I picked up Mona Lisa overdrive in the library a few years ago becausue I had read that
Willim Gibson is a genius. After persuing it, I thought it was flar-flung, surfacey and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. About a week ago I had a chance encounter with the author at a Borders in Virginia where it happened that he was giving a reading. I got a little bored, but I went downstairs and started reading Spook Country. I thought he is a very poetic writer and I am going to read this later.

It may be you like the modern Gibson more than the 80s Gibson. The fact that Mona Lisa Overdrive is third in a trilogy might also have hurt. Finally, Mona Lisa Overdrive is much more explicitly Science Fiction. It makes deliberate use of the conventions of the genre, and makes barely any effort to make it easy for the reader to get themselves familiar. Neuromancer, for all it's deliberate future shock, does contain a lot more exposition about the environment, which probably makes it easier to understand for a first time reader.

Are you a big Science Fiction reader? People who like SF for... escapism is the word I suppose, the effect of being transported to somewhere different, anyway, people who like SF for that, probably like Neuromancer and the earlier books better than his recent books. On the other hand, people who find SF imaginings hard to swallow (is that maybe what you meant by "far-flung"?) probably like his newer stuff.

My feeling is that the poetry was there pretty much from the start. If anything, I'm finding Spook Country tries maybe a little too hard to be poetic in places. (Ooh, I'm going to get it for that one...)

Hi Sandra. Nice first post!
I found Neuromancer quite poetic, actually. But perhaps we don't have a common definition of "poetic"! I find any text with powerful conceptual/visual analogies of the type WG uses poetic.
I'm totally into SF (having been a PK Dick fan before being a WG fan), but I like both the "old" and the recent WG books.

quote:

Originally posted by colin:
... If anything, I'm finding Spook Country tries maybe a little too hard to be poetic in places. (Ooh, I'm going to get it for that one...)

I am GLAD I just beat you at define me 2.0-
How could you?
Consider yourself etrusced.
:-o
Edit: Codfish tries too hard to be poetic.
The Gibson NEVER even tries.

He just IS. He etruscs like an angel.

quote:

Originally posted by colin:
My feeling is that the poetry was there pretty much from the start.

Neuromancer is back on my reread pile again after reading Pattern Recognition and Spook Country - I'd noticed the poetic style more and more over the books but always focused on the story rather than how it was written, even during my first read of Pattern Recognition. Spook Country has given me a kick to look back and read them all again in a different way.

at times spook country feels ephemeral to me, as thought gibson has finally created the art object he has been writing about all these years. to a degree that relates to what i think colin means, that perhaps it feels like it tries too hard, for me its like it is no longer a novel, but an art piece constructed from words. that make sense?

quote:

Originally posted by remotespook:
at times spook country feels ephemeral to me, as thought gibson has finally created the art object he has been writing about all these years. to a degree that relates to what i think colin means, that perhaps it feels like it tries too hard, for me its like it is no longer a novel, but an art piece constructed from words. that make sense?

I see what you mean. I felt that the story was less important in Pattern Recognition than in Spook Country, but the way that Spook Country is constructed does feel more important.

However, I don't think the "art" is smoothly distributed - because of the bigger importance of story (at least to me) there are chunks of exposition that break from the poetical nature of other bits of the text. That said, the exposition is significantly more poetical in nature than most books I've read recently.

certainly there were parts where things turned around, where you were reading story instead of working your head through the construction. thats what keeps it a novel. and i guess its a balancing act.

I think part of the difference is that Pattern Recognition was a victim also of 9/11, so even though its story had nothing to do with it, the writer, and through him some characters, were sorely affected, which made the book a good book portraying some of what happened that day, without being at all a book about 9/11.

However Spook Country is a book with a mission. Gibson has the flimsiest of veneers between the book and the present he is writing about. Because, as his blogging in 2004 made clear, he will not be able to sleep if he does not feel he has tried to do something. In a way, SC is a propaganda book, but done by a master cool hunter rather than a marketing guru. Which is why it is clear who are the "cool" side.

So while PR felt like a tree that has survived being hit by lightning, and even become more interesting due to those scars, SC feels like a bonsai, grown and minimized to push a certain purpose.

Not to say there aren't moments of pure brilliance in there. I just finished chapter 16 (I think?) where Tito visits the cathedral. That chapter really hit the mark. I can see why it was one of the segments he put up on his blog.