WatDabney

They’re explicitly trying to get them killed.

And at some point they’re going to succeed.

Meta has officially adopted the Musk/Trump conception of free expression - promoting bigotry and hate and silencing dissent.

It’s been too long since I read it to clearly remember the details, but yeah - I thought it was awful.

I most remember being disappointed that it deliberately and inexplicably sidelined Flynne, since her character was easily one of the best parts of The Peripheral. I have no idea what the point of that was - it seemed just as if Gibson somehow resented the fact that she was a memorable character and didn’t want her to take over the story. Verity, by contrast, was a very weak character, and I remember thinking that it was ironic that she seemed to have no real agency of her own, and instead was just pulled along by the plot.

I can’t really pinpoint anything beyond that though - as I say, I don’t really remember the details - just my reaction.

Spook Country, to me, was just drab. It was like Gibson laid out the basic plot, which was pretty much just a standard political thriller, then filled in the blanks with whatever bits of technology and pop culture had his attention at the moment. It worked fine as a novel, but had nothing new to say really.

That entire trilogy was pretty poor IMO, and was a large part of the reason that I was so impressed by The Peripheral.

And thinking about it in that light, it’s possible that my negative reaction to Agency was driven at least in part by the contrast to The Peripheral - that Spook Country (and more likely Pattern Recognition) were at least as bad, but at the time I read them, my expectations for Gibson were so low that they didn’t have the same impact.

Mmm…

I thought that The Peripheral was the best book Gibson’s written since at least Idoru, and I was very impressed and pleased.

But I think that Agency is quite possibly the worst book he’s ever written.

Probably the one that grabbed me the most was Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read Children of Time years ago, but bounced off of Children of Ruin and hadn’t read anything else by him. But reading Made Things on a whim this past year set me off on a Tchaikovsky binge that took up much of the rest of the year. I especially liked The Final Architecture books.

The book that I enjoyed the most just in and of itself though was probably Early Riser by Jasper Fforde. It’s a fascinating concept, and more straightforwardly written than most of Fforde’s books (I like his writing, but he has a regrettable tendency toward style over substance that was refreshingly absent from this one).

Well, like, to me, my thing is… a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.

Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy came barrelling out of a bar - fell right in front of me and he had a knife right in his back - landed right on the ground.

And I have no reference to it now. I can’t refer back to it. I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slo-mo and see all the little details.

And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off and I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right.

• Slacker (1991)