Etiology
This book entered my life when I was at the gym riding a stationary bicycle (technically a unicycle), pretending I was being pursued by a horde of hungry zombies, and listening to a CBC Ideas podcast in which Nahlah Ayed interviews Andrew Potter for an update on his book, On Decline. In the interview, Potter mentions the idea of The Jackpot which first appeared in William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral, and which he revisited in a follow-up novel, The Agency. We now have The Jackpot Trilogy with the 3rd installment scheduled for publication god knows when. More significantly, the whole shebang is in development for release as a Prime video series. Although speculative fiction was my point of entry into a lifetime reading habit, I abandoned speculative fiction at about the time I hit puberty. That means I read people like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Bradbury, and Dick, but had outgrown the genre by the time Gibson arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, Potter’s reference piqued my curiosity so, after reading Potter’s book, I moved on to Gibson’s.
The Jackpot
The idea of the Jackpot serves as a backdrop for the novel’s action. In the not-too-distant future, human civilization performs a slow fade. There is no single catastrophe that precipitates this decline. It’s more a case of civilizational decline by a thousand tiny paper cuts. Gibson describes it like this:
No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
Waiting for humanity at the bottom of this slope is not extinction, nor even a violent barbarism. On the contrary, science continues to advance and new technologies continue to emerge and transform human life. But the scale has changed. For one thing, there are fewer humans left to enjoy these benefits. Using new technology developed on the far side of the Jackpot, people can hop back and forth through time across this historic divide.
The Jackplot
Flynne Fisher lives and works on our side of the Jackpot. Her brother, an injured USMC soldier, has a gig providing security in a VR game but wants to attend a counter-protest against a group of fanatical religious protesters so asks Flynne to sub for him. While performing her function, she witnesses a murder in which nanobots disassemble a woman and leave behind, well, not much of anything. At first, Flynne thinks it’s just a killing within the game and therefore nothing to worry about, but she soon discovers that she was not in a VR game after all, but providing security for a very real function on the other side of the Jackpot. What follows is a bit of murder mystery. Who died? Who killed them? What was the motive? And why is it important to involve people from before the Jackpot? If you’re interested in parsing the intricate plot of an almost 500 page novel, I commend to your attention the Wikipedia entry where Gibson’s formidable fan base has laid everything out in exacting detail.
The Opportunity Cost of Reading Bad Books
At it’s most basic, the concept of opportunity cost refers to the cost (measured in a scarce resource like time or money) of doing something that precludes you from doing something else with that scarce resource. For example, if you buy 10 shares of Amazon stock, the true cost of your purchase is not just the price of the 10 shares but also the profit forgone by not buying shares in a better performing stock, like Apple. You can apply the same idea to reading, except instead of money, you measure your cost as time. Since you don’t have a limitless amount of time for reading, it matters how you allocate that time. If you allocate 12 hours to reading a long and tedious novel, that’s 12 hours you no longer have for reading something better.
As I read The Peripheral, I soon discovered that it was a dreadful book and I began to debate whether I should cut my losses, like a wise investor, and turn to something better. However, as with my investing, I’m not a particularly wise reader. I’m like the monkey that clings to the apple in the bottle and is too stupid to realize that it can escape the trap by letting go the apple. Following my compulsive nature—begun when my mother told me I had to eat all my vegetables—I read through to the end. Part of my persistence may also have to do with the thought that I might write something about the novel and I couldn’t very well do so with any integrity if I hadn’t read the whole thing.
A Matter of Personal Taste
I’m willing to concede that maybe it’s just me. After all, a bajillion fans can’t be wrong. It’s become a cliché, but true all the same, that speculative fiction is a literature of ideas. Maybe I’m imposing my hi-brow mainstream lit expectations on a genre that performs according to other conventions. In a related observation, Gibson’s writing may be more meaningful to people of a different cognitive style. I am a visual learner and have come to recognize that when I read, my estimation of the material I read corresponds to the extent that it stimulates my visual imagination.
Gibson’s writing is almost completely devoid of visual cues. Description is rudimentary and serves to usher the reader from one segment of dialogue to the next where speakers reveal ideas and plot twists. Again, my mainstream lit expectations intrude and ask: why would you bother with the medium of the novel when all you’re writing is dialogue? Stick to theatre or a screenplay. It isn’t surprising that Prime has picked it up for development; indeed, the visual richness of the small screen medium can compensate for what is lacking here.
But it may not be just a matter of personal taste. It is possible that the writing is simply bad. I’ll let Gibson have the last word and you can be the judge:
The assemblers, going everywhere, had found them, bringing them to a certain park, their method having been exactly that by which Lowbeer had introduced the Russian pram’s gun to the arm of the peripheral’s interrogation chair, or brought Conner’s terrible cube straight up through the granite foundations of Newgate, astronomical numbers of the microscopic units being employed in shifting particles of whatever intervening matter from front to back, or top to bottom, of the object being moved, solids seeming thereby to migrate through other solids, the way al-Habib had stepped through the curved wall, in Edenmere Mansions.
In your review you state, “Gibson’s writing is almost completely devoid of visual cues.” I found this statement ironic as the first line in Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, is, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
I stopped reading Gibson’s work after Agency, because I felt the prose had lost the sharpness of his original works. I found Agency not as much lacking in visual cues as I found much of the prose monotonous.
That said, I have never written a book so my hat is still off to Gibson for having written many that have found a happy audience — including myself in the early days. No one will ever write a book that everyone loves, nor should they try.
I enjoyed reading your review.
— All grammatical and typographical errors are my own, although my opinions may not be. —
Thank you for your considered comments. Maybe I should have confined my “visual cues” comment to The Peripheral instead of drawing all his writing into my crosshairs. It was ungenerous of me. I haven’t read Neuromancer and so can’t speak to his earlier work although, as you hint, it might prove more rewarding. Thanks for visiting my site.
I too found your comments about Gibson’s writing being devoid of visual clues, if not ironic, then at least puzzling – as he’s one of the most visually oriented authors I’ve ever read. I’m an assemblage artist (found object sculpture and jewellery), and a visual learner as well, and I credit his 2nd novel Count Zero and the descriptions of the mad AI’s Joseph Cornell-like “box” assemblages as the kickstart to my career 35 years ago.
from COUNT ZERO
(April ’87 ACE paperback)
“But Marly was lost in the box, in it’s evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic cicuit boards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicone shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin – but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.”
I have created MANY pieces based on his descriptions; have whole files of quotes from him refrencing his visuals. I’ve also met many folk who’ve complained that his writing features so little physical descriptions of his characters, yet they’ve acknowledged that he goes into minute details regarding the grit and textures of the worlds he builds, with his writing having a poetic and painterly quality.
It’s true that these latest novels aren’t nearly as visually rich as his earlier works – but they are far from devoid of visual descriptives.