William Gibson Books www.williamgibsonboard.com www.williamgibsonboard.com News of the day & Current Issues Fragments of a Hologram Bill
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I am making this thread to collect the blog posts that give us a preview of the new novel. Here is the first one. Me want book now. CABINET (HAPPY NEW YEAR) posted 12:09 AM Inchmale’s club, in Portman Square, was called Cabinet. It was a peculiarly narrow place, apparently occupying half of the vertical volume of a townhouse whose expensively forgettable façade reminded her of a sleeping face. It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, left, half of the building, and she had formed the vague opinion that this might be a foundation of some kind, perhaps philanthropic in nature, or something dedicated to the advent of peace in the Middle East. Something hushed, she imagined, and faintly dusty. In any case there was nothing on the façade or in the foyer to indicate what that might be, no more than there was anything, really, to indicate that Cabinet was a club. There was an ornate desk, she supposed Victorian, at which sat one or another of the club’s quietly attentive employees, young men for the most part, often wearing tortoiseshell spectacles of the sort she suspected of having been carved from actual turtles. This message has been edited. Last edited by: UberDog, | ||
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It's the little things, like omitting 'that' before "she supposed Victorian", that let this rather more elongated prose still work a la Gib. Says me. And I oughta know: I wasn;t there when he wrote it, never talked or corresponded with him in any fashion, and am an uninformed schmuck of a fan. Beat THEM cred-chops, y'all! (Maybe a Hawaiian king could top 'em, but then, he's got that way cool headgear that's so hard to... wait for it... top.) Harmonica, Mon, Harmonica | |||
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"...a sleeping face." Classic Gib trope, echoing neatly, and probably subconsciously when written, off "expensively forgettable facade". expsensively forgettable facade O.mi.god. I;m posting at wigber again. Biochips, save me! Term my program! | |||
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HOLD THE COPROPHAGIA posted 7:52 PM They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper, decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely with slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, somehow ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s many artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she had read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. She took off her coat, hung it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to remove her shoes. The Piblokto Madness Bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria," she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivy to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,’ she added. | |||
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The characters: Hollis Henry, Hubertus Bigend, Reg Inchmale and Pamela Mainwaring seem to reappear from Spook Country and/or Pattern Recognition
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A couple of minor changes in THE GABRIEL HOUNDS fragment, following comments in the very lengthy HE BLOGS discussion thread: "ork-killing" changed to "orc-killing" "run-time" changed to "talk time" This message has been edited. Last edited by: Memetic Engineer, | |||
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William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina.
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CABINET HOLD THE COPROPHAGIA CRICKET THE GABRIEL HOUNDS FIFTEEN SPECIES
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Thursday, February 12, 2009 BOHEMIAN posted 6:28 PM “You’re a bohemian,” he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate. “What does that mean?” “You’ve scarcely ever had held a salaried position. You’re freelance. Have always been freelance. You’ve accumulated no real property.” “Not entirely through want of trying,” she reminded him. “No,” he said, but when you try, your heart’s scarcely in it. I’m a bohemian myself.” “Hurbertus, you’re easily the richest person I’ve ever met.” This was, she suspected, perhaps not quite literally true, but anyone she’d met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had also been exceptionally dull company. “It’s a by-product,” he said, carefully. “And one of the thing’s it’s a by-product of is my fundamental disinterest in wealth.” And, really, she knew that she believed him, at least about that. It was true, and it did things to his capacity for risk-taking. And made him, she knew from experience, peculiarly dangerous to be around. “My mother was a bohemian,” he said. “Phaedra,” she remembered, somehow. “I made her old age as comfortable as possible,” he said. “That isn’t always the case, with bohemians. Reg is quite the model of the successful bohemian, isn’t he?” “I suppose he is.” “He’s always working on something, Reg. Always. Always something new.” He looked at her, across the heavy silver pots. “Are you?” And he had her, then, she knew. Looking straight into her. “No,” she said, there being nothing else really to say. “You should be,” he said. “The secret, of course, is that it doesn’t really matter what it is. Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you, however randomly, to the next thing of your own. That’s what happened the last time, isn’t it? You wrote your book.” “But you were lying to me,” she said. “You pretended you had a magazine, and that I was writing for it.” “I did potentially have a magazine. I had staff.” “One person!” “Two,” he said, “counting you.” “I can’t work that way,” she told him. “I won’t.” “It won’t be that way. This is entirely less…speculative.” | |||
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Sunday, February 15, 2009 AMATEUR posted 12:00 PM “Then send Pamela,” she said. “She understands all that. You have an army of people who understand all that. You must.” “But that’s exactly it. Because they ‘understand all that’, they won’t find the edge. They won’t find the new. And worse, they’ll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath the mediocrity inherent in professional competence. I need a virtual amateur for this. A freelancer.” And he sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he’d regarded the tidy and receding ass of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with sex. | |||
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rss info | Wednesday, March 04, 2009 GABBLE RATCHETS posted 2:18 PM Eventually she sighed, asked the Italian girl for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. Got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds”. By the time her coffee arrived, she had determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, had been or was the name of at least one band. Everything, she knew, had been the title of a CD, just as everything had been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had had such pointedly unmemorable names. But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, antique legend. Hounds heard coursing, high up in the windy night, cousins it seemed of the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there seemed to be even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets”, an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes Gabble Ratchets. Inchmaleian totally; he’d name the right band the Gabble Ratchets instantly. | |||
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http://www.williamgibsonbooks....#4771832245737531839 Tuesday, May 12, 2009 MAQUETTE posted 5:51 PM Bigend's office, when Milgrim was finally ushered in, was windowless and surprisingly small. Perhaps it wasn't that specifically his office, Milgrim thought. It didn't look like an office anyone worked in. The Swedish boy who'd brought Milgrim in put a gray folder on the teak desk and left silently. There was nothing else on the desk except for a stubby combat shotgun that appeared to have been made from solidified Pepto-Bismol. | |||
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[camera meta data: RIM Blackberry 8320] The blog published fragments so far:
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William Gibson Books www.williamgibsonboard.com www.williamgibsonboard.com News of the day & Current Issues Fragments of a Hologram Bill
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