william-gibson-books

"But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it's all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing… My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready−to−wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

"The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline…And this, come to think of it, may be why the Garage Kubrick never made it into my book; I was never able to imagine him letting go of the act of creation long enough to emerge and interact with any other characters. But characters who miss the bus have a way of haunting their authors, and now, falling asleep at the Marmont, it comes to me: He's back, and I'm going to have to figure out where he fits in with this new technology."

"Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop…These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911—" "What happened in 1911?" the Rooster demands. Laney sighs. "I'm still not sure…Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there."

"She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon-based life form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates."

"The heart is a muscle," Bigend corrects. "You 'know' in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped−up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things."

"And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has."

"Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that."

"What he needed, Rydell thought, was something he could do that they weren't expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot, or anyway he should lose them, whoever they were. He'd had an instructor in Knoxville who'd liked to talk about lateral thinking…What it took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody, maybe even you, was expecting."

"Lucky Dragon Nanofax has a hatch on the front Boomzilla could fit through, he wanted to, and he wonders would that make more Boomzillas other places and could he trust those motherfuckers? If he could, he'd have a tight posse but he doesn't trust anybody, why should they?"

"There is that mirror−world ingestion of archaic substances, she thinks: People smoke, and drink as though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of honeymoon phase with cocaine."

"They won't think of us," Cayce says, choosing straight into it. "Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don't mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.” "Souls," repeats Bigend. "Of course we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile."

"You care passionately about this thing…That is what makes you so valuable. That and your talents, your allergies, your tame pathologies, the things that make you a secret legend in the world of marketing."

"Life is more difficult for the serious artist," allows Voytek, "Time is money, but also money is money."

""I'm going to level with you. I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pit bull's tested positive. Twice." She doesn't leave a message."

"They were there, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before. One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era…The other presented an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter… "Mr. Rydell," said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This is the Rooster." "Listen to me, Rydell," the Rooster said. "You are now responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?" "I don't know who you are. I'm not telling you anything." Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper answer." "In your situation," said the Rooster, "you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you." "We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources of the Walled City will be at your disposal in the coming crisis.""

"Someday he'll have his shit together right. He'll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him."

"Harwood smiles. "A number of major cities have these autonomous zones, and how a given city chooses to deal with the situation can impact drastically on that city's image. Copenhagen, for instance, was one of the first, and has done very well. Atlanta, I suppose, would be the classic example of what not to do." Harwood blinks."

"There were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood…everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she’d had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of… Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that."

""And I'm safer with you than I am with these guys you say are mercs?" "I think so, yes," the man said, frowning, as though he took the question very seriously. "You kill anybody else in the past forty-eight hours? "No, I did not." "Well," Rydell said, "I guess I'm with you. I'm sure not going to try to fight you." "That is wise," the man said."

"But the one who shines is there, and beside her another, less clear. "This is Mister Laney," she says, in the language of Silencio's mother. "You must help him. He needs to find a watch." It is a LeCoultre Futurematic, a back-winder, with wind reserve. Silencio knows its serial number, its bid history, its number in today's auction. "Someone is taking it away, and you must follow it." Silencio looks from the beautiful face of the Futurematic to the face of the woman. "You must find it for him.""

"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm…She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

"Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple−pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."

"But Cayce sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot−like form perched on the edge of a dealer's counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within. The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six."

""How do you think we look," Bigend asks, "to the future?" Bigend has a way of injecting these questions into conversations that he's grown tired of. Caltrops thrown down on the conversational highway; you can swerve or you can hit them, blow your tires, hope you'll keep going on the rims. He's been doing it through dinner and their pre-dinner drinks, and Cayce assumes he does it because he's the boss, and perhaps because he really does bore easily. It's like watching someone restlessly change channels, no more mercy to it than that."

"Bigend smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. "We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." Cayce blinks. "Do we have a past, then?" Stonestreet asks. "History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when," Bigend says. ”The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now." "You sound oracular." White teeth."

"Regardless, and regardless of everything else, the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever," Bigend said. "The numbers are amazing…" "Hubertus," carefully, "what exactly is the nature of your interest in this?" "Am I a true believer? That is your first question. Because you are one yourself…My passion is marketing, advertising, media strategy, and when I first discovered the footage, that is what responded in me. I saw attention focused daily on a product that may not even exist. You think that wouldn't get my attention?…And new. Somehow entirely new."

"She's down for a jack move. She'd never really been sure what Donny had meant when he'd say that; he said it when he was angry, or frustrated, and she's both. Jack moves. Context, with Donny, seemed to indicate that these were either deliberate but extremely lateral, thus taking the competition or opponent by surprise. Maybe it had to be improvisational and completely of the moment. East Lansing Zen."

"Each of the segments is of the same resolution, sufficient to allow theatrical projection," Boone said. "…Rendering is expensive, involves a lot of people, and would probably be impossible to keep a secret." "So the Garage Kubrick hypothesis is just a dream?" "Unless the maker has access to levels of technology that don't, as far as we know, exist yet. Assuming the footage is entirely computer−generated means that your maker either has de−engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation." "You're not in 'Garage Kubrick,' then," Cayce says, "you're in 'Spielberg's Closet': the supposition that the footage is being produced by someone who already has godlike production resources." "You buy it?" "No."

"She has been told to meet Ngemi beneath this clock, but is early, so she buys a tabloid, a bacon sandwich, and a Fanta… The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge…The tabloid doesn't go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford."

"National icons are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany's, and this not so much from a sense of historical evil…as from an awareness of a scary excess of design talent. Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well."

"San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities."

"Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love."

"Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature’s way of telling you you had too much money to begin with."

"The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt. The handles of a craftman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace."

"Everything to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he’d built Skinner’s funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, Fontaine had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner’s room."

"Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here."

"It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says. "Instead of what?" "Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies…And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct." "Extinct?" "We started picking them before they could ripen…as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."

"Harwood considers him from the distance behind his glasses. “Do you believe in the forces of history?” “I believe in what brings us to the moment,” Konrad says. “I seem to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe we are approaching one, drawn to it by the gravity of its strangeness. It is a moment in which everything and nothing will change…If the world is to be reborn, I wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today.”"

"Rydell watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated. He'd always dreamed of a special kind of grace…what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow…and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was."

""What did you do to that guy?" "I completed the movement he began when he struck you…His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever the spinal cord without contacting the vertebrae themselves." This in a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery of a new but convenient bus route."

"“[Harwood] is the richest man in the world and ahead of the curve. He’s an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it?” “No.” “We think he’s like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He’s trying to hack reality, but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him.”"

"Fontaine knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing."

"The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination…He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion."

"Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined."

"Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers."

"Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have been very good at what they've done, neither seeming to have the least idea of why. Google Cayce and you will find "coolhunter," and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a "sensitive" of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace."

""You follow the footage." His eyes narrowing… Damien maintains, half−seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century."

"Shorts, she thinks, drawing abreast of this trio, are somehow always wrong in London."

"She finds the Children's Crusade just as she remembers it. Damien's expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people…Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world's leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home."

"My novel Pattern Recognition was gestating, as I wrote this, the “Garage Kubrick” morphing from protagonist (or antagonist, or possibly just agonist) to MacGuffin, though I didn’t know it. Pattern Recognition would eventually manage to be published just ahead of the launch of YouTube, a very good thing considering certain of its plot points."