Zero History [Paperback]

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.

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.

More and more, Mr Gibson seems to want his writing to be pure description
- of surfaces, technology, objects, streets. On this level alone, his books are always worth reading, often attaining a sort of rhapsodic, dreamlike quality.

The trouble with the 'Blue Ant' trilogy, for me, is this prose has been built onto increasingly flimsy and unconvincing narratives, populated by vague, sketched-out characters. (The lead character, Hollis Henry, is supposedly some sort of cool-divining savant, but in this book at least shows almost no abilities beyond being able to order coffee in Selfridge's Food Hall. And, to the extent 'coolhunters' actually exist in reality, are they so well paid as freelancers that they can afford vast second homes in glamourous foreign locations? Sort of doubt it.)

But I digress. This time, Hubertus Bigend wants our two heroes to research an obscure Japanese clothing brand to aid his bid to manufacture clothing for the US Military. A fairly unpreposessing idea or what's nominally a thriller, you must admit, and so it proves as the protagonists sit round in obessively-decribed London cafes eating obsessively-described food whilst having conversations about jeans and the colour green,whilst what little plot there is advances at the speed of a glacier, though to be honest it's pretty difficult to care what happens anyway.

So, if your a Gibson fan, I'd get this for the prose..but maybe wait for the paperback. If your new to him ,this isn't the best start.