Sherryl Vint
Golden Calf 1 © Irving Norman, 1957
William Gibson
Zero History
Putnam, 2010. 416 pp.“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed,” is one of William Gibson’s most famous dictums. Zero History, his most recent novel, is perhaps best understood as science fiction of the present, a representation of this hyperreal moment in which we live surrounded by our technology, no longer — as Marxist critic Fredric Jameson laments — able to imagine a future. In Zero History Gibson, though, unlike Jameson, offers reasons for hope in this SF-saturated present, directing his penetrating powers of observation to capture the textures of this strangely familiar, uncannily alien world.
