JOURNALISM: Distrust That Particular Flavor, By William Gibson, Viking, 259pp. £12.99
BRIAN ENO famously said of The Velvet Underground's first album that only a few hundred people bought it but that every one of them formed a band. William Gibson's debut novel, Neuromancer, shifted significantly more units – six million since its publication in 1984 – and swept the sci-fi triple crown of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick awards, but it can be speculated that just about every geek who fell in love with its splicing of 1930s dirty noir and 1980s future shock went on to become a net obsessive or tech fetishist.
Two years before, Gibson's barnstorming short story Burning Chromewas among the first literary artifacts to dramatise a computer hack job as a visceral as well as virtual heist, conceptualising the net as a fourth dimension. It also spawned the first of many highly quotable Gibson epigrams: "The street finds its own use for things."
Since then, Gibson's works – three trilogies, a collection of short stories, a seminal steampunk collaboration with Bruce Sterling – have shutter-stopped the future as it looms ever closer in the windscreen. His most recent novels, Pattern Recognition (2003 ), Spook Country (2007 )and Zero History (2010 ),were set in a shady version of the now where anonymous guerrilla film-makers post Tarkovsky-like masterpieces online (YouTube before the fact) and military-industrial spooks infiltrate everything from street fashion to psychogeographical art installations. With these books, Gibson hopped the wall between the speculative/dystopian territories of JG Ballard and the Dangerous Visionsgeneration, into the chain-link urban grid patrolled by the postmodernist paranoids: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and pals.
Long-term aficionados might regard the publication of Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson's first nonfiction book, as long overdue. Surely Gibson, the Umberto Eco of future shock, could be banked on to produce an equivalent of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machinesor Iain Sinclair's Lights Outfor the Territory? But Distrust That Particular Flavoris altogether looser and untidier, a compendium of articles and reviews commissioned by Wired, Rolling Stoneand the New York Times, plus online essays and lectures written over the past two decades.
Rather than reshape these pieces into something approaching a purview, Gibson has opted to reproduce the material in its original, unrevised form. An accurate representation of his evolution as an essayist, sure, but the result is a patchier book. Those accustomed to Gibson's meticulously constructed sentences and carefully architected plots – Pattern Recognitionwas almost Victorian in its patience – will raise an eyebrow at apologetic endnotes like the one that accompanies My Own Private Tokyo, a travelogue filed for Wired: "The fiction writing space was occupied, this time, and my very cursory showing, in this piece, is the result of having no place, within myself, to do the work required. Really I should have found a way to spot-weld on some inner sidewalk, but all I managed to do was something that feels to me, in the end, literally phoned in." To which even the most devoted reader might respond: why not rewrite it, then? Or omit it altogether? And what's with all the commas? The kicker is, the piece is better than Gibson thinks it is.
Such qualms aside, any aficionado will read this collection in a day. Despite the author’s protests at his lack of journalistic skills – “I didn’t feel adequately professional, writing non-fiction. I felt as though I was being paid to solo on some instrument vaguely related to one I actually knew how to play” – his TV eye forensically tracks the changes that have transformed the counterculture into over-the- counter culture, diagnosing the present age as a postindustrial, postbohemian fugue in which the mass-marketing apparatus disrupts the common dreamtime with commercial breaks.
Travel pieces such as Disneyland with the Death Penalty(which resulted in Wiredmagazine's being banned in Singapore) and Modern Boysand Mobile Girls, a treatise on Japanese street culture, extrapolate with style on future urban sociology.
His reviews are more uneven: he's strong on Jorge Luis Borges and Peter Ackroyd, hardly trying with Steely Dan. By far the best writings here – Rocket Radio, Since 1948, Time Machine Cuba– are infused with the warm glow of the autobiographical: "I knew a man once whose teen years had been LA, jazz, the Forties. He spoke of afternoons he'd spent, utterly transported, playing 78 rpm recordings, 'worn down white' with repeated applications of a sharp steel stylus. That is, the shellac that carried the grooves on these originally black records was plain gone: What he must have been listening to could only have been the faintest approximations of the original sound. (Rationing affected steel phonograph records, he told me, desperate hipsters resorted to the spikes of the larger cactuses.) That man heard that music."
William Gibson's influence on the culture has been stealthy but immeasurable. He has forecast in his fictions everything from net ubiquity and red-top TV to mass satellite surveillance, virtual pop stars and the tech revolution. Distrust That Particular Flavoris a scrappy but still compelling history of the future, relayed in the present tense.
Peter Murphy is the author of John the Revelator(Faber). His second novel, Shall We Gather at the River,will be published in February next year
