ive read buring chrome before, but i think i read it for the sake of reading it rather than digging deep into the story.

i read all of the belonging kind today after 3 good beers, and somehow perhaps concentrated more?

then i sat for awhile, and read it again


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i dont get it o_O, someone explain the whole premise to me

are these aliens that were dealing with? or simply some sort of permanent evolution of druggies of some sort..

out.

next question

has anybody actualy READ the belonging kind?

I did read it, in '86...
(Miami Vice was hot on the box)
Dont remember much
about it.
Back then I thought it felt more Shirley than Gibson.

I have read The belonging kid, I just do not like your style or your manners. What makes you think you merit an answer?

easy there psycho :P

i see 9 "views" of my question and no answer, this is a pretty small board and i would assume that people that brows it have read atleast some of gibsons works, i doubt you will ever get a topic that says:

"was browsin for porn stumbled on this site who is william gibson??"

so after 9 views and no asnwer i'm trying to rile up some responses, if my style of initiating a response OFFENDS YOU, well, deal with it.

you could have been more constructive and said that perhaps my question is poorly presented or needs clarification.

no forum ever likes a post whore, i thought these rules were universal.

Constructiveness. Right.

The first post was badly written and a pain to read, both from a formal, syntactic and semantic point of view. Those qualities probably explain why nobody answered.

The second was rude, specially as the Find function (that probably you as a forum expert know how to use) returns 44 hits besides the ones on this thread.

The third post was quite correct and in the right peeved mood, which is why I have taken the time to answer it.

However, instead of answering the initial question, I will recommend you check the Lovecraft and Gibson thread.

ok, i confess i was one of those silent viewers of this thread. saw, and went checking. our collective reading diary. (and then something or other came up...)
estonian fandom has a site where everybody can put a mark and comment on every sf story or novel he/she has read. about a hundred active users, nearly 25K comments etc. marks go from 1 - very bad to 5 - excellent. comments are not obligatory and go rarely over 3K letters.
also, we have some hugo-like voting. collection "burning chrome" was translated and published here in '02. the story "burning chrome" was voted the best translated short story of the year. "the belonging kind" was, hmm, voted 41st out of 61.
but back to the reading diary. just 6 persons have found it necessary to give their marks to "the belonging kind". two of them have given "satisfactory" (3) and have tried to describe their feelings as "something muddled about party animals/aliens". two persons have given "good" (4), saying "yeah, it's gibson, but he's capable to write better". two (myself included) have marked the story as "excellent", adding just a short comment "a beauty".
so it seems the more you try to "understand" the less you get from it. it's a "feeling" kind of a story. of course it helps if you have some life experience. as for an example, how does it feel to give up your job and life-stile for some femme fatale or whatever. so i'd think it's a nice and simple story...

psychophant, get over it. maybe noone else responded 'cause there's not much traffic over here.

maybe charma should answer you, 7thgear. i think he once said 'the belonging kind' was one of his favourites.

it's been a while since i read it, from what i remember the story worked around the question of where the cool people come from. and perhaps where they go. well that's what i ended up thinking about anyway. the main character meets some creatures who morph to fit in wherever they go. (doesn't he?) they are the belonging kind. and by the end of the story he has become one of them.

i may have entirely the wrong idea here.

Who is this William Gibson fellow you're all jabbering about? I'm here for the condiments.

Yes, well, I left this thread alone because I hadn't read "The Belonging Kind" in a while and honestly it's not one of my favorite stories. I figured the other members of the WGB we're up to it. And they are, but since there seems to be some risk of ruining the friendly atmosphere here because of a lack of commentary, I'll add my two... um... bits... stuff.

Anyway, the ambiguity is deliberate, I think. You are meant to leave the story still wondering exactly what the belonging kind are. It's about, at least for me, creating an eerie atmosphere and just planting the idea that some of the people you see out there aren't really people at all... and maybe you aren't people either, and you just haven't realized it yet.

Being an analytical, or perhaps just plain anal, type, I have created my own theories, but they are personal extrapolations, not something in the story. My theory is that these people are part of a parasitic species which has evolved alongside humanity. They are something like the cuckoo bird, in that they lay their eggs in other birds' nests, or in this case substitute their offspring for normal humans. In an interesting twist the young grow up not knowing about their special abilities until they happen upon another of their species.

But it could be aliens, or it could be magic. Who knows?

colin, you're right on about the ambiguity. i don't think it's important, literally, what the belonging kind are. metaphorically is the ground i think we're supposed to explore.
the story, to me, is about loneliness, the inability to function socially, and the seemingly unfeeling nature of our world.
i think those people we see out there who can just fit it anywhere, do seem like aliens, at least to me. here, Gibson and Shirley flesh out this alien-ness with the shapeshifting ability, the voice mimicry...perhaps the belonging kind don't even realize the shifts are happening. i think instinct is an important idea in the story - there's the fact that they were all roosting in the very same hotel Coretti chose to flop out in, how they later found his boarding house and new what song to play over the phone.
it all just leaves me with a surreal sense of longing that makes my guts a little bit bubbly.

It is not that hard of a story to understand.

The moral of the story is:
"If you concentrate too much on fitting in, you lose yourself"

And if you read very very carefully between the lines you will also see that pleated pants on a man are a *good* thing. At least seen from a woman's point of view.

Shadow world.
A little bit _Naked Lunch_ a little bit rock 'n' roll.
_The Belonging Kind_ is one of my favorites. Of course a collaboration by two of my favorite authors would be. Check it.
The whole shadow world _After Hours_ illusion is what appeals; you already named the mode and modus..."dabuya tee eff".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eric,

quote:

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And if you read very very carefully between the lines you will also see that pleated pants on a man are a *good* thing. At least seen from a woman's point of view.

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There you go again with the pleats.

I think (and I can't check cos I'm stealing bandwidth at work at the moment) that there's a paragraph toward the end of the story that speculates about the origin of the belonging kind, but I see the story as an allegory of social acceptance rather than as a true Sci-Fi yarn. It's Sci-Fi merely because it contains elements that defy what we know as reality. You wouldn't call the magical realist Garcia-Marquez stuff Sci-Fi, rather it's all allegorical or symbolic. Or metonymical, whatever.

Coretti becomes one of "them"; his desire for acceptance has changed his physical form utterly. To ask whether this means he's an alien, or a different Earthborn species, or magical, devalues the theme of the story that FP distilled so well. In my oh-so-humble opinion.

A section of WG's forward in _City Come a Walkin'_ reminded me of _TBK_ or at least how I imagined the story may have originated. (I feel like a blueant when I mention a book lately )

i get it, good stuff people, thanks for posting!

the reason i was interested in this is that i club alot and i see people in the club that fit in, that dont fit in, and that simply dont belong, with plenty of stories to tell to boot.

pleated pants do look good on a man, i like pleated pants, they add dimension.

i like the cuko bird idea, how they are not even aware of each other until they meet one of their own.

out.

Am I too late to jump on, or has this bandwagon sailed already?! Hmmm. Can I agree to disagree? TBK, at least from what I can recall of it, is optimistic to the point of near-inspiration.

(Sidebar: Burning Chrome was actually my good-luck charm in dog-eared, coffee- and pollution-stained, well-worn and badly-beyond-weatherbeaten form. Given the snaky turn of events of my life over the course of the past year, it appears the good ju-ju in the book finally ran out, because I misplaced the damn thing somewhere in between the last three moves. Which either means I will have very, very good luck from this point forward, or that it would be advisable for all concerned to avoid me like SARS and Ebola combined. Not only that, the lucky bamboo plant I bought three-and-a-half months ago, which had three stalks for good luck (or happiness, I think it was), had one stalk up and die two weeks ago, so now there's only two stalks left on the plant. Which, according to what little I know of the Chinese luck philosophy, means I should start seriously looking into life insurance. Or something. Anyways. Ramble mode off. Onwards.)

The story itself (if I recall correctly; can't place my hands on the exact interview where this is stated) was actually a longer story Gibson sent to John Shirley, then Shirley revised it to the present form, and submitted it to OMNI. Be interesting to read what Shirley cut out of the longer version.

Given what I know now of the history of both authors, it is quite easy in retrospect, to look back and appreciate which sections of the story came from each author. When I first read TBK, though, I was at just the right age and the right stage of my life to "get it"; Mid-adolescence, going through a rough patch of isolation, both self- and environment-inflicted, using SF basically as a means to completely escape the troublesome, wearying world I found myself no longer wanting to be in.

When I read TBK in the process of reading Burning Chrome cover to cover, my teenaged brain suddenly started yelling at me to wake up and quit reading those Star Drek and endlessly recycled Pern books for good, that there actually was some SF out there which could not only speak to me, in a (pleasantly) weird and mind-boggling way, there was some SF out there which could also speak for me. Which TBK, and to a lesser extent, the rest of Burning Chrome, did.

Okay, here's what I think. Agree or disagree as you will. "The Belonging Kind" is about feeling just ever-so-slightly out of step socially with the rest of the hairless apes swarming around you (something I can still identify with unfortunately), and what an individual has to put themselves through internally, merely to get along in everyday life.

Coretti's physical transformation is an allegory for the psychological transformation people wishing to belong (heh) to the culture of mainstream society have to wield upon themselves in order to be able to face the person in the mirror every morning, yet still manage to go through the day-to-day world without going absolutely stark raving.

Don't believe me? The last line of the story gives this away: "And he said it right. Like a real human being." Even though, at that point, Coretti clearly is anything but. The twist lies in the fact that Coretti has to become something completely other than himself, in point of fact something completely other than human, in order to feel the most accepted among human society and culture.

Which makes the subtle point of how mainstream society tends to more readily accept those who blandly, blindly, unthinkingly, blend in, rather than those who might be just one or two steps out of sync. A very subtle satire on blind acceptance of pop culture and unswerving devotion to current social mores without any real consideration or thought given to the beliefs one holds steadfastly to be accepted and true.

Of course, the optimistic part of the story suggests that there are others like Coretti out there; whether they transform into nothing more than creatures of habit and blind instinct (there's a telling social commentary all its own in that), or they are born that way, into becoming the shifting faceless crowds you encounter wherever you go, at least Coretti finally does finally find his way into the ranks of "the belonging kind".

In so doing, however, he has to give up an essential, thinking part of himself, becoming little more than a passing shadow in the night. Moral of the story being, how badly do you want to be a member of the belonging kind? And how much of your self and your own individuality are you willing to sacrifice to be there?

What'cha think? Am I completely off-base or what?

Yelena

quote:

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Originally posted by Yelena Virago:
What'cha think? Am I completely off-base or what?

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Not off-base at all Yelena.

Welcome back.

Edit: You're in the blog!!!

now that you put it in that perspective ( well written btw) i just thought of something

does corretti not jump ship from one perfectly accustomed lifestyle into another?

the books "belonging kind" are only so in the bar/club atmosphere.

Coretti's transformation forced him to quit his job as a teacher which from what i gathered he didnt mind all that much.

to become accepted with the "belonging kind" he had to abandon his own kind, which puts him at no greater point unless at this specific time he values the acceptence of the "belonging kind" more than his previous life.

which is to say that as far as social status/culture go we must sacrafice some friends/lifestyles if we wish to make some sort of internal change of values and social surroundings.

i can relate to this personaly as i am aquainted with numerous "types" of people, from car theives to med school graduates, and i find that i jump ship to "chill with the crew" about 3-4 times in a year, but every time my crew changes, i must leave behind most if not all of my previous crew's, but i always come back however, and no one seems to mind

i do have one best friend howerver that is always with me regardless, but in restrospect its funny how easy i addapt to almost any type of social surrounding.

out.

This is actually one of my favorite shorts from that book.

Being the obnoxious ass that I am, and considering the current political climate (as well as being in Canadian territory right now), I feel as if it could also be interpreted (because lets face it, we all imagine stories how we want to, not how the author wants us to) as a middle finger up to the hoards of fleeing migrants that pass over the borders between Canada and the US...maybe even a nod to Gibson's own flight...that perhaps opting out means you lose a certain part of yourself and gain another. Gibson isn't really considered an American author, although, birth-wise, he is.

People opt out of society for reasons that only benefit themselves. To others, it can be a positive or negative thing, depending on which side of the border you stand on. I've never really considered "The Belonging Kind" to have any particular neg/pos connotations...just that it was necessary in order to feel right.

It could be the now-cliche of a popculture satire. But it could also be something else. Interesting thoughts indeed.

FYI Yelena - it is never too late to jump the bandwagons...stories are, as Shakespeare said, forever immortal. New thoughts, at least IMO, should never be discouraged.