American Novels

"“But do they really have singers who don’t exist?” “The idol-singers,” he said. “The idoru. Some of them are enormously popular.” “Do people kill themselves over them?” “I don’t know. They could do, I suppose.” “Do people marry them?”"

"Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System. “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response. “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.” And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts. The Russians’ mouths were open… “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.” But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard."

"Masahiko’s room…was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers…It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn’t they love to bathe?"

"Masahiko pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history…Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross…and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun…and the teacher had to call the police."

"Gomi Boy’s cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn’t gone through yet to digitally erase them."

"“What kind of hotel did you say this is?” Chia got into the elevator. “Love hotel,” Masahiko said. “What’s that?” Going up. “Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour…but people who come here sometimes wish to port. There is a reposting service that makes it very hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure.” Chia was looking at the round pink furry bed."

"His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants."

"So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future."

"In Market Street, the nameless man who haunts Laney's nodal configuration has just seen a girl. Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage. And he remembers, in that instant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is another century."

"That other country, waiting. He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country. Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he holds the wind in his hand. The door swings gently open. But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial…raises his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own."

"“What did Blackwell mean, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?” “Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.” Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”"

"Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy's eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely."

"“Walled City is of the net, but not on it," Masahiko said. "There are no laws here, only agreements.” “You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said. “Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile.”"

"Rydell had a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website."

"There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore."

"Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on. “It’s a virtual light display,” Freddie said, “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.” “Telepresence,” Rydell said. “Naw,” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”"

"“You got eyes” she said, and yawned in the middle of it, “like two piss-holes in a snowbank.”"

"Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there."

"Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit."

"A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives,” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse."

"When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain. “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”"

"The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough."

"“Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”"

"She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth."

"Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum."

"Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect…these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met."

"And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them. “Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?” The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?” “Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.” “Tokyo? Who told you that?” Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…” “Tell us” the dinosaur said. So Rydell did."

"”That Walled City, Zona, what is that?“ “They say it began as a shared 'killfile.' It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand? Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out.”"

"“You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar. Sally looked down. “Yeah.” “Why don’t you have it removed?” “Sometimes it’s good to remember.” “Being hurt?” “Being stupid.”"

"Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow. It’s called money, Lanette said."

"Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human."

"Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?"

"That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news."

"The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about…'When It Changed'?" "The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

"Kumiko looked into Colin's transparent green eyes…"What are you?" "A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese visitor in the United Kingdom." He winked at her. "Why did you wink?" The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. "I'm something else as well, yes. I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. I can't tell you exactly what I am, though, because I don't know.""

"Child, know me. And Angie felt her there, all at once, and knew her for what she was, Mamman Brigitte, Mademoiselle Brigitte, eldest of the dead. I have no cult, child, no special altar. You are summoned to my reposoir. Hear me. Your father drew vévés in your head: he drew them in a flesh that was not flesh. You were consecrated to Ezili Freda. Legba led you into the world to serve his own ends. But you were sent poison, child, a coup-poudre."

"He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did."

"I am no spy." "Then start being your own. If Tokyo's the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire."

"Petal called the city Smoke."

"The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita. For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse…The ghost woke to Kumiko's touch as they began their descent into Heathrow…a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots. "Hullo," the ghost said…"Name's Colin…Didn't get your name." "You aren't real," she said sternly. He shrugged."

"London was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care…Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire."

"It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of a nowhere sky. [Mona Lisa] had never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims."

"You've got the wrong data in you, for what you're meant to be," Tick said. "To be perfectly honest," Colin said, with a toss of his forelock, "I've suspected as much." "Been iced over…You're supposed to know fucking everything about Shakespeare, aren't you?" "Sorry," Colin said, "but I'm afraid that I do know fucking everything about Shakespeare." "Give us a sonnet, then." Something like dismay crossed Colin's face. "You're right."

"The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying."

"The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t."

"“As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.”"

"So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and all other artifacts of the style sometimes dubbed "cyberpunk." Those French guys, they got their end in early."

"It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths."

"Shit. He'd come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the icebreaker he'd rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in, punching for the base he'd chosen as his first live target…He'd only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but he already knew he wanted to be more than just some Barrytown hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was already over."

"The Finn was looking at Bobby now. “I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.""