She always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a liar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another one, and if so, what it would be called. The first decades of the current century hadn’t yet acquired any very solid nomenclature, it seemed to her. Seeing relatively recent period clothing, particularly, gave her an odd feeling. She guessed that she unconsciously revised the fashion of her own past, turning it into something more contemporary. It was never quite as she remembered it. Shoulders tended to be peculiar, hems and waistlines not where she expected them to be.
William Gibson, Zero History, pg. 102. What I liked about this book the most was there are gutters in this; comic book gutters. The comic book gutter is the separation between panels, the white space, and the key to the gutter is from panel to panel the transfer of information without actually showing anything. There’s a gap and I feel like that is what Gibson does so expertly he intentionally leaves out information and allows you to fill in the gutter. Or what your old English teacher probably described as “show don’t tell.”
The book was excellent. I started reading Gibson my first semester of grad school, right around when I started writing Worthy’s Cause so these Bigend books were definitely a big influence on me. I read Pattern Recognition in Fall ‘08 and I had started writing my first novel the previous July and read Spook Country Spring semester ‘09. I finished the first draft just before starting my internship at Marvel. So December ‘09. One of the things that I modeled after Gibson was alternating chapters between settings and sets of characters. There’s not much else that one can model from Gibson, he’s one of a kind, but yeah.
(Source: williamgibsonbooks.com)
