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precision posted:"The Footage" in Pattern Recognition was also incredibly on the money. It predicted every creepy YouTube series/ARG/everything like that. He's pretty prescient in general. I've always thought of the three trilogies as either intentionally or unintentionally dealing with predicting trends from the current zeitgeist. The Sprawl trilogy was all about the things people were trying to figure out in the 80s: runaway corporate control, the rise of Japan, and the idea of networked computers. By the Bridge trilogy, he's going back and dealing with the things nobody predicted in the 80s that were starting to emerge in the mid and late 90s: the whole idea of a social internet and a panopticon society. Then in the Blue Ant trilogy, he basically throws his hands up and stops trying to predict and instead writes a trilogy about claustrophobia and terrorism and the blurry lines between government and private contractors. I saw an interview where he admitted that the pace of change is too fast for him to try to predict the future anymore. I've been waiting to see if he comes out with a trilogy for the 10's, but no signs of that yet.
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Feb 11, 2014 00:38
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So, what did people take as the big themes/commentary from the Peripheral? One of the things that has interested me about his last three trilogies is the way that they honed in on a specific aspect of the decade that would end up being core to the zeitgeist of the time... in the 80s it was all about fear of Japan, corporate rule, and the rise of computers, then for the 90s it was about social media/web 2.0 stuff, and for 2000's it was all about shadow wars and spooks. I think the dude is pretty prescient, and it makes me wonder what aspect of the Peripheral is him talking about modern themes. My interpretation is that the "jackpot" and the whole idea of climate change and massive disruption, as well as the mention of post-humanity and the crazy physics of the server are the things that he's pulling out as the areas where there will be a lot of action in the near future.
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Nov 18, 2014 00:24
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Snak posted:
The scene that has always stayed with me about his insight on addiction is from Mona Lisa Overdrive - it's a minor one but I'll spoiler it anyway in case you haven't gotten to it: I don't recall the details, except that things are going to poo poo in a spectacular way and in the middle of it all Mona pulls out some meth she found and gets high because she can't deal with everything that's happening. That's a minor scene, but I can't imagine anyone without close experience of addiction writing it.
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Feb 20, 2015 01:29
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I just reread the Blue Ant trilogy, and one of the things that struck me this time was how it can be read as a trilogy about design in general and art specifically. Pattern Recognition is about film and branding, Spook Country is about locative art and performance art, and Zero History is about fashion. I picked up on the design elements on my first read, because he kind of hits you over the head with them, but I didn't think about how they play out in different ways across the trilogy.
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Nov 22, 2016 18:17
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