William Gibson Books www.williamgibsonboard.com www.williamgibsonboard.com Spook Country *SPOILERS OK* Sex in Spook Country
www.williamgibsonboard.com www.williamgibsonboard.com Spook Country *SPOILERS OK* Sex in Spook CountryPage 1 2
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One of the things we discussed in London (but I at least did not go so far to mention it to WG) was how little sex, and how elliptic its presentation, there is in SC.
We have Odile possibly (well, very possibly) having sex with Heidi. And once again Odile living with Bigend in his house. Maybe she got to try Bigend's maglev bed. It would probably be the best use for such a bed... Despite Hollis' obvious attraction to Garreth, that looks like a doomed relationship, and anyway it takes place beyond the bounds of the book. Ideas, suggestions, lewd comments? Names. Numbers. Held as though they might be a map, a map back out of the underground. |
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I'm pretty sure Brown jacks-off with his gun in his "off' hand. "This is my rifle! This is my gun! This is for fighting! This is for fun!" --- Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing - more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. |
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I kind of like that there isn't any explicit or "current" sex in Gibson's novels. I think there is more than one writer out there who uses sex in the same way Gibson admitted to using technology advancements in Neuromancer--a way to get themselves out of a plot hole. The fact that Gibson can create these thoroughly engaging stories without resorting to sexual encounters is very impressive.
Of course, it could just be that he isn't comfortable writing about it, being all Southern Gentleman-like, and so doesn't put any of that kind of action in his stories. ______________________ "As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior orals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying." |
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Have you read Neuromancer?
That said there certainly isn't much in later novels, to be fair. |
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Hear Hear! I was under the impression that ordinary sex in the 21st century has become science-fictional, while celebrities and various commodity brands provide new objects of attraction for the unreleased sexual tension of a generation. I thought Gibson was writing about this, I had hoped sarcastically, in Idoru, where the whole plot revolved around the expressed intentions of a rock star to marry a software program. No one, that I recall, had sex in that novel either, and now i think now Gibson has extended this truly dystopian vision to our present circumstances. Everyone in his novels now has more immediate and intense personal relationships with their appliances than with other people. (Brown had his gun, Milgrim his Rize, Tito his Ipod, Hollis had her celebrity, and while she was not "in love" with it, Bigend picked her because he knew she could use it to manipulate those who knew and loved her as a celebrity, a type of human commodity.) While techno/media-fetishism has been a constant theme in Gibson's work, it seems with these last two novels that, finally, the machines have won.
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Although we do have to wait quite a bit for the actual deed, I think there is quite a lot of sexual tension throughout Pattern Recognition, (both main and secondary characters) and Cayce and most characters come across as a sexual people.
Maybe it is age and the sheer peculiarities, but only Odile comes across in Spook Country as someone with a sex drive, with Heidi, as always, doing what she does because she is who she is. All have probably good reasons, but all of them uninterested in sex? It is not a tendency, I think it is more particular of this book. Names. Numbers. Held as though they might be a map, a map back out of the underground. |
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I'd agree it's probably more particular of the book. In that full-blown sex would've tanged the flavor of Spook Country away from that muted grey-scale palette of subtle spooky rumor. Maybe.
Though there hasn't been 'sex scening' in his recent work, I think the wetter aspects are recognized and handled pretty well, especially in Patter Rec where you have an intricate and realistic depiction of real-time emotional (including sexual) movement, instead of a novel with a stiff-lipped love story subplot and money shot roughly stuffed in (as InfinityCircuit suggests seems common). This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur, ___________________________ All Tomorrow's Neuromancers Twilite Minotaur Productions The Hawaiian half of Minobot! |
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I dunno, I thought Heidi was just leading Odile on.
Was Tito not allowed to have a girlfriend because of protocol or something? A gentle-natured acrobatic Cuban-Chinese Johnny Depp lookalike musician who can speak three languages seems like sort of a catch to me. |
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Guys who only have one room to live in can be hesitant to bring women home with them....but yeah...a guy like that with black rope wrapped around him....who could resist??
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I can see Heidi doing that, if not for the ax-handle found next to Odile's bed |
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I suspect protocol demands agents know how to handles sexual matters. Ideally that requires that your first boy/girlfriend comes from the family. As Eusebio and Vianca.
Maybe there are no available cousins of the right age... Or he prefers the wrong gender, which is why he is so close with Alejandro... Names. Numbers. Held as though they might be a map, a map back out of the underground. |
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I don't know about the absence of sexual activity in the novel. But Freud would have views on the Mongolian Death Worm.
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Part of what I got from that novel was a frustration with the meat, if it did not connect to something larger. Cayce strikes me as someone looking for the rarity of events, not the physicality. |
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And yet, Cayce hooks up with ParkaBoy at the end, and the way the "boy/girl lego doesn't click" for her and Damien suggests (to me) a once fumbling friendly make-out session that didn't work and settled down to fast friendship... But I'm just throwing darts, really.
What's fantastic is that he lets all this be subtextual. If sex were important to describing the relationships, it would be described; I wonder if the relative dearth of explicit sex after Neuromancer is a result of his confidence that he can actually write a novel? If he was worried about boring his reader when he wrote Neuromancer, Case's sex with Molly may be a function of that (though fairly well character-motivated, providing the way back to the meat that Case wants so desperately to evade). Oh, right: and in Idoru, Laney and his boss (when he was at DatAmerica) have spectacularly bad-idea sex, and he and one of the techs (Arleigh? books aren't in front of me) definitely flirt toward the end of the novel. In Virtual Light, Rydell has sex with his "Cops in Trouble" producer/lawyer (the nanotech squid that serves for birth control and std barrier being memorable), and, of course, launches the ill-fated relationship with Chevette, which picks up again at the end of All Tomorrow's Parties. How can I forget the unforgettable mechanization of blow-jobs that happens when the shlub from whom Chevette steals the VL glasses is jet-lagged in his hotel, watching Russian porn? Or that he has another pair with which he apparently fornicates-in-simulacrum? This message has been edited. Last edited by: Justy, »» "Forget infinity. I've got books waiting for me to read them." — colin »»"Speculative novels of last Tuesday." — William Gibson |
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Writing effective erotic passages is a difficult task, especially because it is poised between our mindless erectile reaction to pornography, and the the need for exquisitely wrought prose on the other (especially since sex is so tactile and limbic, two experiential modes that especially challenge verbal description).
The loosening of literary mores of the past 100 years has created a bulging abundance of badly written and too often gratuitous sex scenes. Ironically, my first exposure to truly exalte4d literary prose was a chance exposure to the teenage erotic passages in Nabokov's "Ada", chapters 16 through 20. It engorgemed of *both* heads. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher |
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Reg Inchmale and his beautiful wife Angelina had sex - at least sometime in 2005, resulting in drooling baby Willy Inchmale!
------------------------ Talk about heteronormativity! |
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Right, and that's how I think of sex in Gibson's writing--we know it had to have happened, but we don't see it. It's been soooooo long since I've read the earlier novels that I'd forgotten those scenes entirely--shame on me! But my forgetting serves to show that sex isn't anything like a primary activity in his texts, I think. If it were more important or happened more often, then I'm sure I would have remembered. ______________________ "As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior orals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying." |
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Laney had sex with the lamp design editor in Ixtapa as well. At the end of the book he wakes up next to Arleigh. VL had Chevette thinkg about sex with Lowell. Sex is always present tangentially in one form or another. --- Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing - more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. |
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Well, Mona was a prostitute. --- Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing - more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. |
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Not necessarily a question of permission... Absorption in one's craft will do it. Shit, back when I was actively competing in pistol, I voluntarily gave up coffee. It's not really difficult for me to imagine a fringe-dwelling character like Tito as semi-deliberately celibate- but the breaking of that celibacy would definitely be quite plausible, and could generate much drama mileage. I just don't see the V.2007 Mr. Gibson mining that vein.  |
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