William Gibson Books

"I began to tell interviewers, somewhat testily, that I believed I could write a novel set in the present, our present, then, which would have exactly the affect of my supposed imaginary futures. Hadn’t J. G. Ballard declared Earth to be the real alien planet? Wasn’t the future now? So I did. In 2001, I was writing a book that became Pattern Recognition, my seventh novel…I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted."

"The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time. If Tito were to see one of those announcing the very latest, the most recent and terrible news, yet could know that it had always been there, fading, through every kind of weather, unnoticed until today, that might feel something like meeting the old man in Washington Square, beside the concrete chess tables, and carefully passing him an iPod, beneath a folded newspaper."

"Sensing an immense patience, and power, Tito imagined that this old man, for reasons of his own, disguised himself as a revenant from Lower Manhattan's past. Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then to draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity."

""The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”"

"“He knows he knows something nobody else does. Or thinks he does…whatever makes him mark the floor of that factory according to the GPS grid. He won’t sleep in the same square twice." “And that might be?” She hesitated. “Pirates,” he said. She looked from Bigend to the crowd around them, feeling like she’d fallen into someone else’s pitch meeting."

"“Real pirates,” Hubertus Bigend said, unsmiling. “Most of them, anyway. Some of them were part of a covert CIA maritime program. Stopping suspect cargo vessels to search for weapons of mass destruction.” “This isn’t bullshit, Mr. Bigend?” “It’s as expensively quasi-factual as I can afford it to be.""

"“In August 2003, one of these joint CIA-pirate operations boarded a freighter…The team’s interest centered on one particular container. They’d broken its seals, opened it, when orders came by radio to leave it. Leave the container. Leave the vessel…Apparently it’s still out there, somewhere,” Bigend said. “Like the Flying Dutchman.” “The pirates.” “Yes?” “Did they see what was in it?” “No.”"

"One of the bays of stone that lined the sides of this tremendous space was Eleggua’s, and this made clear by images in colored glass. A santero consulting a sheet of signs, among which would be found the numbers three and twenty-one, whereby the orisha recognizes himself and is recognized; a man climbing a pole to install a wiretap; another man studying the monitor of a computer. All images of ways in which the world and worlds are linked, and all these ways under the orisha. Tito glanced back, down the length of the nave, and saw a single figure, approaching. He looked up, to Ellegua’s window, where one man used something like a mouse, another a keyboard, though the shapes of these familiar things were archaic, unfamiliar. He asked to be protected. “Gutenberg,” the old man said, raising his hat to indicate the santero. “Samuel Morse sending the first message,” indicating the man using the mouse. “A lineman. A television set.” This last what Tito had taken for a monitor."

"“I’ve learned to value anomalous phenomena. Very peculiar things that people do, often secretly, have come to interest me in a certain way. I spend a lot of money, often, trying to understand those things. From them, sometimes, emerge Blue Ant’s most successful efforts…Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.” “Which means?” “Secrets,” said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, “are cool.”"

"Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal."

"There were ghosts in the Civil War trees, past Philadelphia."

"“Are you any closer to understanding who they are?” “They’re one of the smallest organized crime families operating in the United States. Maybe literally a family. Illegal facilitators, mainly smuggling. But a kind of boutique operation, very pricey. Mara Salvatrucha look like UPS in comparison. They’re Cuban-Chinese and they’re probably all illegals.” “Can’t you get ICE to roll them up for you?” “You have to find them first.""

"“She’s not supposed to be here,” said Bobby, sounding as though he was about to cry. “But you do know her, Bobby?” the old man asked. “The strange thing,” Garreth said, “is that I know her too. Not that we’ve met before. She’s Hollis Henry, from the Curfew.” The old man raised his eyebrows. “The curfew?” “Favorites of mine in college. A band.” “And you found her, just now, in the alley? Am I missing something, Garreth?” “At least it’s not Morrissey.”"

"The old man was as American as it got, but in what she thought of as some very recently archaic way. Someone who would’ve been in charge of something, in America, when grown-ups still ran things."

"A part of her business, henceforth, she’d decided, would be to be that chimney brick behind which the old man had chosen to hide the secret of what he’d done. Which apparently was still very much a secret… They had told her to expect that, though. The whole business had to play out initially in spook country, and might well remain there for a very long time…"

"“Look at that,” the old man said. “Exquisite. If you were in the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, and ordered poached eggs and bacon and toast, what you would be served would in no way differ from this. The presentation.” And he was right, she saw."

"Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city. “Their money’s heavy,” he said, dropping a loose warm mass of pound coins into her hand. “Buys many whores.”"

"Milgrim considered the dog-headed angels in Gay Dolphin Gift Cove…in the most thoroughgoing trove of roadside American souvenir kitsch he’d ever seen. How old did a place like this have to be, in America, to have “gay” in its name? Some percentage of the stock here, he judged, had been manufactured in Occupied Japan."

"In the amusement arcades, he judged, some of the machines were older than he was. And some of his own angels, not the better ones, spoke of an ancient and deeply impacted drug culture, ground down into the carnival grime of the place, interstitial and immortal; sun-damaged skin, tattoos unreadable, eyes that peered from faces suggestive of gas-station taxidermy."

"They were headed inland through a landscape that reminded Milgrim of driving somewhere near Los Angeles, to a destination you wouldn’t be particularly anxious to reach. This abundantly laned highway, lapped by the lots of outlet malls, a Home Depot the size of a cruise ship, theme restaurants. Though interstitial detritus still spoke stubbornly of maritime activity and the farming of tobacco. Fables from before the Anaheiming."

"“Was that a twelve-step program you were in, in Basel?” asked Sleight. “I don’t think so,” said Milgrim, assuming Sleight was referring to the number of times his blood had been changed."

"The door opened inward, revealing a football player with an Eighties porn haircut."

"“Someone,” Bigend said, “is developing what may prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision.” “You sound guarded in your appreciation.” “A certain genuinely provocative use of negative space,” he said, sounding still less pleased. "I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it…Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” “No,” Hollis said. He smiled, obviously pleased."

"“Twenty-ounce,” the handsomely graying professor of denim pronounced, the Gabriel Hounds jacket spread before her. “You like it?” “I haven’t tried it on.” “No?” The woman moved behind Hollis, helping her remove her coat. She picked up the jacket and helped Hollis into it. “Fit is very good…By-swing shoulders. Inside, elastic ribbons, pull it into shape. This detail is from HD Lee mechanic jacket, early Fifties.” “You don’t know where I could find…more of this brand?” Their eyes met, in the mirror. “You know ‘secret brand’? You understand?” “I think so,” Hollis said, doubtfully. “This is very secret brand,” the woman said. “I cannot help you.”"

"“Fucking hell,” hissed Clammy. “What are you doing here?” “Looking for denim,” Hollis said, then had to point back at the shop, having no idea what it was called, discovering simultaneously that it apparently had no sign. “Gabriel Hounds. They don’t have any.” Clammy’s eyebrows might have gone up, beneath his black beanie. “Next to fucking impossible to find,” he pronounced, gravely. As if suddenly taking her, to her amazement and for the first time, seriously."

"“Know what? The salt of the fucking earth never tells you it’s the salt of the fucking earth. People who get scammed, they’re all people who don’t know that.”"

"There was something she found deeply peculiar about Milgrim's affect, even in this brief an exchange. He seemed genuinely mild, amiable, but also singularly alert, in some skewed way, as if there were something else looking out, around corners, swift and peripheral. "Why is Hubertus interested in fashion, now?” Hollis asked. “He isn’t. In any ordinary sense. That I know of.” And the obliquely-looking-out thing was there again, around that interior corner, and she felt its intelligence. “What is it, exactly, that you do, for him, around clothing? Are you a designer? A marketer?” “No. I notice things. I’m good with detail. I didn’t know that. It was something he pointed out to me.”"

"Milgrim looked up from the plate, both elements of his oddly fragmented self seeming for the first time to see her simultaneously. “Why don’t you sing?” “Because I don’t sing,” Hollis said. “But you were famous. You must have been. There was a poster.”"

"“Why did you take my picture?” Milgrim asked, unexpectedly bypassing his robot voice and sounding like a completely different person, the one you automatically and immediately arrest. “I’m obsessive,” Whitaker said. Milgrim blinked, shuddered."

"“I wish I had a book.” There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative. Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

"“What happened to your line?” Hollis asked. “Business happened…We crashed and burned. There might be a warehouse full of our last season in Seattle. If I could find it, get my hands on it, the eBay sales would be worth more money than we ever saw from the line.”"

"They don’t know they’re con men…wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience—that’s part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces…Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn’t know how to do, and not even realize he’s bullshitting about his own capabilities. It’s a special kind of gullibility…psychic tactical equipment. The Army put him through schools that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters. And he believed them."

""You can do sneaky-ass," Winnie said, "Instinct tells me. Whose phone are you using?…I just e-mailed the number to someone, and they’re telling me the GPS is very amusing. Unless you’ve taken up marathon randomized teleportation.”"

"Milgrim knew almost nothing about Fiona's mother, other than that she’d once been involved with Bigend, but he’d always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating."

"Simply in terms of ingredients, it’s about recent trends in the evolution of the psychology of luxury goods, crooked former Special Forces officers, corrupt military contractors, the wonderfully bizarre symbiotic relationship between designers of high-end snowboarding gear and manufacturers of military clothing, and the increasingly virtual nature of the global market."

"I called it "Zero History" because one of the characters has had a missing decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he hasn’t been up to much good, the past ten years…Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a credit rating, and the need to pay taxes. It’s also the first book I’ve written in which anyone gets engaged to be married."

"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."

"“Okay,” Arleigh said.“What are the nodal points?” Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds, except the things you see are really there.” “Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.” “It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”"

"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."

"If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his. He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk."

"Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative."

"“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.”"

"”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.”"

"Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that."

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

""And you are obsessed with her?" "Not with her…Cody Harwood. They're coming together, though. In San Francisco. And someone else. Leaves a sort of negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he's not there."

"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."