Zombie vs. Shark vs. Anthony Ha

"Until this moment, she would have had to slip a skin over her perceptions to point to the Andromeda galaxy in the sky. But now it seemed like the most important thing in the world that, two and a half million years away, somebody had shouted across the void before they died.
...
"'We're here,' Ferron said to the ancient light that spilled across the sky and did not pierce the shadow into which she descended. As her colleagues turned and stared, she repeated the words like a mantra. 'We're here too! And we heard you.'"

- Elizabeth Bear, "In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns," from Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2012

"Time has not softened my opinions on this matter. It is my belief that, as a rule, creatures of Happy's ilk — I am thinking here of canines and men both — more often run free than live caged, and it is in fact a world of mud and feces they desire,  a world with no Art in it, or anyone like him, a place where there is no talk of books or God or the worlds beyond this world, a place where the only communication is the hysterical barking of starving and hate-filled dogs."

- Joe Hill, "Pop Art," collected in American Fantastic Tales, volume 2

"'It's a knowledge guild,' he said soberly. 'The bosses, the big'uns, they can take all manner of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks. ... They can make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do. ..." Mick shrugged angrily, his lean shoulders denting the heavy of fabric of the greatcoat. 'And even a rob a hero's daughter of her virtue, if I'm not too bold in speaking of it.' He pressed her hand against his sleeve, a hard, trapping grip. 'But they can't ever take what you know, now can they Sybil? They can't ever take that."

- William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

"'Oh I don't know about,' he replied, implying that he had had several successful affairs to enhance her opinion of him. Similarly Rosanette did not confess to all her lovers, so that he would think more highly of her. For in the midst of the most intimate confidences, false shame, delicacy, or pity always impose a certain reticence. We come across precipices or morasses, in ourselves or in the other person, which bring us to a halt; in any case, we feel that we would not be understood; it is difficult to express anything exactly; perfect unions, for that reason are rare.

"The poor Marshall had never known anything better than this."

- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, translated by Robert Baldick and Geoffrey Wall

"A lot of people now—even people much younger than James Wolcott—dream of a lost moment when the opportunities were truly 'hidden like Easter eggs,' when the paths were not yet mapped and overrun. How can we be expected to create properly, the thinking goes, without the tools of past success? How can we write without the old serious publications, make movies without risk-taking Hollywood producers, live without cheap urban housing, discover art without the underground, make a career without the circulation-desk jobs?

"Kael's great achievement was to fight this way of thinking, to persuade her readers that work is always done with the machinery at hand."

- from "What She Said: The Doings and Undoings of Pauline Kael" by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, Oct 24, 2011

Over the past couple of weeks, I filled one of the big gaps in my science fictional CV — I finally read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

It was a strange experience. During the book's first half, I was completely in love with every sentence, to the point where I would try describing it to friends, starting in pretension and eventually sliding into incoherence. (I think I managed to avoid using phrases like "the human condition," but only barely.) It was thrilling to watch Gibson deploy the same skills he used to convince readers of Neuromancer's future, but this time to tour London and the Internet, circa 2002, through the eyes of a character who sees the patterns of popular culture more intensely and vividly than we do.

But as the story approached its end, it seemed to deflate, to move (to borrow John Clute's criticism of the sequel Spook Country) into a "time out" from "the felt chaos of the world." When I closed the book, I thought, "Well, that was ... fine." I would absolutely recommend it, because it's an ambitious, partially successful work from a formidably talented writer, but, unlike Neuromancer, I don't think it will stick with me.

There are a couple of problems here. For one, Gibson spends too much time running through the plot, which is perfectly fine as plots go, but one that's considerably less interesting than his exploration of setting and character. And as is almost always the case, the answering of questions (Who created the mysterious footage that haunts the first half of the book, and why?) feels like a let down compared to the mystery itself, no matter how clever those answers are.

I wonder if my real complaint is with the model that Gibson has chosen. Neuromancer, famously, was based on film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, specifically The Big Sleep. Judging from Gibson's recent comments on Neuromancer, he may have started chafing against some of the clichés and limitations of the noir mode, but that doesn't mean Pattern Recognition breaks free from all generic models. In its globetrotting, its blank-check expense-account that finances said globetrotting, and in its final determination to tie up all plot threads, the book behaves like a techno-thriller, albeit one that's more realistic than anything by Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton.

Cliched though they may be, I can't help but prefer the rain-soaked, neon-bathed endings of Neuromancer and stories like "Burning Chrome" to the clear-as-day, let-me-explain resolution of Pattern Recognition. In their melancholy way, they give a sense of a world that remains open, rather than a book that has shut.

"People still use words like 'middlebrow' and 'kitsch' as terms of disapprobation, even if they don't remember the Marxist tree from which those apples long ago fell. This is because aesthetic preferences are always tied up with anxieties about social status. I can't help judging you by the novel you're reading on the plane or the wallpaper in your house. (You have wallpaper?) If we had no social invidiousness, we would probably have no art — or, at least, we would have a very different economy of art. People like to debate the merits of what they read and see and hear, and to pretend to think ill of those who differ. It's part of the game. The college freshman who declares herself a relativist in philosophy class by day will argue all night about whether Band X is better than Band Y."

— from "Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald's war on Midcult" by Louis Menand, from the Sept. 5, 2011 New Yorker

"Drawing, I now think, need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment. Without the one right tilt in true spatial time, there's nothing to see. And that's so even if the skill is cerebral, the time told abstract. Our (reluctant) admiration goes to people who can do things we can't. We know we can't do them when we try and fail.

"Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private."

- from "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, in the June 27, 2011 issue of the New Yorker

GIBSON: Today I could write a version of Neuromancer where you'd see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldn't be science fiction. With the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldn't have been able to do that, and, of course, I didn't know what it would be like.

INTERVIEWER: What was needed that you were missing?

GIBSON: I didn't have the emotional range. i could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows -- no middle. It's taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let's go rob a Chinese corporation -- cool!

- from the interview with William Gibson in the latest issue of the Paris Review. The magazine includes an interview with Samuel Delany that's quite good too.

"In real life, barbarians (and peasants) are the least free of men -- bound by tradition, ridden by caste, fettered by superstitions, riddled by suspicion and foreboding of whatever is strange. 'City air makes free,' was the medieval saying, when city air literally did make free the runaway serf. City air still makes free the runaways from company towns, from plantations, from factory-farms, from subsistence farms, from migrant picker routes, from mining villages, from one-class suburbs.

"Owing to the mediation of cities, it became popularly possible to regard 'nature' as benign, ennobling and pure, and by extension to regard 'natural man' (take your pick of how 'natural') as so too. Opposed to this fictionalized purity, nobility and beneficence, cities, not being fictions, could be considered as seats of malignancy and -- obviously -- the enemies of nature. And once people begin looking at nature as if it were a nice big St. Bernard dog for the children, what could be more natural than the desire to bring this sentimental pet into the city too, so the city might get some nobility, purity and beneficence by association?

"There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious destroyers of wild and rural countryside."

-- from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs