Mudd Up!  

GIBSON´S SPAN

Just finished reading Hip: The History by John Leland, and William Gibson´s Virtual Light. Nimble books. I´ve been stunned by Gibson-- a large part of it due to his relation to future possibilities and sci-fi-y ideas: they emerge already naturalized in his texts, not like some precious overblown Big Concept or escapist tech-fantasy that WIRED will tap into to raise advertising revenue. No, the futureshock stuff is just there, part of the building blocks of his stories, and those ideas propel the narrative almost as much as the outward action. Like this extended engagement with The Bridge-- benevolent anarco-badlands aka the unzoned, upwardly ramshackle illogical conclusion to American westward frontier expansion. The Bridge stretches on the twisted post-earthquake remains of a bridge spanning San Fran & Oakland. Now disenfranchised people live there. The Law´s afraid to enter, and everything absolutely everything is recycled or resuscitated from some previous use. Stacked up, hammered or glued or tethered in place.

Gibson´s Bridge is like some crazy mongrel of downtown Osaka, a jungle filled with treehouses, Maghrebi medinas, pirate utopia plus the scurvy, a Danish squat where survivalist speedfreaks apply interpretive frameworks inherited from Naomi Klein and comic books onto postindustrial plumbing applications and/or welder-art, NYC´s Chinatown when you arrive on the Chinatown bus from a calmer city, and what the internet might be like if it were physical and poor.

Beehive, hustlers, no straight workers and no straight queens. Gibson writes it into existence vividly. The Bridge becomes a medium in the story as familiar as the specific characters doin´ there thing. This fiction opens space.

The book is set in a 2005 where the middle class has been ground into extinction, where AIDS has been cured via a gay prostitute (J. D. Shapely) who spread his non-lethal HIV strain via unprotected sex with hundreds--inoculating them. Christianity, variously televised and sectarian, convulses as millions believe Shapely was Jesus. All this stuff isn´t just there for show, though, Gibson draws it out smoothly; he´s a good writer and chooses to set his dramas in places that don´t yet exist, technically speaking. But he writes as naturally and coolly as if they could, allowing the futureshock to bleed into and comment on our present. Headspringers, headsprung.

Most public spaces have been purchased. Golden Gate park, renamed Skywalker, now charges steep admission. Police strongarm alongside rent-a-cop security firms. (Gibson thanks Mike Davis for the inspiration received from Davis´ powerful riff on L.A., City of Quartz).

Virtual Light isn´t as plainfacedly good as Gibson´s more recent Pattern Recognition, (which plays out like finely textured contemporary fiction), but it is sharp & fresh-feeling, more woozy, very well composed.