Book review: Zero History

Published on Tuesday 21 September 2010 16:17

ZERO HISTORY William Gibson Viking, £18.99

WHEN I first heard that the Department of Homeland Security had brought in a group of science-fiction writers to brainstorm new ways that terrorists might attack America, something changed for me forever. I realised this was one of the first news stories I had ever totally believed - in part because it was like something from fiction. Even if it hadn't happened yet, it could happen, and therefore probably would. In a late-capitalist marketplace where you can buy or sell almost anything, including artificial islands in Dubai, nothing feels impossible. And in a world where fiction is becoming indistinguishable from reality, as the philosopher Baudrillard suggested, the flow of "truth" goes both ways. It's just as likely that fiction will come true as it is that the truth will turn out to have been fiction all along.

This borderland territory between unlikely truths and likely falsehoods is where William Gibson's fiction has always resided, since his first novel, Neuromancer, was published in 1984. In that novel, Gibson imagined (and named) cyber-space, long before most people had even contemplated the kind of computer networks we have today. But since then, the time it takes an idea to travel from fiction through uncertainty to reality has shrunk drastically. Gibson used to write about an imagined future; now he writes about a half-imagined, half-real present in which it is almost impossible to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. When he name-checked the Adidas GSG9 boot in a recent novel, one interviewer assumed it was made up. But it is real, and genuinely named after the German special forces.

The Matrix films, which were partly inspired by Gibson's early work, proposed the idea that it would be impossible for humans to tell the difference between fiction and reality if one resembled the other to the point of a perfect simulacrum. Of course, in those films humans saw "glitches" in the Matrix: patterns that existed because the world wasn't simply random but had been programmed. Among other things, Gibson's recent fiction explores the idea that our world now is also programmed, in the sense that most of it is encoded as "information" in zeroes and ones, and therefore has patterns and glitches of its own. The logical machine that will encode the world is already here, but it doesn't send bots to fly around shooting at people as it does in the films. Instead, it emotionlessly captures every Google search, every product anyone buys on eBay and, disturbingly, every recorded image of people walking around public places - especially in Britain, where closed-circuit TV cameras are ubiquitous and where Gibson has set his new novel, Zero History.

Since everything is wired up to everything else, it becomes possible to see glitches, connections, coincidences and all kinds of "trending" around mass-market commodities like pop music, soft drinks, sportswear and, of course, fashion, which is the main subject of Gibson's new novel. But significant cultural nodes aren't always exactly where you'd expect to find them, and in Zero History there is an interesting intersection between military clothing and fashion. Hubertus Bigend wants to get involved, somehow, in marketing apparel to the newly unfashionable United States military.

Zero History is Gibson's third novel to feature Bigend, the Belgian micro-management freak who runs the viral marketing and coolhunting agency Blue Ant, and who is interested in what "fascinates" people. He made his first appearance in Pattern Recognition in 2003. In Spook Country (2007), Bigend employed Hollis Henry, former lead singer of the fictional 90s band the Curfew, to investigate "locative" technologies.

Now, in Zero History, Henry reluctantly accepts a second commission from Bigend, to track down the designer behind the super-fashionable but anti-fashion "secret brand" Gabriel Hounds. She finds herself working alongside a reclusive ex-addict named Milgrim, whom Bigend spookily "owns" after paying for his long rehabilitation in Switzerland. Into this mix comes Heidi Hyde, the Curfew's old drummer, who has just dumped her husband, and Hollis's love interest, Garreth, a former base-jumper who is good at logistics. The novel stands alone, although there are good reasons to read Pattern Recognition and Spook Country first. Particular nuances of characterisation are built up over all three books, and one of the main pay-offs in Zero History makes complete sense only if you've read Pattern Recognition.

As always, Gibson's writing is thrillingly tight. This is a disorientating world of nouns, mirroring our own world, where nouns - things, that is - are dizzyingly paramount. The only other writer who is as good at chronicling our contemporary milieu, in which the world of things eats itself like an ouroboros, is Douglas Coupland. To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future because it seems the present is becoming the future faster than it is becoming the past.

One of the great things Gibson does is put some romance back into the digital world. His characters, as they roam darknets, monitor trends, observe ghostbranding and so on, find that there is always someone listening to the same record or wearing the same jacket. Whether or not one should care about a piece of denim is a question Gibson is asking, certainly. But he is also celebrating a world where people do still care about something. v

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on September 26, 2010