found drama

Waiting for dinner to cook…  Smells good, can’t wait.

Caught P.’s latest Twitter shortly after I got home and had this weird moment of synchronicity.  See, I stopped off at the library on my way home and while browsing the available volumes of Dick, Delaney, and Lovecraft (none of which piqued) I noticed that they had a copy of William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive.  I almost went home with it.  Just to round out the Sprawl series for myself; but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I guess I’m not ready to re-cast my read of “vintage Gibson” quite yet.  I tried to (last year?) with the last time I read Neuromancer.  P. got this one down pretty well:

I’m reading Count Zero. It’s sharply written, but man… it really is remarkably out of date in terms of its vision of the future. I’m kind of trying to retrofit my read to a 1987 context, in keeping with the modern reading of Gibson’s books that are set in the modern day.

Exactly.  It’s a tough one.  Any speculative fiction is dated instantly, retroactively to ten years before it’s written.  Taking those Sprawl series books in-context means re-embracing what we all took for granted as the only natural end-game for the Cold War (give or take).  And it’s easy to forget.  Or perhaps more appropriately: it’s hard to discard the accumulated distance from that perception.

Anyway.  I came home instead with Accelerando.   Maybe I should Twitter that?

About Rob Friesel