Is it me, or have the reaction and comment on Spook Country been much less intense than they were on Pattern Recognition?

I seem to remember a positive blizzard of topics following PR's publication, much more activity than Spook Country has roused.

Am I right, or can someone demonstrate otherwise?

Hey, I tried, but the peeps, they just didn't want to discuss as much...

I made a bunch of threads.

Also, SC had less emotional resonance than PR I think. Cayce was one of the most empathetic characters Bill's done. that might be part of it, And the political aspects of the book have, for some, overshadowed what I consider to be the more important ontic observations about our shifting definitions of self/reality.

I would agree about the emotional resonance, at least for me personally. I just wasn't as moved by the characters in SC as much as by PR. Now this isn't to say I didn't like it, but rather it's kind of like preferring one meal over another at your favorite restaurant, they both might be great, but you have a favorite.

But I think there was a fair amount of significant observations made in the book (SC) which we barley touched on.

Everyone sort of thought that the VR was, you know, cool and all, but we never delved into the significance of "real" space being relcaimed by the populous via the virtual.

We didn't get very deep into to Bigend's observations about having gone through the screen and what that means for collective reality.

And we didn't have much to say about the residual celebrity self which persists beyond the artist's career and, in River's case, beyond his life nor how that speaks to the American desire for heroic, persistent and/or fixed identity. Or how we, as a culture, ascribe an collective identity by mute consensus to said celebrity if effect, create a proxy national identity at least as visible as what we project as our national ideology and, in recent years, more believable.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

And we didn't have much to say about the residual celebrity self which persists beyond the artist's career and, in River's case, beyond his life nor how that speaks to the American desire for heroic, persistent and/or fixed identity. Or how we, as a culture, ascribe an collective identity by mute consensus to said celebrity if effect, create a proxy national identity at least as visible as what we project as our national ideology and, in recent years, more believable.

a lot of that is covered by the idea of mediated identity which was covered in the past.

and maybe there will be more activity once the paper back and foreign editions start to propagate?

i need to re-read anyway.

I think part of the appeal of PR was the single character viewpoint - viz. Cayce - where SC returned to multiple viewpoints. In fact, both Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition were single person viewpoints, and have been, in my opinion, the most influential of WG's books.

I can't seem to shake the feeling like something is missing with Spook Country. I don't know who/what is doing the missing - me or the book.

Chances are it's me, so I'm cracking it open for read #3.

quote:

Is it me, or have the reaction and comment on Spook Country been much less intense than they were on Pattern Recognition?

Thought the same just recently. Maybe that the board has become different since PR. More of a social space than a mostly ''Gibson/SF" place...
Who knows?

We've changed as a species. Rather than discussing connections in the book as a social act, we've become solitary creatures Googling concepts.

As we still need the social interaction we create things that aren't currently Googleable.

quote:

Originally posted by Fashionpolice:
We've changed as a species. Rather than discussing connections in the book as a social act, we've become solitary creatures Googling concepts.

As we still need the social interaction we create things that aren't currently Googleable.

So, what shall we call these Googleable items?

Volunteer workers of the meme factory unite!

Cultural detritus.

The non Googlable are Neoloogleisms.

Can we measure the pace of culture by how long a new concept takes to becoming suitably Googable?

quote:

Originally posted by Fashionpolice:
We've changed as a species. Rather than discussing connections in the book as a social act, we've become solitary creatures Googling concepts.

As we still need the social interaction we create things that aren't currently Googleable.

Yeah: I think PR, happily, appeared during the 'board's settling in period. You have a bunch of people not only discovering a new book but also discovering new people. Of course there will be excitement about both.

Now... I don't know. I tend to let things sit for a while: it took about three years for me to be ready to write about PR, let alone write about it on an internet message board. It will be the same with Spook Country, which I rate as equally successful as PR, but in different ways. It will take a few more reads before I settle on *how*, and I tend to keep my own counsel on such things until I'm ready to express my ideas.

I wonder if there is a subconscious undercurrent of waiting for the "trilogy" to be complete before full meaning is construed.

I'm still considering "cultural detritus"... which from an absolute point of view could encompass everything. But I don't think that is what you meant.

It's ringing a bell somewhere... The idea that the death knell of subcultural movements is the instant it enters mainstream awareness. Makes sense to me.

So how does Googlibility fit into this idea?

Speaking of culture detritus and speed-

Harmonically, I wrote a short a while back that involved the terms 'ghost cultural detritus gibson dating', Googlable as such, and probably entered the G-pool faster than you could walk down a coastal boulevard in hot winds of abrasive particle.

I think that SC is a book WG wrote for few people (perhaps mostly for himself). Other works, like Neuromancer, were written "for the masses".

WG, along the time mastered the style of creating parallel plots that converge to a common end.

In the Sprawl trilogy and in the Bridge trilogy the ideas were focused in concepts of (a) define and separate what is real and what is virtual (b)what is intelligent life? {c} Is it possible to create "artificial intelligent life"? (d) is it possible to "store life" under virtual reality? (e) Is it possible to embody an "artificial intelligent life" in the "real world" (ie, is it possible to play God?)

In his last works, he decided to abandon the "metaphysical studies" and land in the grounds of "the present state of civilization". He was better accepted in PR for a number of reasons: (a) the way the story develops is closer to previous works, (b) the "soup opera" background (the footage quest, glamorous characters) was present, (c) the story didn't touch neuralgic points as 9/11, missing people, Latin (semi)clandestines, spook agencies acting violently inside the country, etc.

In my opinion, as a work of art SC is better than PR. It has more subtleties, more content, the structure is better and more challenging. A work that will be better appreciated in the future, when the cultural wounds of the first "semi-absolutist" government of USA are healed.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: cb4(r2)3t0,

I would also say that PR was, after all, a pretty big break from the past, in that it was his first-ever novel set in the past, instead of the future, so probably there was more to wrap your head around. Now we have the precedent of PR to understand SC with. But I dunno because I wasn't here when PR came out, o course.

Am I the only one who is not really interested in Googling stuff in books?

quote:

Originally posted by Gustave:
I'm still considering "cultural detritus"... which from an absolute point of view could encompass everything. But I don't think that is what you meant.

It's ringing a bell somewhere... The idea that the death knell of subcultural movements is the instant it enters mainstream awareness. Makes sense to me.

So how does Googlibility fit into this idea?

Googlibility (SP?) empowers a certain immediacy of the conversion you're talking about. There isn't in effect any period of time which things aren't universally realized anymore.

One has to unplug oneself from the world in order to preserve the rarity of any concept anymore. As soon as it reahces the world (internet) it not only become mainstream it becomes publicly owned. Reality become a consensus in a more trackable way and nothing is really independent.

Not that it ever was, but the perception that it was is no longer viable.

quote:

Originally posted by TwiliteMinotaur:

Harmonically, I wrote a short a while back that involved the terms 'ghost cultural detritus gibson dating'...

Is that a kind of temporality in which everything "new" becomes immediately and irrevocably dated or a new match making service you're offering?

quote:

Originally posted by cbarreto:
I think that SC is a book WG wrote for few people (perhaps mostly for himself). Other works, like Neuromancer, were written "for the masses".

WG, along the time mastered the style of creating parallel plots that converge to a common end.

In the Sprawl trilogy and in the Bridge trilogy the ideas were focused in concepts of (a) define and separate what is real and what is virtual (b)what is intelligent life? {c} Is it possible to create "artificial intelligent life"? (d) is it possible to "store life" under virtual reality? (e) Is it possible to embody an "artificial intelligent life" in the "real world" (ie, is it possible to play God?)

I would contend that what he did in the Sprawl trilogy was position man as a kind of demiurge who, conversely, created God. But not in a fictitious and compensatory way. man creates the matrix and the matrix becomes self aware thus making the planet self aware and for the first time able to view it's own totality.

At which point it promptly leaves for Alpha Centauri which certainly says somehting baout hwta it saw.

quote:

In his last works, he decided to abandon the "metaphysical studies" and land in the grounds of "the present state of civilization". He was better accepted in PR for a number of reasons: (a) the way the story develops is closer to previous works, (b) the "soup opera" background (the footage quest, glamorous characters) was present, (c) the story didn't touch neuralgic points as 9/11, missing people, Latin (semi)clandestines, spook agencies acting violently inside the country, etc.

PR is all about metaphysics. I keep saying this. It's The Crying of Lot 49 which was about the potential for genuine meaning in the world.

The creator of the footage is the God analog.

The completists argue for a divine plan while Cayce and hers argue for a lack of intentionality in the universe.

People in the novel are on a grail quest, determining whether teleology is real or whether human pattern recognition imposes it upon the world.

Who here has read The Crying of Lot 49?

Foucault's Pendulum?

Pattern Recognition is in the same vein. It's an allegory, broadly speaking, about man's search for meaning.

Int he book he even says how close to theology the FFF debates get, that's a pretty clear telegraph of one of his underlying themes at work.