Lit Nerdery Part II

I've gotten through the majority of the notes I feel like I want to take. I'm trying to puzzle out a 'so what'. I started based on a few concepts. Gibson is primarily known for writing the Sprawl trilogy, then writing the Bridge trilogy, which wrapped up roughly a decade ago. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are both novels, though, written in the modern age. The themes that we frequently allocate to cyber-punk carry over well; both of these novels feel like their spiritual successors, but if you're not willing to call something post-cyberpunk*, then they're just thrillers.

Ugh. Just thrillers. That's not what I meant. What I  mean is that divorced from the trope that we associate with cyberpunk, you've got a recognizable existing genre, albeit one that's rarely accorded much respect.  Gibson has the saving grace of accidentally creating a subgenre along with Bruce Sterling and, possible, being known for writing some truly excellent similes.

Gibson isn't just cranking out thrillers, though. He's a type of meta-geek. He's deeply interested in what people are deeply interested in, and it shows. That kind of filter is what allows him to basically take a paper thin plot and really make it about a series of things that exist and are fascinating to him, often in the lines of material culture and technology. It's just that in Pattern Recognition, for all his obsession about mechanical calculators, jetting around the world, and memes, he can't avoid making some kind of comment on the kind of community that's created on message boards and the ramifications of a digital life.

But while those observances feel true, a piece of genre fiction, however well-researched, is not a source to be referred to as fact outside of the ramification to either the reader or literature in general. I can't point to Patten Recognition and say, 'this is online community', and besides, there's enough observance of that elsewhere anyhow.

I guess what is compelling is that I don't see it a lot. We've got businesses and celebrates scrambling to take advantage of twitter. My grandmother's on Facebook. Shit, almost everyone I know is on Facebook. I've got like, one holdout friend who refuses and life has already become more difficult for him, as he refuses to schedule invites and communicate on what's become ubiquitous for the rest of us. Literature, which is ostensibly a kind of communication and which is often about communication, communities, ect, et al, but I'm not seeing a lot of this in text. I don't know if we can get away from this, though. And the implications of it are pretty complicated.

Cayce, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition, is a member of an online forum community which finds itself compromised both by media and business interests. Issues of identity, security, and personal space surface. In one chapter, we find that the flat she is staying in has been broken into, but rather then the physical space being the indicator, it's a site left at the top of her browser history on her computer. Her virtual space. And, I mean, I feel like this is pretty good stuff. Gibson is writing about communities and the problems they're facing, even if it's not front and center to the plot. She communicates with her best friend by email and the bulk of her direct assistance comes from a web forum.

And I'm stuck trying to explain why this matters. Maybe I can do it just in the context of the novel. Digital community - the subtext we can't escape from. Geeze, I dunno.

* And cyberpunk is dead on the vine, anyhow.