![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Verity spends most of the book as a passenger, being moved around to escape from a corrupt corporation who hired her at the start of the novel. This strict alternation regardless of what's going on and who has the most at stake at the time, and this choice of viewpoint characters, soon begin to work against the success of the book.īoth viewpoint characters are essentially passive. The author establishes a strict alternation between two viewpoint characters: Verity, in a version of 2017 California where the US election of 2016 and the Brexit vote went the other way, and Netherton, in a post-apocalyptic future descended, quite possibly, from our version of the timeline. In fact, they do almost nothing, and it's narrated at great length. They do almost nothing that has any impact on anything. What it doesn't have much of is a plot, and what the characters don't have much of, by irony that may or may not be unconscious, is agency. This tedious William Gibson novel is clearly a William Gibson novel: it has the effortless prose, the vivid (if occasionally inaccurate) imagery, the geek-culture namedrops, the characters who are outsiders to power and the mainstream. I never thought I would use the phrase "tedious William Gibson novel," but apparently this is the version of the world we now live in. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |