“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”
Almost a year ago, I posted this line from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. It still bothers me to think that my past (good and bad) is not fixed. Permanent. That today’s past will look different to a future me. On the other hand, I’ll probably feel differently tomorrow.
I would have sworn I mentioned these but can’t find any reference. John Grisham’s King of Torts was… predictable. And not very interesting. But I couldn’t put it down. Hmmm. I enjoyed William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition more than any of his recent books. And Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon was pretty damned good, despite similarity to early Gibson novels.
Finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and enjoyed it as much as expected. With the characters and settings still in my head, it was strange to read (on Gibson’s blog) how real they are for the creator:
“One odd moment, sitting in the lower lobby of the SoHo Grand, Cayce’s entrance suddenly unspooled and I looked up, almost expecting her to walk in. And simultaneously reminded I don’t know what she looks like; she’s written “from inside”.
This means zip to anyone that has not read the book. Other nuggets that got some highlighter:
“Like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.” (pg4)
“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. (pg57)
“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.” (pg67)
“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out onthe web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it every was.Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.” (pg68)
“History erased via the substitution of an identical object.” (pg194)
And my favorite…
“She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.” (pg92)