Zero History
by William Gibson
We're living in a cyberpunk world. It's true. Just pick up your iPhone, pull up a newspaper and read about the impending plague of cyberterrorism, or about companies battling for control of the Internet. If you need a break from your reading, hop on Facebook – or, better yet, ChatRoulette.com – to socialize. Today's digitized landscape may seem wholly new, but it's all too familiar to William Gibson. For roughly 30 years now, Gibson has been realizing it in short stories like Burning Chrome (1982), in which he famously coined the term "cyberspace," and in novels such as the hugely influential Neuromancer (1984).
A few years ago, Gibson told The New York Times, "Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios." That, along with the sheer power of his brilliantly inventive writing, points directly toward the root of Gibson's increasingly mainstream appeal. The cyberpunk genre he helped create has by now become so firmly entrenched in popular culture that it has been spun off into "post-cyberpunk."
Spook Country, the predecessor to Zero History, was released in 2007. It further filled out the world of Pattern Recognition (2003), revolving around Huburtus Bigend, the Wizard of Oz-ish antihero behind the global marketing agency Blue Ant. Zero History – Gibson's tenth novel, including one written collaboratively with Bruce Sterling – again follows Hollis Henry on an assignment from Bigend, this time attempting to track down a shadowy fashion designer who Bigend plans to charge with developing uniforms for the military. With help from the expert translator Milgrim, another character from Spook Country, Henry dives into a paranoid world populated by hackers and viral marketing schemes. It's a place that Gibson and his legions of fans know quite well by now.
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William Gibson
Zero History (signed copy)
$26.95