- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Viking (2 Sep 2010)
- Language Unknown
- ISBN-10: 9780670919529
- ISBN-13: 978-0670919529
- ASIN: 0670919527
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.5 x 4.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 175,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Zero History
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.30
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Zero History for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.30, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Former rock singer Hollis Henry has lost a lot of money in the crash, which means she can't turn down the offer of a job from Hubertus Bigend, sinister Belgian proprietor of mysterious ad agency Blue Ant. Milgrim is working for Bigend too. Bigend admires the ex-addict's linguistic skills and street knowledge so much that he's even paid for his costly rehab. So together Hollis and Milgrim are at the front line of Bigend's attempts to get a slice of the military budget, and they gradually realize he has some very dangerous competitors. Which is not a great thought when you don't much trust your boss either.
Gibson's new novel, set largely in London, spookily captures the paranoia and fear of our post-Crash times.
About the Author
William Gibson first novel Neuromancer sold more than six million copies worldwide. In an earlier short story, Gibson had coined the phrase 'cyberspace', and he developed the concept in the novel, creating an iconography for the Information Age long before widespread use of the Internet. Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive completed his first trilogy.
He has since written six further novels, moving gradually away from science fiction and futuristic work, instead writing about the strange contemporary world we inhabit. His most recent novels are Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, both available in Penguin.
He was born in South Carolina but has lived in Vancouver, Canada for many years.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Zero History is the third of Gibson's books to feature the Blue Ant ad agency and continues to explore issues of branding, marketing, technology and cutting edge cool in a fast moving and entertaining thriller.
It's almost obligatory when writing anything about William Gibson to recall that in an earlier short story, he invented the term 'cyberspace'. Gibson remains at the cutting edge of what is 'cool. Like most of his books, Zero History is a thriller, but at its core are issues surrounding technology, how we interact with it, branding and marketing. It would be easy to criticise much of his content as being too shallow and concerned with 'nothing' - but then that's part of his point.
Gibson also has a history of writing in trilogies - and this is indeed the third of his books to deal with the mysterious Blue Ant ad agency run by the gloriously named Hubertus Bigend. But equally, it stands perfectly on its own and no prior familiarity is required with the other two books (Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).
Although set firmly in the present, Gibson writes about cutting edge issues that gives his books an almost science fiction feel, and if you are a fan of some of the lighter sci fi genre, then you will find much to enjoy here. There's plenty of gadgets and no small amount of humour.
At the heart of this thriller is a subject that is, at first, unexpected; namely a secret brand of denim jeans, known as The Gabriel Hounds. This is what Bigend wants his Blue Ant agency to understand and initially has in his employ, a former rock singer, Hollis Henry, and a recovering drug addict, Milgrim (both of whom will be familiar to readers of his previous book). Both are separately working for Bigend, with varying degrees of reluctance but quickly become emerged in the same task. If that sounds a dull basis for a story, you would be wrong. Yes, at times it feels a little on the unlikely side, but then it will have you questioning if it is really so unlikely after all. At stake here is the ability to control fashion desirability and Gibson goes on to make some thought provoking links between street fashion and military ware.
Everything in Bigend's world is knowingly über-cool. Sometimes this can be irritating, but it is essential to build up the world in which Blue Ant is involved. I-phones get a lot of coverage, as do augmented reality, CCTV surveillance and Japanese 'secret brands'. Gibson also seems strangely obsessed with describing elevators. The constant brand mentioning would get wearing in some books, but here is entirely justified. By including the reactions of Milgrim, who has been 'off the grid' in re-hab, to some of the technology that we are now very familiar with, like Twitter, Gibson will have you thinking 'really, can they do that?' with some of his more outlandish concepts. If so, we are in for a treat with penguin-shaped balloons in the very near future.
The book is largely, and convincingly, set in London, with the odd foray into Paris and the US. Often American writers who set books in London seem to fail to grasp the soul of the city, but Gibson pulls it off with aplomb.
It's fast moving, entertaining and frequently amusing. The heart of the mystery around which the thriller operates does shift at times, and this can be a bit annoying, and ultimately it's a lot of tech to employ on such a small issue, but it's fair to say, without revealing too much, that even Bigend might be in over his head on this one. There's a lot of paranoia and there's always seems to be someone watching everyone.
It's almost obligatory when writing anything about William Gibson to recall that in an earlier short story, he invented the term 'cyberspace'. Gibson remains at the cutting edge of what is 'cool. Like most of his books, Zero History is a thriller, but at its core are issues surrounding technology, how we interact with it, branding and marketing. It would be easy to criticise much of his content as being too shallow and concerned with 'nothing' - but then that's part of his point.
Gibson also has a history of writing in trilogies - and this is indeed the third of his books to deal with the mysterious Blue Ant ad agency run by the gloriously named Hubertus Bigend. But equally, it stands perfectly on its own and no prior familiarity is required with the other two books (Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).
Although set firmly in the present, Gibson writes about cutting edge issues that gives his books an almost science fiction feel, and if you are a fan of some of the lighter sci fi genre, then you will find much to enjoy here. There's plenty of gadgets and no small amount of humour.
At the heart of this thriller is a subject that is, at first, unexpected; namely a secret brand of denim jeans, known as The Gabriel Hounds. This is what Bigend wants his Blue Ant agency to understand and initially has in his employ, a former rock singer, Hollis Henry, and a recovering drug addict, Milgrim (both of whom will be familiar to readers of his previous book). Both are separately working for Bigend, with varying degrees of reluctance but quickly become emerged in the same task. If that sounds a dull basis for a story, you would be wrong. Yes, at times it feels a little on the unlikely side, but then it will have you questioning if it is really so unlikely after all. At stake here is the ability to control fashion desirability and Gibson goes on to make some thought provoking links between street fashion and military ware.
Everything in Bigend's world is knowingly über-cool. Sometimes this can be irritating, but it is essential to build up the world in which Blue Ant is involved. I-phones get a lot of coverage, as do augmented reality, CCTV surveillance and Japanese 'secret brands'. Gibson also seems strangely obsessed with describing elevators. The constant brand mentioning would get wearing in some books, but here is entirely justified. By including the reactions of Milgrim, who has been 'off the grid' in re-hab, to some of the technology that we are now very familiar with, like Twitter, Gibson will have you thinking 'really, can they do that?' with some of his more outlandish concepts. If so, we are in for a treat with penguin-shaped balloons in the very near future.
The book is largely, and convincingly, set in London, with the odd foray into Paris and the US. Often American writers who set books in London seem to fail to grasp the soul of the city, but Gibson pulls it off with aplomb.
It's fast moving, entertaining and frequently amusing. The heart of the mystery around which the thriller operates does shift at times, and this can be a bit annoying, and ultimately it's a lot of tech to employ on such a small issue, but it's fair to say, without revealing too much, that even Bigend might be in over his head on this one. There's a lot of paranoia and there's always seems to be someone watching everyone.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Only 3 stars for this I'm afraid. I'm a massive fan of Gibson's (ground-breaking) SF work, but I haven't much liked the Blue Ant novels (Pattern Recognition and Spook County) and this is the weakest of the trilogy. Set in contemporary London it follows Hollis Henry and Milgrim (both of whom appear in Spook County, but this book can be read standalone) as they follow the trail of iconic new fashion at the behest of the enigmatic Hubertus Bigend.
I thought the English stuff was fairly well done in terms of location and dialect, but the plot didn't really engage me and I found it somewhat confusing at times. There is something (big) that Bigend really wants, but it's hidden away and almost inconsequential.
Having said that there is some excellent writing: "[The Neo phone]....was also prone to something Sleight called "kernel panic" which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with."; "Milgrim....was caught in some frustrating loop of semi-sleep, slow and circular, in which exhaustion swung him slowly out, toward where sleep should surely have been, then overshot the mark somehow..."; And my favourite: "These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them."
And there are good ideas - not so much the fashion stuff for me, but the "Order Flow" is clever and the idea of the hideous T-shirt having an impact on surveillance is wonderful - although both of these ideas are credited to others in the acknowledgements.
Ultimately the book just didn't engage me and I wondered if Gibson was trying to say something about society by deliberately writing in this almost dreamlike manner - if so it went over my head.
I'll probably still buy every novel he writes still, but a fairly disappointing end to a so-so trilogy. Maybe he'll return to SF - I do hope so.
I thought the English stuff was fairly well done in terms of location and dialect, but the plot didn't really engage me and I found it somewhat confusing at times. There is something (big) that Bigend really wants, but it's hidden away and almost inconsequential.
Having said that there is some excellent writing: "[The Neo phone]....was also prone to something Sleight called "kernel panic" which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with."; "Milgrim....was caught in some frustrating loop of semi-sleep, slow and circular, in which exhaustion swung him slowly out, toward where sleep should surely have been, then overshot the mark somehow..."; And my favourite: "These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them."
And there are good ideas - not so much the fashion stuff for me, but the "Order Flow" is clever and the idea of the hideous T-shirt having an impact on surveillance is wonderful - although both of these ideas are credited to others in the acknowledgements.
Ultimately the book just didn't engage me and I wondered if Gibson was trying to say something about society by deliberately writing in this almost dreamlike manner - if so it went over my head.
I'll probably still buy every novel he writes still, but a fairly disappointing end to a so-so trilogy. Maybe he'll return to SF - I do hope so.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A good and enjoyable read, but not one of his finest works. Is william Gibson on the payroll of apple, ott apple product placement became irratating at times.
Review written on my iPhone ;-)
Review written on my iPhone ;-)
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Zero History
This is the third part of Gibson's informal "Blue Ant trilogy", beginning with "Pattern Recognition" and moving to "Spook County". Read more
Published 3 months ago by David Brookes
Gibson back on track
Definitely, almost, back to Gibson's original glory. 'Spook country' was quite frankly dire so zero history is a welcome return to excellence. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Tim
Sadly disappointing
I have been a fan of William Gibson ever since "Neuromancer". His skill in weaving genuinely original ideas about technology, art and social interaction into a damn good story... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Aurelio
Polished
When you open a William Gibson novel nowadays you know what to expect: meticulously crafted, beautifully written, not a word out of place, subtle reflections on consumerism,... Read more
Published 6 months ago by number9dream
Clever and beautifully written, and yet I feel sort of dirty and empty
Gibson is still a great writer, and I am really interested in the idea of writing about the present within a cyberpunk aesthetic - which he does very well. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Jezza
William Gibson does it again
Tremendous sound quality, and a highly engaging storyline. Some interesting concepts in terms of brand management, and a tightly woven plot. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Owen Phillips 2
The End of History
About two pages into "Zero History" I realised that, as with every other Gibson novel (except for the unfortunate collaboration with Bruce Sterling, whose name I have forgotten) I... Read more
Published 7 months ago by John Fletcher
Welcome to Apple World
Self-absorbed, too cool for school meedja types, every one of them armed with an iPhone , does not make for an absorbing thriller. And it didn't.
Published 8 months ago by Martin Kent
surprisingly low-key
I'm only giving this four stars rather than five, although I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anybody interested in urban fantasy/sci-fi, even though it's not really... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Charlotte Geater
Underwhelming
Albeit I was heartened to see both Hollis & Milgrim return as characters from Spook Country, there is a level of unreality to the apparent boundless financial generosity of... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Kadayi
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
