“I walk with you, please,” he says, drawing even with her and smiling, as if delighted to offer her this favor. “My name is Voytek Biroshak.”
“Call me Ishmael,” she says, walking on.
“A girl’s name?” Eager and doglike beside her. Some species of weird nerd innocence that somehow she accepts.
“No. It’s Cayce.”
“Case?”
The standard criticism of William Gibson is that he’s spent twenty years writing the same story. Fair enough. But now I’m finally getting around to Pattern Recognition and remembering that I don’t care; the reason I go back to his books is their startling immunity to scansion.
I imitate the voices of a number of writers, particularly Margaret Atwood, Douglas Adams, Ellen Raskin, Rebecca Borgstrom and Neil Gaiman. I can get away with it most of the time (well, maybe not Borgstrom), but at a higher level, the whole desire to write microfiction is an attempt to shadow Gibson. I try to achieve, for a hundred words, the density he maintains for hundreds of pages.
That story Gibson keeps writing–the one about transcendence through technology–usually fails the Zafris test: its climax involves some nebulous achievement on a computer. Even if it is stereotypical, though, he always avoids making it trite. Orwell said never to use things in ways you’ve seen before. Gibson, appropriately, always finds his own uses for things.
