Book review: 'Zero History'

Book: Zero History

Author: William Gibson
l GB Putnam
l 404 pages

Speculative fiction tries to anticipate the future through sometimes utopian, mostly dystopian lenses. A high-risk genre (do we want to know the future all that much?), it has, however, been famously prescient in the works of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson. Its job is to extrapolate present technologies and ask: what more can be done with these?

On occasion it also asks: do any of these technologies improve the quality of human, plant and animal life as we know it? Is there any ethics to technology? What forms of the human, if any, will survive?

In any culture, it is the vision of the future that drives the present, and speculative fiction invents those visions. In many ways, it also sees the future as having already arrived, as the present. But then, the present changes so fast, and so radically, that speculative fiction has enough trouble dealing with it.

As Hubertus Bigend, that slightly dubious ad-man of William Gibson’s later novels puts it, “We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future … For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on.”

Gibson is famous, mainly, for his coinage and definition of the term ‘cyberspace’ — he did this, legend has it, on a typewriter in the early 1980s. With Zero History, the doyen of cyberpunk brings to a close his loosely connected trilogy, which started with Pattern Recognition and had Spook Country as part two) to a close with Zero History.

Less sci-fi or speculative fiction, the trilogy is more a thriller-adventure where people speak a lingo that is either supremely technical or plain street-talk (which can be interpreted by the reader as: ‘or maybe I am just too old’), and embark on a quest after logos, trends, ‘cool’, invisible monies, and people so elusive they don’t exist.

In Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard, whose father had died in the WTC on 9/11, is a ‘cool hunter’ tracking down future trends. She is hired by Hubertus Bigend to find the origins of a mysterious and hypnotic web footage released in instalments.

In Spook Country, Hollis Henry has to track down a paranoid programmer, Bobby Chambo, who creates the software for locative art (digital media art tied to real spatial locations and working with real people in those locations).

In Zero History, Hollis, having written her book on locative art, is hired, again by Bigend, to find the maker of a special fashion brand, Gabriel Hounds, which is not sold openly on the market, is very elitist, and whose origins are a mystery.

Bigend is interested because military clothing, which has some connection with fashion in the present day, is something he wishes to enter into. Hollis has for company, the recovering drug-addict Milgrim (he has no other name), and the recovering divorcee Heidi. Hollis herself is recovering from a broken relationship.

Bigend furnishes the tech back-up, but is also battling a coup in his firm, led by Oliver Sleight, who monitors Milgrim through his Neo phone. Hollis painstakingly sifts through evidence pointing to the mysterious brand-maker. Meanwhile, the US defence department also has an interest in these doings. Milgrim becomes a pawn in a high-stakes game where Bobby, Bigend’s genius programmer, has been kidnapped, and Milgrim is the ransom.

Gibson’s prose, which was once fascinating, sounds more telegraphic with each novel. The plot here is tighter than in Spook Country, and the characterisation has greater depth. There aren’t any more new devices (they have all been invented, right?). There are excellent cultural insights (my favourite in Zero History, in an era where there are more people talking on phones in public places than smoking, is this one: “Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones”). One reads Gibson for the surreal worlds of digital media and commodities.

Gibson’s world is made of passions — and the passion for labels and elusive brands is the most significant. The consumer cool of the trilogy is worth exploring in some detail, for the insights into big business, and the retailing of brands (“the branding would be that it was a secret”, the designer tells Hollis) and identities.

Yet ethics and moral codes also enter into all this somewhere, and Hollis’ decision to not reveal the designer’s identity, or the discovery of diverted Iraqi reconstruction funds in Spook Country, suggest that Gibson is still grappling with ethics in a postmodern world.

Sure, the world is simulation and simulacra (it was Gibson’s early work, alongside philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s, that
inspired The Matrix films). But that makes it all the more essential that the ethics, loyalties and affections are real, suggests Gibson.

Pramod K Nayar teaches English at the University of Hyderabad