Entries tagged with “William Gibson” from Things You Don't Care About

So over the last few weeks I've been watching a fair bit of movies and TV simply because I have to spend about 4 hours a day lying in bed doing nothing.  In addition to watching all of the commentaries and extra features in my Freaks and Geeks boxed set (which, by the way, is well worth it -- I'm still horribly disappointed I never caught it when it was first airing and that it got canceled), I upped my Netflix subscription to two movies at a time to try and fill the hours.

The first bunch of DVDs I got were the third season of Forever Knight.  I'm more than willing to admit that the first two seasons of the show were a lot cheesier than I remembered (though I don't really regret having them on DVD), but the third season really struck me as a very Silk Stalkings-ified version of the show when I saw the first few episodes on USA (and promptly gave up on it, after staying up at weird hours to watch the second season).  I figured I might as well watch to see if it was as bad as I thought (and see the last episode, which I had never seen).  On the whole, it ended up being probably a little better than what I expected, but I think it was definitely still a big step down from the first two seasons, which had quite a few episodes that were far better than the usual late night syndicated junk.  Probably the worst change was the loss of John Kapelos and Deborah Duchene (Schanke and Janette) for Lisa Ryder and Ben Bass, something that always struck me as kind of a lowest-common-denominator move.  And the last episode was....well, really pretty disappointing and a definite downer.

That was followed, however, by probably the best find I've come across in quite a while, No Maps For These Territories, a documentary that's basically an hour and a half discussion with William Gibson on his writing, information age society, futurism, and a variety of other topics while he rides around in the back of a limo.  If you are a big Gibson fan (and I am), you will probably enjoy it; if you aren't that interested in William Gibson, there's no reason for you to see this movie (well, duh).  He talks about almost every aspect of his life, and his discussion of Neuromancer was especially interesting for me, going a long way towards explaining why it is so different from most of his other books.  I'll probably end up buying this one actually, simply because I didn't get enough time to really digest the movie or the associated extras (including more interview snippets that didn't make it into the body of the movie itself).  The only thing I can say is that the movie is made in such a way that it is a little more "artistic" than it had to be for me, since I was mostly interested in what he was saying and not the visuals of the movie.

The next on this list is Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone.  Honestly, if I hadn't been told that this was his first movie as a director, I would never have known.  Almost every aspect of the movie is done in a way that really shows a good eye for the camera and for getting the actors to really bring their characters to life.  I suspect that the fact that the movie takes place (and was shot in) Affleck's hometown of Boston helped contribute to this in the same way it did with Good Will Hunting; many of the people in this movie are simply residents of the Boston neighborhood where it was being shot.  The plot is well-written, and while I may agree slightly with Chesnut, who said it seemed a little convoluted for his tastes, I did not feel like the "twists" were just thrown in to be twists -- each one highlighted the moral choices the characters had to make.  Really, without them, the movie would not have been worth making because those twists are in the movie to highlight the central point.  I highly recommend seeing this movie, though I will say it will probably not leave you with a good feeling at the end.

Michael Clayton is a movie that probably won't leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling at the end either, but it too is a good movie.  Unlike Gone Baby Gone, though, this film feels a bit more formulaic and not nearly as authentic (but maybe it wasn't trying to be).  The performances, by George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Tilda Swinton most notably, were as good as I'd expect from actors of that caliber, and the writing for each scene was well done, but the plot that holds it all together, as Chesnut wrote in his capsule review, seems kind of like Another Lawyer Movie.  Still worth watching, though, and I think the actors and writers probably deserved their Oscar nominations, but on the other hand, I am glad that it didn't win the Best Picture Oscar, though so far I've only seen one of the other nominees.

Last for this installment was The Golden Compass, which I just watched the other night.  Obviously made as a Narnia-like attempt to cash in on the Lord of the Rings' success (which doesn't necessarily make it bad), this suffers from the fact that it feels like half of a movie and there was no guarantee the other half was going to get made.  The film's climax seems like should be about where the Mines of Moria scene was in Fellowship, but instead it ends with the film's real conflict hanging in the wind.  That being said, I didn't think the movie was really bad, it just felt like it fell short of what it was trying to be.  The CGI, which was a large part of the movie, was competently done, and for the most part looked real, and I liked the sort of Victorian steampunk style aesthetic.  It sounds like the sequel is still going to be made (largely due to its strength overseas, it sounds like), so maybe I'll like it more with the next part.  I was disappointed by how bare-bones the DVD is though; there's no commentary, no deleted scenes (and I know there were quite a few), no behind the scenes stuff.  For a movie like this, you'd think there'd at least be a little of that on the DVD, but maybe with the perceived failure of the movie at the box office no one wanted to put any money into it. 

So I've been meaning to do at least a couple short reviews on a few of the books I've read recently, but I just haven't had the time to really sit down and write out my thoughts on them.  I'm finally going to get around to this, and I apologize if they are a little vague; I left this go a bit too long and some of the details are a little fuzzy now.

Spook Country is first on the list.  William Gibson's latest, I saw it getting good reviews on RPGnet and decided to pick it up and try to figure out why I hadn't read anything by him in ages.  As I said before, Spook Country really felt like returning to a literary home for me; despite the fact that the book takes place in 2006, it is undeniably a cyberpunk book, and focuses on many of the same themes that are touched on in Neuromancer and his other books.  The writing style is very similar to what I remembered from the Sprawl trilogy, and as with everything I've read from him from Count Zero on, the book is constructed from multiple points of view that start out separate and slowly come together at the end.

While I have a harder time really describing too much what the story is about, simply because it encompasses so many themes, the one thing that seems to unify most of the plotlines in the book is the way technology, especially the internet, has intertwined with daily life in a way that is both similar and completely diferent from what Gibson envisioned in Neuromancer.  Gone are the neon cities, replaced with GPS and near-ubiquitous wireless networks that make things like locative art possible.  Buried somewhere in there is an espionage plot that touches on the kleptocracy of Iraq and the overreaching national security apparatus of the United States, but I get the feeling that is more of a medium in which Gibson is trying to use to explore these other concepts.

So, after reading Spook Country and really enjoying it, I decided to pick Virtual Light back up and try to figure out why I never really got into it when I first tried reading it (which must have been near when it was first published, back in 1993-94).  This time, I didn't have any problem getting into the book, and I am a bit baffled as to why I didn't like it when I tried before.  It didn't seem that much different, at least in style, from Neuromancer, with a much more straightforward action plot than Spook Country (though it doesn't start out that way).

I thought it was interesting that Gibson's three trilogies have been more and more contemporary as technology and society have become closer and closer to what he envisioned in his earlier works.  Virtual Light was especially interesting in the fact that when he wrote the book, it took place 12 years in the future, and when I was reading it, it took place 3 years in the past.  Gibson doesn't get the future quite right, of course, but it still rings pretty true and the book is filled with the immersively real places I've comes to expect from him -- the Bridge, the strange curio shop Berry looks into a job at, the messenger services offices, the party Chevette steals the VR glasses at, and the trailer community for the television oracle religious commune, for a few examples.

For some reason, the Bridge especially appeals to me.  In large part, I think that is because the Bridge is a community and a place built upon a historical artifact but also molded by the very people that live there, a fusion of old construction and new, one that feels very lived in and homey despite its obviously fragile and grungy state.  It's one reason that having a loft in a warehouse or some other reclaimed building appeals to me; it feels less artificial, more natural -- like a cave reclaimed from the wilderness, and certainly not sterile.

The plot of the novel also touches on this -- the hacker group that screws Berry over in the beginning of the novel and who saves him in the end is prompted to act to defend San Francisco, a place at least some of them call home and which also has that same aspect of being a new city built on the bones of the old, organically grown -- in contrast to the city that Sunshine wants to construct, which is going to be carefully sculpted from the ground up (despite the fact that it actually is going to be grown, by nanotechnology -- this is an artificial growth, not a natural process).  Once again, Gibson's plot is not nearly as gripping as the details and themes he explores.

The last book on this hit parade is Freakonomics, which I've wanted to read ever since I saw one of the authors, economist Steven Levitt, talking about it on the Daily Show a few years ago, but I never really got around to it.  My brother got it for Christmas a while back and I finally got around to borrowing it last weekend.  It's a quick (and for a book on economics, rather light) read, and it is probably one of the most interesting and thought-provoking books I've ever read.  I don't know that I really buy the "these are just the fact, you can take them as you will" tone that Levitt and Dubner try to set, at least entirely, but it does a good job of backing up the assertions it makes with facts and examples, so you can at least look into what they are saying if you want.

The best part of the book for me was how they tied in all sorts of anecdotes into wider studies and examples that push you to think just that much harder about the "common sense" things you pick up over your lifetime.  They also approach things very analytically, at least supposedly without any agenda or bias, which appeals to my brain (and, perhaps somewhat egotistically, it's what I think the "Caldari mindset" is), and it can lead to some seriously disturbing conclusions -- that all the innovative policing in the world matters less than legalized abortion, for instance (though the upshot of that chapter would seem to be that any method for preventing the birth of unwanted children would be beneficial).

It's not going to be the kind of book that changes the way you live your life, but it might make you think about things you wouldn't have otherwise questioned.  Well worth a read, even if you aren't that interested in economics (I found the stories about the way the KKK was undermined and the analysis of the Black Gangster Disciples business operation to be extremely interesting on their own).  And, if you want more from the authors in the same vein, they have a blog on the New York Times website.

Last week, I ordered two books from Amazon with my latest gift certificate, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Spook Country by William Gibson.  I read the PKD book first, since I have had trouble piercing a lot of Gibson's books in the past, ever since I read the sequels to Neuromancer.  It was good -- interesting at least, though it ends very abruptly and is as indecipherable as anything written by Dick.  A good effort at world building though, with a lot of interesting philosophical questions, something that I have pretty much come to expect from Dick's writing.

I started Spook Country this morning, and wow.  I haven't read anything by Gibson since I tried starting Virtual Light a long time ago and never managed to finish it.  I keep meaning to go back and reread Neuromancer again, but I haven't had the chance (and I can't find my copy -- I think I might have loaned it to someone).  However, just reading the first two chapters of Spook Country I remembered why I think he's such an amazing writer.  He has such a skill with metaphor, such an attention to detail and description, that it blows my mind just to think about.  When he describes something, he talks about it in a way that you would never think to describe it, but you can instantly picture what he means.  If he is able to do this reflexively, if that is how things just come to him, than I am supremely envious.  To me, it seems like each paragraph is perfectly crafted, like delicate etched glass, painstakingly designed and cut for hours or days.

Gibson's writing can be dense and sometimes impenetrable; like I said, I tried reading Virtual Light and I haven't managed to do so successfully yet.  His plots are sometimes so labyrinthine that you have to reread them a half dozen times before you really understand what's going on and his characters can sometimes be complete enigmas. Even so, there is no question, at least to me, that he is one of the best writers I have ever read.  Regardless of what you may say about him, you can't deny that every book he writes feels real, like he's just describing a scene that he is watching, one with infinite resolution -- you could read the fine print on every warning label, feel the ridges and cracks in every piece of grubby plastic, taste the ozone in every breath of air.  I almost feel like his current books, which are set in more or less the present day, are almost a waste of his talent.  I want to read about something new and different, completely separated from what I know and yet intimately familiar.  For me, as a writer, that is the ultimate challenge, and when someone can pull it off with such apparent ease, I have to simply sit back in awe.