quote:

Originally posted by Hasa:
What is a 'rize'?

I couldn't find that on the net.

don't know. some kind of short for medication? a sweet? i have half a recollection of it being mentioned in one of the other extracts.

editengine posts in the he blogs thread about rize

Rizatriptan comes in foil packets to treat migraine

ativan also is known as Lorazepam- an anti anxiety agent , but doesn't seem to match the kind of effect Milgrim feels either
rizatriptan

WG's blog made me look again- Rize is a brandname for a tranquilizer called Clotiazepam (Clozan, Distensan, Rize, Rizen, Tienor, Trecalmo, Veratran )

found it here in the Ineternational Benzodiazipine chart

That makes sense.

The act of creation of a coherent new world from a series of half-understood fragments must be such a stressful business as to require a tranquilliser of some kind. This, in my opinion is why God gave us alcohol. The use of anything more complex chemically is probably not a good idea. Didn't he say that somewhere?

Audrey

quote:

Originally posted by Audrey Wylfing:
That makes sense.
in my opinion is why God gave us alcohol. The use of anything more complex chemically is probably not a good idea. Didn't he say that somewhere?



Audrey

I am not sure . I do know that Neil Stephenson did say something just like that in "Zodiac".

Of course, that's it. I expect it was WGs mention of a Zodiac in one of the fragments that put it into my mind.

THEIR DIFFERENT DRUMMER

This new excerpt is strange to me on a bunch o'different levels. Surrealer and surrealer.

lets hear it for strange! woo!

though i guess thats the joy of fragments, you lose context and what makes them make sense.

The Eugene Future Bag post melded with the axe handle into a song...Careful with that Axe Eugene...

maybe we should be renaming this the spook country fetish forum then?

Hmm. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

spook country - and who was the obvious spook in PR, that we've already had peripherals to with the blue ant and "pamela". hmm. dorotea would be a curious tangent to take, though nothing stopping her being supporting cast if she does crop up.

quote:

Originally posted by remote:
maybe we should be renaming this the spook country fetish forum then?

May have been a joke to start with, but _Spook Country_ is the best title I've heard in a long time. Sticks to you like pine resin from the gap And if for some reason the title changes anyone who sees my copy will see _Spook Country_ scrawled across the cover in Sharpie.

So, I'm all for renaming the thread, remote.

Yours is the power, Remote, at least within this thread.

José

I don't know about the rest of you, but the phrase "Spook Country" scares the shit out of me.

It helps knowing the title of the book and that spook can either be used as in spirits and ghosts or as in spies and espionage. To me, it looks like there are three separate story lines going on.

The first deals with Hollis Henry, a female character who was once married to Inchmale. My guess is she is working freelance for Blue Ant as an art reporter and that when she is called K.T. in "The MacGuffin" it's a typo that should have been PT. Inchmale is some kind of performer. Odile must have some connection to Blue Ant, which was a company from the previous book, Pattern Recognition. I think when he said that the car was like Pamela's (as in the Pamela that used to work at Blue Ant but got fired) it doesn't necessarily mean Pamela is in the story or still works at Blue Ant.

The second line deals with Tito, who appears to be part of a Santeria cult. It looks like he can communicate with "the Guerros" (the warriors) who look similar to the spirits in Count Zero to me. He seams to have some spy/martial art training along with his religious training. Could Ochun be Tito's Grandfather? Why else would a person be in a vase unless he were ashes or disembodied somehow? The fact that Ochun owned many houses implies that he was a human being.

The third story line looks to be about two spies named Brown and Milgrim.

I love the writing style of the snippets Gibson shared.

Welcome OpticalVoodoo. I hope you are as anxiously awaiting the book as the rest of us are!

Ochun is a Voodou goddess. She represents beauty and vanity. Having many 'houses' may mean that she lives in many places, i.e. in the hearts of many people.

I find it interesting the way that Gibson first picked up on Voodou for Count Zero after seeing something about it in the National Geographic, but then it seems to have exerted a continual draw on cyber-fiction writers (and post-cyber-fiction, whatever that may be). I asked Jon Courtenay-Grimwood about this, because he uses Voodou in some of his books, and he says that it appeals to the cyberpunk mentality because it has similarities on a base level: Voodou is about practicality and forming a working method for interactions between a non-physical and physical world.

Given that WG has said he's working with characters that he thinks of as the modern-day equivalent of the Neuromancer hackers, I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that Voodou has raised its head again. It's interesting though; do we always need to use existing paradigms to help us understand things that are beyond us? When we didn't think in scientific terms, Odin made the thunder in the sky, but science came along and normalised it. Maybe 'cyberspace' is like the sky, and the hacker-priests are going back to old myths to explain how it all works the the uncomprehending masses.