That also meant we got in a visit to DreamHaven Books and Comics – a place worthy of a trip to Minneapolis on its own – and being readers as well as writers, we bought books.
Among the books I got were two I’d already read from the library, but wanted to read again and own, the most recent books by William Gibson: The Peripheral and Agency. And, since I came home to needing to deal with a few stressful things, I have now re-read them both.
(I note that one form of reading that we don’t talk about much is reading to escape responsibilities. I perfected this skill as a kid, and I still fall back on it.)
These books are a tour de force, masterpieces of invention and writing from an author whose skill is legendary. I first read Gibson when Neuromancer came out in the 1980s. He was one of the few male authors I read back then and the only one of the cyberpunk group I really appreciated.
On this re-read, I was in awe at the way he constructed the story
I loved The Peripheral when I first read it — I wrote about it here — and I loved it again this time. I don’t like Agency as much, but I still enjoyed the re-read. Part of that is the characters; I’m more inclined to appreciate people struggling to get by in a southern town in a dystopic near future than I am techbro adjacent folks in a San Francisco of my own timeline.
But this time around the books made me think about some other aspects of both the stories and how those things relate to the reality we’re living in now – a reality that seems to set up all too easily the “Jackpot” that underlies the books.
I can’t talk about this without getting into some spoilers, so I’m going to do a page break here in case you want to read the books first. I know they’ve been out quite awhile – The Peripheral was published in 2014 (and there was even a streaming series), Agency in 2020 – but I want to be polite to anyone who hasn’t read them as well as to recommend that you do so. Continue reading “Re-reading William Gibson”…