Conjuring the Numinous Out of the Quotidian
This post's title comes from a strange blurb from a Publishers Weekly review that was used on a William Gibson book cover: "Gibson has delivered what is assuredly one of the first authentic and vital novels of the 21st century, placing himself alongside Haruki Murakami as a writer who can conjure the numinous out of the quotidian."
Translated for the rest of it, it means he can pull the awe inspiring and spiritual out of the everyday of life. (I bet some reviewer got the Word of the Day calendar as a gift.)
William Gibson is credited with having coined the term "cyberspace," and some say he predicted the Internet and virtual reality early on. He definitely connects to people in the wired lifestyle.
His ninth novel, Spook Country, is set in the a high-tech present day. Some say that the present caught up with Gibson, so now he can set his books in the present. (He did the same in his last novel, a good one called Pattern Recognition.)
In Spook Country, a journalist is researching a new art form that exists only in virtual reality. If you're looking for themes running through it, try espionage, the nature of media, emergent phenomena and the sociocultural effects of technology.There's also Gibson's great metaphoric language.
In an interview on Amazon.com, they ask Now that you're writing about the present, do you consider yourself a science fiction writer these days? Because the marketplace still does.
Gibson: I never really believed in the separation. But science fiction is definitely where I'm from. Science fiction is my native literary culture. It's what I started reading, and I think the thing that actually makes me a bit different than some of the science fiction writers I've met who are my own age is that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets a year later, and got that in the mix. That really changed the direction. But it seems like such an old-fashioned way of looking at things. And it's better not to be pinned down. It's a matter of where you're allowed to park. If you can park in the science fiction bookstore, that's good. If you can park in the other bookstore, that's really good. If people come and buy it at Amazon, that's really good.
I'm sure I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails. But that just the way it is. All of that stuff reads so differently now. I think nothing dates more quickly than science fiction. Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher.
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