Review: Zero History

Zero History Cover.

William Gibson and the unevenly distributed future are back in Zero History, the third installment in his Blue Ant series after Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

As usual, the plot is weak, let’s get that out of the way from the get-go. But then, we don’t read Gibson for his plot-boiler skills—we read him for the prose and the characters. Ah, the prose. As always it’s simply wonderful, creating a sense of a different world existing parallel with ours, intersecting, a world of details and weirdness, a world we could inhabit if we would just pay attention.

As to characters, the main new addition to the stable is Milgrim, a recovering drug addict whose addiction was so severe he lost his personality and his memories—a shadow of Armitage in Neuromancer: a person who has completely lost his past.

It’s extremely difficult to describe the plot without spoiling it, since it depends on you wandering through a strange world of government operatives, fashion designers and general weirdos and uncovering what ties them together. Let’s think of it as “atmospheric.”

In the end, Zero History is strictly for the fans. If you like Gibson you’ll like this. But it won’t blow you away or create new fans.

Related Core Dump reviews:

Pattern Recognition

Spook Country