“Inchmale’s spirit-beast, the narcoleptic stuffed ferret, still frozen in nightmarish dream- waltz amid the game birds, was waiting near Cabinet’s grumbling lift.”
Gibson was science fiction, but now the exact same work is contemporary. We’ve caught up. He sees life as intertwined with media and trends that are captured on the street, bred in boardrooms, then fed to the masses. Technology advances not for ease or health but only for the cool factor, and Gibson knows cool: hotels, cars, tech toys. He is obsessed with music and clothing as modern fetishes by which we declare our tribes. While guilty of mild escapism (no one works a day job, everyone is a genius of sorts), he can also craft sentences of astonishing beauty.
