Distrust That Particular Flavor

by William Gibson

William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, with his work ranging from his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, to his more recent contemporary bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly thirty years, though, Gibson has been sought out by widely varying publications for his insights into contemporary culture. Wired magazine sent him to Singapore to report on one of the world's most buttoned-up states. The New York Times Magazine asked him to describe what was wrong with the Internet. Rolling Stone published his essay on the ways our lives are all "soundtracked" by the music and the culture around us. And in a speech at the 2010 Book Expo, he memorably described the interactive relationship between writer and reader.

These essays and articles have never been collected-until now. Some have never appeared in print at all. In addition, Distrust That Particular Flavor includes journalism from small publishers, online sources, and magazines no longer in existence. This volume will be essential reading for any lover of William Gibson's novels. Distrust That Particular Flavor offers readers a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Cyberpunk, Science, Technology, Audiobook, Philosophy

210 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 3, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, having coined the term cyberspace in 1982 and popularized it in his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.

While his early writing took the form of short stories, Gibson has since written nine critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), contributed articles to several major publications, and has collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians. His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, academia, cyberculture, and technology.


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William Gibson. (2007, October 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:30, October 19, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?t...

Reviews

[RandomAnthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor utilizes, ahem, prodigious white/grey space. While the pages number 254, approximately 75 of these are white/gray dividers between articles/speeches/book introductions. So assume the text runs maybe 150 small pages. Does that mean Mr. Gibson and Co. are trying to pull a fast one on completist readers? I don't think so. While Distrust That Particular Flavor is short and far from cohesive, the gathering of the author's best non-fiction in one compact book provides a welcome and necessary fragment of the author's totality.

Gibson admits early on he's more comfortable writing fiction than non-fiction and shoots straight in his assertion that accepting the assignment to write and speak out of his comfort zone often meant an opportunity for travel to cool locations. He's at his best, and most like his fiction, when writing from a sense of place (Singapore, Tokyo, London). Gibson also provides a strong introduction to a Borges reissue and a couple futuristic speeches that, were you to read them without knowing the speaker, you could probably attribute to Gibson even with minimal exposure to his books. So while Distrust That Particular Flavor doesn't disappoint, the segments rarely break new ground. A bizarro defense of Steely Dan (barf) and minor autobiographical sketches are probably the weakest links, and the short, reflective commentary after each segment are often more fun than the segments themselves. If you're a Gibson fan, and you're jonsing for his style but don't want to re-read his novels or wait for the next, Distrust That Particular Flavor suffices, esp. when compared to searching out all these individual texts separately. More interesting than compelling, but worth the time.

[jenelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't had such an immediate, pressing desire to read a book in a long time, but from that NY Times Review, I knew this book nestled perfectly into my life-as-sci-fi imagination, esp. travel-as-time-travel. This is a collection of Gibson's published "nonfiction" essays, although he admits early he's uncomfortable relating anything as pure nonfiction, and each essay is footnoted by his present-day critique. Somehow I haven't read a single thing by Gibson before, and I wonder if I had this would just feel like a less perfect version of what he'd accomplished in those novels. Anyway, this was great. I bought and read it cover-to-cover in one day, something I haven't done in years. It was a slow start: I had a really hard time getting through the first essay Rocket Radio, like how I can never watch Sans Soleil all the way through, even after all these years, without at least getting up to walk around the room once or twice for fear my head will explode: too good. The comparison to Sans Soleil is right, especially since they both occupy the space between documentary and narrative, and of course they both get interested in futuristic 80's Tokyo. It turns out some chapters are better than others, and some themes (Tokyo, the Internet, all "futuristic" sci-fi is only about today) are re-worked several times over, so it didn't conclude as scarily brilliant as it had begun. I had a good time! The most beautiful chapter is Shiny Balls of Mud, which looks at this obsessive trend that spread amongst Japanese pre-schoolers of creating perfect spheres from mud as metaphor. One of the most succinctly touching was about Skip Spence's jeans ("the gift of his brave elegance"), you may not have guessed. Wm. seems like such an appreciator, everything moves his imagination so sincerely, and he doesn't seem to get caught up in any cult of things... I mean he somehow isn't even dorky.

[Jackie "the Librarian" · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Gibson likes Japan, big mechanical Swiss watches, eBay, and Steely Dan. Japan is still the future, in case you were wondering.
I mildly enjoyed this collection of book intros and magazine essays with their insights into why Japan seems like it's in the future already (a couple of hard shoves into the modern world after Commodore Perry and then WWII supercharged the culture), the addictiveness of bidding on eBay, and why Singapore is at once both super safe (too safe) and super scary.
But this isn't a great collection - while his insights (especially on Japan and tech and the future) are fascinating, Gibson repeats himself, and as these are intros to other works, or short magazine articles, he doesn't have space to build much on those insights. Hurray that Gibson likes Steely Dan (I LIKE Steely Dan, shut up), and yes, they have a distinctive sound and are still producing music. Okay, and? This essay, and many of the others, would have been much more interesting with a bit more content.
So, good as far as it goes, and if you love Gibson, or commute by bus (like I do) and want short reads sometimes, go ahead and read this.
I don't know why this is called "Distrust That Particular Flavor" though. I don't remember any essays about food, futuristic or otherwise. Mary Roach should write that book. It would be funny.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually view these essay compilations as a greatest hits album from a mediocre band—an inevitable 3 star rating—but William Gibson's Distrust That Paricular Flavor is good. There are some classic lines, including Singapore is like "Disneyland with the death penalty" and "the Street finds its own uses for things." I loved his discussion (on pg. 45 in this edition) about how science fiction is always about the present even if it's about the future. In an essay about the Internet, he notes that it takes away slack from our lives (pg. 196). My goodreads friend, Alan, highlighted this line in his review, which I want to share (can't imagine why) at this time: "Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present models of the world that more easily make sense than the world itself, and, regardless of how dark or threatening, are inherently less frightening" (pg. 116). I don't normally write down page numbers, and yet I read Gibson thinking that I will want to reference or reflect upon these ideas again. Although it seems one of his least favorite essays, I loved "My Obsession," which is about buying watches on ebay, and immediately sent the original online version to my friends (who also liked it). Recommended.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Singapore:Disneyland with the death penalty

This collection of Gibson's nonfiction essays, articles, reviews, and forewords is a valuable historical artefact that addresses some of the questions raised by Graeber in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy and others, such as "Where are the flying autonomous vehicles and other promised tech?"

In addition to the apropos send-up of Singapore, which played host to our family for five years (the essay was published in Wired magazine, which was subsequently banned in Singapore--along with a whole host of other media quietly absent in that nominally friendly police state), Gibson's takes on tech and Tokyo, our family home for six years before Singapore, are particularly personal and interesting.

Gibson’s nonfiction is often as engrossing and vivid as his cyberpunk. His later, more mature, takes on his older magazine articles are particularly illuminating as retrospective on expected / predicted tech developments that have failed to manifest.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always admired William Gibson's fiction. Now I can say, after reading Distrust That Particular Flavor, I can also say that I like his essays just as much. It is interesting to me that Gibson started out as a science fiction writer of sorts, and that he now finds the future in the present. As he writes in "Dead Man Sings":

This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.

Gibson is very conscious of where he stands on this spectrum, which makes reading his work exciting.

[Linda Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurbs at the end of each of the essays in this book cumulatively convinced me that, yes, Gibson, as an essay writer, finds himself "thoroughly not that." We get a glimpse of Gibson's imagination at work and play in short forms about subjects he cares about. Like London. Tokyo. Singapore. Chateau Marmont. He doesn't understand why he was asked to write some of the essays and apparently struggles to believe he gave good value. But this paid excursion contributed to Pattern Recognition and that trip gave him the bones of Zero History, and one day I hope we can read about Garage Kubrick. A novelist is what Gibson thoroughly is. Like Vannevar Bush, who invented hypertext searching - Memex - in 1945, Gibson's brain works in an augmented state that is immersed in the future/history of humans and our relationship with interconnectivity. He is fascinated by our world in which we can watch dead bands still playing, and history is made and erased every day. But some imprint of all this remains, including those bison on cave walls. "Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking, immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the individual-perhaps even of surviving the death of the species." Forget robots, cyborgs, cranial implants, nanobots. We already are the Borg. Cool.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think very highly of William Gibson. I've been vastly entertained by three of his novels and can't wait to get my hands on more of his fiction. But this collection of non-fiction pieces, written over a span of several decades, is a disappointment, likely to be of interest only to diehard Gibson fans.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing here to change my impression that Gibson is smart, and a fundamentally nice guy. But pieces like the 1993 essay about his impressions of Singapore for "Wired", or two essentially similar 2001 pieces about the futuristic appeal of Tokyo as a setting for his fiction were probably only modestly interesting when first published and have not improved with age. As coiner of the term "cyberspace", Gibson is probably doomed to suffer a lifetime of being asked to write pieces that try to predict the future. Does reprinting such efforts really address some deep-seated need among the reading public? I doubt it.

To his credit, Gibson adds a little coda to each such dated piece, in which he signals his own embarrassment at serving it up again. One senses this book was the brainchild of some enthusiastic soul working for his publisher. It is a fundamentally misbegotten effort.

If you have yet to discover the fun to be had in reading Gibson, try "Neuromancer". Or "Pattern Recognition". Or "Spook Country". Or any of his fiction. But give this collection a miss.

[Ryan I · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even if he wasn't a real-deal writer of the fictions, William Gibson's non-fiction stuff would be still be must-read. Most of the essays in "Distrust..." have the feel of being a behind-the-scenes look at how he forms the ideas that go into his books, but they still hold up on their own (which is good, because many originally ran in Rolling Stone, Wired, etc.)

But a constant theme of emerges in his writing, that's twinned with his fiction writing; it's Gibson wrapping his wild brain around how different technologies will shape mankind, and vice versa, whether its eBay, e-books, digital film (and the Digital Kubrick) and the 'net (in an essay from 1989). Also, it shouldn't surprise that Japan is the focus of more than a couple essays.

How often Gibson predicts technology-use is as shocking and fun as checking what year the piece was originally published. (The Mobile Girls p.124)

And there's also thoughts on Borges, Beat Takeshi, and psychogeography.

Favorites:
"Disneyland with the Death Penalty"
"Time Machine Cuba" -(a good part on 206)
"Googling the Cyborg"


Amazing intro to a piece: "Time moves in one direction, memory in another." - p.51

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of Gibson's nonfiction pieces, products of an attempt at a form with which he professes discomfort, as if he is just pretending to do nonfiction. Some of them are more trenchant than others, and many are slight at best, but all of them exhibit a deep love of language and fascination for the telling detail, which are the qualities that make his fiction so hypnotic. We have here travel pieces, commentary on tech, several on Asia (the one on Singapore is particularly unnerving), and a few explorations of science fiction as history or form. By and large these are not works with any conclusions or answers. Rather they are proposals of conversations, topics for consideration, suggestions for ways of looking at things, contextualizations for consideration. His intent seems to be for the reader to take off from a given essay and finish the exploration, either in dialogue or through extended research or just to use as a viewpoint when reading other work on similar subjects. As if he's strolling through the postmodern landscape, occasionally pausing, pointing, and saying "Did you notice this?"

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of nonfiction essays by Science Fiction author William Gibson. As a fan of cyberpunk, and someone that has been reading Gibson for years, Recommended for someone that c!can't get enough Gibson. Some interesting
autobiographical information, some Interesting takes on urban spaces and technology). I listened to this on Audible (not my favorite media, but that's just me).

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked his pieces on Orwell, digital film making, and Japan the best but for me Gibson is much stronger writing fiction then n0n-fiction, a fact that I believe he himself would readily agrees. The essays on Japan seem the most informative for the time they were written. I'm glad he was a fan of Alta Vista it was my search engine of choice as well, way back then.

[Miloš Petrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little gem grants and unexpected insight into the mind and process of one of the great contemporary futurists, allowing us a glimpse into the biographical, the influences, and the general likes and dislikes of the man who gave my generation hours of wide-eyed wonder (and one dubious film) in our teenage years.

[Evgen Novakovskyi]

есеї Забужко: ало друже вейк ап нас вбивають!

есеї Токарчук: гей читачику ану вхопи Кайроса за чубчик та будь як той дослідник із гравюри Фламмаріона й не соромся зазирнути за лаштунки всесвіту. але не забувай сортувати сміття, бо планеті шось пізда.

есеї Кундери: єдина підстава для існування роману — це відкрити те, що може відкрити лише роман. роман, що не відкриває жодної незнаної досі частки буття — аморальний. пізнання — єдина мораль роману. (*кашляє в кулачок, поправляє монокль)

есеї Борхеса: вітаю, дзеркала та злягання — огидні, бо і те й інше збільшує кількість людських істот (*тікає)

есеї Ґібсона: колись я купував багато годинників на eBay і зараз я вам розповім про свої відчуття з цього приводу. до речі, Японія дуже крута. а от Сінгапур — такий собі. а ще мені подобається тинятись барахолками. і Steely Dan подобається. інколи ми разом із донькою дивимось європейське кіно. а одного разу я викатав кульку з бруду. до речі, я казав вам, що ЯПОНІЯ ДУЖЕ ДУЖЕ ДУЖЕ КРУТА? спитайте в мого бро Дугласа Коупленда та його бро Майка Стайпа, вона дуже крута.

Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer—equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short—and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami.

боже, та в цього пана нафіть нонфік імерсивний. за це й любимо.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Gibson is a sort of reluctant futurist. He wishes to write fiction, yet so much of it has, presumably against his wishes, turned out to be reality, or at lease a semblance of reality. He "creates" cyberspace on the page and shortly it exists, of a sort. Unlike many science fiction writers who attempt to predict the future, he seems to be a sort of future historian, seeing shadows of possibilities through a broken lens. Never an exact projection, but frighteningly close.

Reading this collection - of essays, speeches and other ephemera - and seeing his commentaries on technology, media and the various "mechanisms of Information" at work in the world tying us together, you get a similar impression. Most of these treatises were written in the previous decade, some in the previous century (as strange as it still sounds to say that), and yet so many of the topics all sounded quite familiar. Like they could have been written this year or last. And his analyses are just as accurate, regardless of the publication date.

I enjoyed this book, but there was very little doubt that I would. The subject matter of Gibson's fiction always intrigues and entertains me, but I don't know if I would devour his work with the voracity that I do if it weren't for the voice he uses to tell these tales. Just the way he assembles the words on the page speak to something in me. His non-fiction is no different.

People speak of writers who excel at crafting realistic sounding dialogue by saying that they "write the way people really speak." Gibson writes the way I think. As I'm an acolyte of his work, an admirer, a fan, I would hardly consider my opinion of this book unbiased. Your milage may vary.

[Florin Pitea · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a detailed review, please visit my blog: http://tesatorul.blogspot.ro/2012/07/....

[vonblubba · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a novel, but a collection of essays on various subjects, technology and travel mostly. I find always entertaining to read Gibson's opinions, whatever the topic, for he has an uncanny ability to pinpoint the critical points that define it. A suggested read only for Gibson's hardcore fans.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The particular flavor we're supposed to distrust doesn't show up explicitly until very late in Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's brief but sparkling 2012 collection of essays. I will tell you what that flavor is, but hide it here in case you'd rather run across it in context: to paraphrase what Gibson says in "Time Machine Cuba," he distrusts that flavor of science fiction which purports to predict, to prescribe, the future it's really merely describing—"the italics of the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever, the less evolved." (p.207).

And Gibson's probably right to distrust that particular flavor, as he has been right about so many other things—as he is correct, for example, when he asserts that he's not really a non-fiction writer. Oh, he's good at writing nonfiction—these essays establish that much quite conclusively—but it's not where his interests lie, nor the bulk of his output. Though they range over decades, these pieces are all short, and all are flavored with at least a little unreality, a little flicker in the corners of your field of vision, like the one that let you know your VR helmet's refresh rate is substandard.

They're all most definitely William Gibson pieces, too—peppered throughout with the sort of keen, quirky observations that make his fiction so fascinating. Like the one at the heart of "Dead Man Sings":

When we turn on the radio in a New York hotel room and hear Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel," we are seldom struck by the peculiarity of our situation: that a dead man sings.
In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only just changed a moment ago.
—p.52

Or this one, from "Metrophagy":

Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present models of the world that more easily make sense than the world itself, and, regardless of how dark or threatening, are inherently less frightening.
—p.116

That latter insight explains so much...

Or his brilliant capsule history of 19th and 20th-Century Japan (just three succinct paragraphs on pages 124-125, though still too long to reproduce here), a "mirror world, an alien planet we can actually do business with, the future." "Modern Boys and Mobile Girls" helps explain among other things why the Onion article "Earthquake Sets Japan Back To 2147" resonates so well.

What I'm trying to say, here at the end of another impossibly distant future year (2015! Clarke's astronauts found the Monolith on the Moon fourteen years ago!) is that this book contains, I truly believe, a flavor you can trust.

[William Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Gibson thinks very highly of himself, Angela told me as we listened to this audiobook on a drive in the suburbs. I think what she actually said was, "this guy is super into himself".

You can definitely get that impression from this collection, although the conclusion would be unjustified. The articles are more or less supposed to be about him- his experiences, his thoughts, his vision. So to make a judgment as such seems unwarranted when the non-fiction you are reading is supposed to be exactly what it is you criticized it, or its writer, for being.

Distrust That is a retrospective collection of what read like future histories. At the time they were published, I would have classified the articles as such, anyway. Unlike other non-fiction collections, however, we get a commentary track from the future Gibson (or present day Gibson) as he tells us what was wrong with the article, what he made up in the article, how little knowledge he actually had in certain areas of the writing and so forth. So future Bill is adding his own color commentary into these pieces that he sees as sometimes very foolish or undeservedly righteous and other times just acts as an editor after the fact.

It doesn't take long to get through, I listened to it on audio, yes, but the book itself is slight. I wouldn't say you'd learn anything new about the world, or about eBay or about the Internet, but you will get a better handle on who Gibson is as a person, rather than just a name on some very classic sci-fi lit.

[Roy Kenagy]

http://avc.lu/nLyrGJ

AVC: Your first collection of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavor, comes out in January. Have you always wanted to write non-fiction?

WG: I’m a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don’t really feel qualified. I have the toolkit of a novelist, and no training as a journalist or science writer. But I’ve been surprised to realize how much of my fiction over the years has been steered by getting non-fiction assignments and agreeing to go meet someone or look at something. I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone and have to think about these things differently.

AVC: So what are the essays about?

WG: One is about the future of digital film; another is about Orwell’s version of the future versus what we live in today. It’s a very mixed bag. There are 25 pieces, which range from my review of a fairly recent Steely Dan album to musing on where the Digital, with a capital D, might be headed.

AVC: Are they new for this book? Or have they been published elsewhere?

WG: Most of them have been published elsewhere, but there are some talks that have never been published.

[Philipp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non-fiction by one of the more famous names in recent SF (most famous for coining "cyberspace").

Some essays here feel a bit unnecessary, like the introductions to books I've never read, so they kind of hang there in empty space. Others are so dated that they're fun to read, but not much else ("have you heard of this thing called 'eBay'???"). The best ones are about the "Future" (with a capital F), the Future that he grew up believing in in the 50s to the 70s - the one with the jetpacks and the space ships, the boundless optimism. That Future that has now merged into "our" future, less optimism, more an ever present "now". The essays surrounding this change are the best ones.

The weirdest few essays are the ones about Japan - I see a completely different Japan compared to Gibson. Gibson's Japan already exists in the optimistic perfectionist Future (even after the economy crashed!), "my" Japan is a special kind of hell with 80 hour work weeks lacking any vision, working not to achieve something, but because your surroundings expect it.

I'd say this is recommendable to Gibson fans, but not really anyone else. 2.5?

[Mary Slowik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dare you to find a quicker-reading non-fiction book. This took all of maybe four hours to read. As with (almost) any collection of essays it's hit or miss, and I especially liked the post-scripts for each one, in which Gibson often takes himself to task for caffeine-fueled rambling, or makes fun of his referencing 'AltaVista' in a pre-Google universe.

I will say this. It's William Gibson's world-- we're just living in it. I've heard this line so many times, but it happens to be true regarding this book: it will change the way you look at the world. The day after I read his musings about technological change being the sole driver of cultural change, and specifically discussing how the music industry came into being and is now being phased out, I saw a singer on Bill Maher talking about how very few musicians are making money.

Coincidences and junk. Anyway, as I said, hit or miss. When he goes into the minutiae of his eBay obsession, cherry-picking old watches, I kind of tuned out. But overall it's still a quick, entertaining, thought-provoking read.

[Paul Gleason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fun but, in all reality, unnecessary grab bag of William Gibson's nonfiction odds and sods. Most of it is fun and easy reading, mainly because Gibson's prose is such a joy to read. But many of the pieces are very dated. I guess this means that Gibson really is the prophet that many of his admirers claim him to be.

The bit on William Blake being the world's first graphic novelist is pretty great, as is the final essay on Vannever and cyborgs.

But the collection, as a whole, provides zero insight into Gibson's fictional universe and philosophical mindset. Gibson comes off as a nice and affable cultural observer whose essays were probably a lot more radical and groundbreaking when they were originally published.

It will be interesting to compare this collection to Neal Stephenson's forthcoming nonfiction collection, which comes out in early August.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

"There is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original."

- William Gibson

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson says that "reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society."

Insightfully, he says this in The Road to Oceania, a 2003 article he wrote for the New York Times, reprinted in this book of articles and essays collected from various (nominally) nonfiction publications for which he has written over the years. It was insightful at the time in a very conventional sense in that, while reliance on broadcasting does not encompass the whole definition of a technologically backward society either when he wrote the article in 2003 or ten years later -- this year -- when I read it, it was inescapably true that any society whose formal maintenance required broadcast propaganda as the primary form of information dissemination was also a society that had not caught up to the postmodern information age in which we lived. In that age of the Internet, information moved in myriad directions, the power of publishing having become accessible to anyone with six hundred dollars to spend on a computer and another fifteen or more per month to an ISP. In 2003, it was not so long since ad-funded "free" Internet access had been popularly available in the United States, in fact, and that had only really gone away because Internet access had become such a ubiquituous requirement of contemporary life that everyone was willing to spend money on it. Now, free Internet access is back with a vengeance; it can even be had wirelessly at crummy fast food joints, and a failure to provide wireless Internet access is the very definition of a technologically backward fast food chain.

More than all that, however, it was insightful because we as a society were on the cusp of beginning to realize, on some not-strictly-conscious level where we take the fundamental facts of our lives for granted, that broadcasting itself was the mark of technological backwardness in this millennium, even in those very early single digit years. It is now a mere decade later, one fortieth the time that passed between the invention of the foundational tool of mass publication (movable type) in China in the eleventh century to the refinement of the technology (the Gutenberg press) to the point where it provided the ability to perform the task of mass publication in less than a week's time in the fifteenth century. In that decade, Gibson's perhaps accidental insight that we were about to enter an age where broadcasting itself was a mark of backwardness has gone from being insightful to banal, as much a fact of life as breathing and eating, as if the knowledge that broadcast technology is "over" is etched in the rhombencephalon -- the "primitive hindbrain" that controls the things we don't have to think about and on which the conscious thinking parts of our brains implicitly rely.

Ironically, he writes these words in 2003, roughly ten years after it became inevitably true due to a number of socially relevant factors including the appearance of the truly world wide web (then still called the World Wide Web), the appearance of open source software that would actually have a significant impact on the whole world instead of a tiny cabal of obsessed technologists (general purpose operating system software that could run acceptably on commodity hardware, including the post-Berkeley BSD Unix and Linux families of operating systems), and the introduction of arguably the world's first smartphone (the IBM Simon, a handheld touchscreen combination wireless mobile telephone and personal digital assistant -- yes, really, before Java). This puts him a decade behind when the future backwardness of broadcasting he identifies had already arrived, even if it was not yet well distributed.

More than all that, however, it was ironic because he has built his career as a writer of fixed-form books and short pieces for publication in fixed-form magazines. That is, he writes for publication, the carefully polished, cautiously curated, comprehensively broadcast dissemination of derivation-resistant works of authorship, in a form essentially unchanged since the fifteenth century even when distributed in (DRM-encumbered, copyright-protected) digital formats. Knowing what I imagine I know of Gibson, perhaps a hubristic conceit for someone who has never met the man except through his writings and photographs, I rather suspect he lives with a disquieting sense of the technological backwardness of his craft's current form pressing through the membrane between the subconscious and conscious parts of his mind, if it has not already crept into the light of day, blinking blearily at the dazzling strangeness of the world in which it has emerged. His most recent trilogy of novels (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) reads, in some ways, like attempts to describe the underlying truths of the phenomenon of broadcasting's obsolescence to the recipients of his broadcast word without actually setting it down on paper for them to recognize and, perhaps, learn to transcend his published works before they even buy them. This would of course not be the attempt to run a moneymaking scam on his readers, in the tradition of fundamentally broadcast oriented media publishers like Random House and Universal Music, but rather as a means of buying time to adjust to the emerging reality.

"Publication", to make something public in a known and static form, has become hopelessly antiquated in principle in the world of distributed version control systems and BitTorrent. From the perspective of 2003, when Gibson wrote The Road to Oceania, the world will have fully woken up to this when we all have easy access to our textual culture in an intrinsically version controlled, arbitrarily editable form that makes it take an effort of conscious intent to avoid sharing with the world, via nothing more sophisticated than the devices we carry in our pockets, and we have stopped regarding it as a fringe curiosity or one-off niche tool the way we regard Wikipedia. In the meantime, when the insights of distant others are shared with us, they are largely delivered to us via the works of published authors such as William Gibson -- all of whose books (both collection and novel form) have delivered wisdom to this reader that would have otherwise been harder and longer in the finding -- and by random commentators shouting out their observations in the open-air agoras of the Internet. These are our standard options, and not quite up to the distributed, version controlled, automatically reshared standards of Wikipedia.

Spanning almost two decades of writings (or fully two decades, judging by publication dates, if you include the preface), Distrust That Particular Flavor is overflowing with trademark Gibsonian insight into the way our changing world interacts with our psyches, and vice versa, described in largely literal presentations of life arranged so that the picture that emerges is at once both hyperreal in its edgy clarity and flavored with the surreal. It serves the role of intellectually distributing some of the future that has already in fact permeated every fiber of our lives, as members of societies where something like this website has any meaning. As Gibson himself has reminded his readers more than once, he is no technologist, and he has even said he is no futurist, writing about today in the thinly applied makeup of tomorrow even when his settings are "the future". His genius as an author has been in recognizing many implications for our cultures and lives of the technologies already developing, when those implications have not yet fully revealed themselves to most of us, and gently conveying them to us in fictionalized form in a manner that somehow helps us weather the imminent futureshock with more savoir faire. This volume of collected nonfiction proves he can do the same without the fictionalizing soft-light filter over the lens through which he directs our attention, and as well as he ever did in his fiction. The Road to Oceania is also, after all, the essay in which he warned the politicians of the day of the yet-to-be implemented Wikileaks, starting with the words "It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret."

If there is a flaw in this book, it is the final piece of writing, Googling the Cyborg. For all its insistence that much of science fiction and futurism is too literal about the metaphors that are developing, and shaping our lives, so that they often miss the fact the futures they describe have often already taken root and spread through the world, its value is in taking the important step of making the core of Gibson's overarching narrative purpose explicitly literal. Its weakness is in the way it comes across as more distracted and fumbling than any other piece of writing of his that I have encountered. It is not bad, nor even merely mediocre; it still inspires and offers insights. What it lacks is Gibson's typical atmospheric depth for me, at least, and what creeps into it unwelcomed is an inexpert sort of repetition, a clumsy sort of foreshadowing, and actual errors (i.e. the terms "electron" and "neuron" are both misused, and in the same paragraph). It is an essay he needed to write, but I can only conclude that when he wrote it for a lecture he would give at the University of British Columbia circa 2008 he was not ready. In his own terms, referring to the words of other science fiction writers, I think it was not yet "Steam Engine Time". Imperfect it may be, but this lecture in essay form is still worth reading, and measured by its subject matter it in some sense serves as the perfect coping stone for the book.

While I do, in fact, deeply distrust the particular "collected nonfiction articles individually available elsewhere" flavor of book in general, Distrust That Particular Flavor has turned out to be an informative, revealing look at the world in which I live through the eyes of William Gibson, broadening my perspective and whetting my apetite for whatever solutions its author may find to the problem of escaping the obsolescence of broadcast technologies. Read it, then build upon it. It isn't just broadcast any longer, y'know.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Gibson wrote some of my favourite sci-fi, back when I first encountered it in the 90's. His work got better and better over the years too. He is widely credited with creating the cyberpunk genera, though he certainly was not alone in that. He was instrumental in creating a sort of social consciousness, world wide awareness of the internet. Even people who have not read his books would probably be surprised at how much his fictional world building has informed the world wide web.

This book, which I stumbled across, is a collection of various works he did over the years which are NOT fiction. Different magazine including Wired and Rolling Stone had him write articles on different tech and social aspects of the world. This apparently involved them flying him to fun places like Singapore and Japan.

These articles are a fascinating glimpse into the mind that wrote some of my favourite sci-fi books and it is a fascinating mind, keenly inquiring and able to see small things which are obvious when he points them out, but often overlooked. His use of the English language is, as ever, both lush and erudite and his perspectives on society are everything you would expect. One gets the sense , through these essays, of a perpetually inquiring mind, which can see absurdities and possibilities in the most mundane and is able to let it's reader see limitless possibilities in a grain of sand.

I found it fascinating how Gibson reiterates that his books, while billed as science fiction, to him were more the present. But that is so much excellent science fiction, it is always the most interesting when it is examining human behaviours, social relations and political structures and sci-fi does that from a platform that is impossible to achieve any other way, because it's possibilities are limitless. George Orwell found the same thing, and he is mentioned in one essay.

Thoroughly enjoyable collection which is encouraging me to read Gibson's work again. I don't think I ever read the entire Spook collection straight through.

[Josef Komensky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is true must for any lover of books of William Gibson and his world of future that is now becoming a world of our present.

William let us inside of his secret drawing room of his own imagination, of his literary Idols. His passion for watches or his amazement with Japan and its history and culture.

This book that have been composed from all odd bits and pieces is completely different from his dreamy visions that we readers used to know from his other works such as neuromancer.

His writing style is matter fact and to the point.
So it is very readble also for all those readers who have problems with his usuall writing style.

[emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was like listening to a 'slightly racist' , openly sexist drunk ramble about shit he 'saw' during his 'travels abroad' that made him feel super cultured and shit . I wish I hadn't wasted my time reading this . Got to chuck this one out; wouldn't be able to bear the embarrassment of having it sit on my shelves .

[Silvia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ecclectic collection of nonfiction pieces that were made more interesting by the end-comment to each by the author himself. Some were more deep than others, others were tacking some very interesting issues.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this, kind of an evolution of Gibson’s writing and ideas. Most especially Modern Boys and Mobile Girls which brings me back to my experiences of and in Japan.