High Def Nothingness: Zero History by William Gibson Book Review

I am a huge fan of William Gibson’s work. His Sprawl and Bridge trilogies have influenced my work a great deal, as anyone who has read my novels can attest. Moving his Bigend novels back to present day, of which Zero History is the third in the series, sounds like a bigger deal than it actually is. The present day setting doesn’t really hinder Gibson, but there’s a lot more wrong with all three of the novels in this loose series than any sort of temporal shift can explain.

I unfortunately read the books out of order, starting with Spook Country before I realized that Pattern Recognition preceded it. Luckily, Pattern and Spook only marginally went together, connected by the mysterious character Hubertus Bigend. I enjoyed Spook Country, though it took quite a while to really get going. That seems to be an endemic problem with the Bigend series. The books start agonizingly slow and aimless, and Zero History is no exception. Even though the characters Hollis Henry and Milgrim return from Spook Country, nothing they do in the first 300 pages of the book really hooked me, and I found myself bored senseless. Neither character really stood out in Spook Country, and though they both go through changes in Zero, only Milgrim is even remotely interesting as a character. Both seem to flit from one situation to the other without really taking any decisive action of their own, lead around by Bigend’s bizarre and esoteric errands. It’s not until the return of the secret agent/thrill seeker Garreth from Spook Country that anything remotely interesting happens.

I’m not entirely sure what fascination with clothes, branding and fashion the author has been gripped by, but his constant brand-name dropping and description of clothing adds words without meaning to the story. Like the two books previous, much of the verbiage is concerned with high definition descriptions of nothing in particular. His choppy, terse writing style, so effective in his early books, is irritating in this one. I feel like I’m reading a manuscript Shatner-style while trying to struggle through the book. Character dialogue is so dicey that it feels forced and half-written. The story itself doesn’t in the end make any sort of sense. Hollis is sent to find the designer of a pair of underground anti-brand jeans, the kind of clothing you can only get by knowing someone who knows someone. Milgrim is brought in for… well, I’m not really sure why Milgrim is brought in for anything. Bigend seems to be fascinated with him, but Milgrim doesn’t really ever do anything. 200 pages into the book and suddenly the jeans-designer plot hits a dead-end and some mysterious arms dealer turned fashion designer has a hard-on for Milgrim, kidnaps one of Bigend’s prized programmers that was working on… well, something that is never really explained. The last 100 pages of the book follow a meandering set of arcane plans by Garreth to rescue the programmer without handing over Milgrim, a rescue that happens “off-stage” and is so muddled and choppy that by the time the whole thing is over, I still didn’t have a clue what the book was about.

None of the characters had any depth. Bigend, who the author seems to think is important, has less depth than a wading pool, feeling more like a plot device on legs. Three books in and I still know nothing about who he is, what he wants or why he hires these characters for these elaborate snipe hunts. Like the previous two books in the series, I can’t recommend Zero History for anyone that isn’t already a huge fan of Gibson’s, and even then, I’d caution the reader to expect very little.

I’d give Zero History 2 out of 5 stars, and tell you to go read something more interesting, like any of his earlier, pre-Bigend work.

October 22, 2011 at 5:32 pm | Books | No comment

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