz Rickson jacket, attends her Pilates classes, drinks Starbucks coffee. This makes perfect sense to me.

I enjoyed making Cayce’s acquaintance, and I enjoy renewing it by re-reading. Like Cayce, and so many other people, I loathe having logos on my clothing, and I fall asleep quite helplessly during Tarkovsky films. She’s very much like one of my friends.

Custer’s Last Jump, and Other Collaborations, Howard Waldrop

(Golden Gryphon Press, 2003)

The stories in this collection are great, of course. Some are recently published, some have been sprung from the prison of time, and one, the long-rumored collaboration between Howard Waldrop and Bruce Sterling, has never been published previously. The title story is the one that changed the ground rules for writing alternate history. These are stories of ideas—of complete profligacy with ideas—of inventing forms, pushing their envelopes, and making the rest of the world sit up and take notice.

But the stories are only half the story. This collection comes with context. Context bubbles irrepressibly out of Waldrop’s introductions to the stories. Context pours from the afterwards written by his collaborators. Waldrop’s accompanying essays pretend to be about the process of collaborating, but they too are really about context. And the context is of people who’ve known one another forever: people who grew up together, drew comics together, slept on one another’s couches, drank one another’s last beer, and after all that, still like one another.

Howard’s collaborators are among the people who made Austin a free-fire zone of SF ideas and original stories in the Seventies and Eighties: Bruce Sterling, Steven Utley, George R. R. Martin, Leigh Kennedy, Buddy Saunders, and astrophysicist Al Jackson. Howard says it’s “thirty years of the True History of SF.” Since he and Saunders were in the 7th grade together, and he and Martin first started corresponding in 1963, so I’d say Howard is shorting himself a decade there, but really, who’s counting?

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Eileen Gunn is a short-story writer, and the editor of the online science-fiction magazine The Infinite Matrix. She is also currently the chairman of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. Stable Strategies, and Others, a collection of her short stories, will be published by Tachyon Publications in the fall of 2004.