Despite a youth in which I read literally hundreds of sci-fi novels, I somehow missed the works of Clifford D. Simak. I would blame the fact that Simak wrote his best books long before I was born, in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but I managed to read other giants from that period like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. No, I think I missed Simak simply because, well, he wasn’t as popular as those guys. In fact, he became known as one of the founders of Pastoral Science Fiction, a sub-genre in which the stories are set in rural or other off-beat settings. (Sounds sexy, huh?)
So, you can imagine my surprise when I read Simaks 1964 novel They Walked Like Men. I stumbled upon the book on my local library’s web site. It was a modern copy (see the excellent 1979 cover below by Jan Esteves), and I figured that if my librarians like it enough to buy an e-book copy, it must be worth a shot. So, I checked it out. And I loved it. It’s one of the strangest, edgiest sci-fi novels I read in a long time. Imagine an alien invasion narrative, set in the early 1960s, in which the major plot point is…real estate.
Sounds funky, right? The protagonist, Parker, is a hard-drinking, noirish newspaper man who stumbles upon a plot by mysterious strangers to buy all the real estate in town. Naturally, the strangers turn out to be aliens whose actual shape is something like a bowling ball, but who can simulate almost any form—kind of like the T-1000 in Terminator 2, with equally gruesome results. Parker makes it his mission to get to the bottom of the murderous aliens’ plan, whose true motive turns out to be even stranger than I suspected.
Honestly, I can’t believe no one has adapted this book into a movie. It reads like The Maltese Falcon meets Twin Peaks meets The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I could someone like Jordan Peele coming in and making this into a really cool, eldritch thriller.
In the meantime, we have the book! Check it out…
Here is the cover from the latest printing, which I also really like…
If there is one song that can instantly evoke memories of the early 1980s, when me and friends stayed up all night watching MTV, it’s this one, “Mexican Radio.” It’s a very strange little song by a very strange little band, Wall of Voodoo, but it perfectly captures the “collapsed-time” vibe of the Reagan era. The suppressed but inescapable feeling that American culture had somehow degraded (“de-evolved,” as the band Devo put it) to a state where it was totally insane, vulgar, and incomprehensible.
The same sort of black humor, satirical zeitgeist was immortalized in film two years later, in 1984, when Alex Cox’s Repo Man came out. That movie’s soundtrack included many fine punk and post-punk bands like Wall of Voodoo—but without Wall of Voodoo. Oh, well. The movie could have given the band some much-needed exposure. They never did get the respect they deserved.
But for a while, they really did shine.
(Fun fact: I always thought the band’s name was a reference to a spell in Dungeons & Dragons, but I was wrong. It was, in fact, inspired by the brilliant madman Phil Spector and his famous Wall of Sound effect on the songs he produced in the 1960s. Go, figure.)
Yesterday I got a three-word text message from my son Connor: Kilgore is dead.
I knew, of course, exactly who he was referring to—Robert Duvall, the great actor who passed away yesterday at the age of 95. More specifically, Connor was calling out one of Duvall’s most memorable characters, that of Lt. Colonel Kilgore, the cheerfully psychopathic Army commander in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Everyone, it seems, has a favorite Duvall role. For many young dudes these days, it is Kilgore. For others, it’s the soft-spoken but iron-willed Tom Hagen in the Godfather films. For still others, it is the authoritarian Marine dad in The Great Santini, or the fearless Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae. No matter what kind of character he was playing, Duvall’s own, real-life character always shone through: smart, fierce, tough, and comfortable in his own skin.
Being a mega-film-nerd, my definitive Duvall role was that of THX 1138, the titular character in George Lucas’s first film, which is still one of the most daring and visually stunning movies ever made. THX 1138 also marked one of the few films in which Duvall got to play the lead. Most of the time, he was cast in supporting roles, working in the background. Invariably, this allowed him—like Kilgore in his helicopter—to swoop in and steal the movie.
Although he trained with many famous Method actors, he was not generally considered to be one himself. Yet, he could hang with the De Niros, Pacinos, and Hoffmans of the world with seemingly effortless ease. Indeed, as an actor, he could hang with anybody.
For many (White) guys my age, Duvall represented the ideal American man. German/Irish but still cool. Macho but not toxic. Smart but not showy.
And funny. Even in the midst of mass-slaughter, Kilgore is funny. So is Santini. So, in his own way, is THX 1138. One of my favorite, later roles that Duval played is that of the craggy old Marine who helps Tom Cruise in the 2012’s Jack Reacher. With just a few lines of dialogue, and a barely suppressed, ghoulish chuckle, he manages to deliver some of the funny moments in recent cinema.
I finally moved out of my parents’ house when I was twenty-two, when I embarked on a cross-country move to Tucson, Arizona. I had enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the university there, and I arrived knowing not a single, living soul. Once I found a place to live and acquired a U-of-A ID card, I spent my evenings going to the small, student gym in the basement of the football stadium, where I and a few other lonely souls (all dudes) worked out until the lights went off.
I vividly remember my first night at that gym. There were radio speakers in the ceiling tuned to the local F.M. rock station. That night, as it happened to be running an hour-long special devoted entirely to one rock album: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The show included a few tracks off the album along with interviews with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie. (For some reason, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were left out.)
By this time, Rumours had already achieved legendary status of the sort afforded very few pop-music albums. (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is perhaps the only other.) Today, many years after that first night in Tucson, the album’s popularity and reputation has not diminished. If anything, it has increased. It’s gone from being a recognized artistic masterpiece to a timeless cultural colossus. As each new generation of music fans and musicians have discovered Rumours, an entire legendarium has been constructed around it.
Entire books have been devoted to the months-long, tortuous period in 1977 when the album was recorded. Two of the band’s members, John and Christine McVie, were in the midst of an ugly divorce. Two other members, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were in the midst of an ugly breakup. And the remaining member, drummer and band leader Mick Fleetwood, was on the verge of breaking up with his famous wife, Jenny Boyd. The five members alternated between screaming obscenities at each other and slipping into effortless, soulful harmonies, all while drinking heavily and vacuuming titanic amounts of cocaine up their collective nose.
At one point late in the process, the album’s producer, Ken Caillat, was horrified to discover that the master recording tapes were literally flaking-out. They had been re-run through the mixing machines so many times that the metal-oxide strip was coming loose from the plastic, threatening to lose all the work he and the band had done. A technician from the manufacturer was flown in to manually transfer the recording onto a new tape before disaster struck.
In short, the fact that Rumours was made at all seems like something of a miracle.
I’ve been saddened by the deaths of many famous people, but only three genuinely depressed me. Like, for a good while. These were Robin Williams, David Bowie, and Dolores O’Riordan.
Everybody remembers the first two, and I would bet that many people shared my crestfallen reaction to those two deaths. But relatively few will recognize the third. Unless, that is, you were alive in the 1990s and listening to alt-rock.
I was in the early stages of a career at the time, writing code for a series of software companies, and I was always amazed at how many macho, tech-bros I met were also huge fans of The Cranberries, the band that O’Riordan joined when she was eighteen years old and soon made famous. The band’s first mega-hit, Linger, is also their best song. It displayed O’Riordan’s unique genius—her amazing, Irish voice, alternating between dreamy-and-angelic to fierce-and-vengeful. And the lyrics! Even as a teenager, she could really write! The song’s tale of a woman who has been deceived by the one she loves is sad but not sentimental. Never weepy. Rather, it surges forward with tremendous power.
But it was this song, Zombie, that proved how powerful the band—and O’Riordan—could hit. It’s a protest song, but like all good protest songs, it works both as a political statement as well as a kick-ass song. Some have called it the definitive grunge-rock song. I don’t know about that, but it’s damned good.
Interesting fact: The music video was partially filmed on the streets of war-ravaged Belfast. The kids (and the soldiers) are real folk, for better or worse.
Fourteen years have passed since Skyfall, the twenty-third installment in the James Bond franchise, was released. The Daniel Craig era is now over, and the entire Bond series has just been dumped onto Netflix until a new actor is anointed and the series can undergo yet another reboot.
Of course, I have no idea who Eon Productions will pick as the new Bond, but I do know that he will have very large shoes to fill. Craig, who was initially dismissed as a blond pretty-boy, came to inhabit the role in its best incarnation since Sean Connery’s. With his baleful stare and ruthlessly sculpted physique—a body that, by its very existence, suggested military fanaticism—Craig interpreted Bond as a high-tech samurai, patrolling the alleyways, caves, and tunnels of the criminal underworld. This was a new, modern Bond. He still drank, but didn’t smoke. And where previous Bonds were sexually rapacious, Craig’s version seemed almost indifferent to the beautiful, amoral women surrounding him. Indeed, in the Craig era, it was the women who initiated all the lovemaking. For Bond himself, sex almost seemed like an afterthought, a distraction from his real objective: revenge.
I have written before about the revenge-fantasy as a seldom discussed—but hugely popular—Hollywood genre. And it seems very probable to me that the current explosion in the genre’s popularity, from the John Wick movies to Taken to Sisu and on and on, originally stems from Daniel Craig’s Bond. The best movies of the Craig era are, implicitly, revenge fantasies of a sort. From the very first film, Casino Royale, Craig’s austere expression and muted affect both imply some horrific past trauma, an experience of loss which transformed him into a fearless, disciplined operative. A killer looking for vengeance.
Of course, the central mystery of the Craig films, and a huge part of their appeal, lies in what, exactly, Bond is seeking vengeance for. And on whom? None of the films explores this mystery as deeply and effectively as Skyfall.
In one early scene, Bond, still traumatized from having almost been killed on his last mission, is forced to undergo a psychological evaluation. The bearded shrink asks him to play a word-association game, to which Bond reluctantly submits. When the shrink gives him the word “Skyfall”—the first mention of the term in the film—Bond’s expression freezes into a rictus of rage, pain, and contempt. He angrily ends the interview and storms out.
Not only is this scene a brilliant way to introduce the Skyfall term into the discourse of the film (“What could it be?” the viewer wonders), it also acts as a kind of clue to that deeper mystery to which I previously alluded. That is, the mystery of why Bond is so damned angry. We sense, immediately, that it has something to do with Skyfall (whatever that is), and that it involved some horrific trauma that Bond suffered in his past. Thus, it becomes the biggest clue in the psychological whodunnit of the movie, the mystery that we, as viewers, want to solve.
When I re-watched that scene recently, it occurred to me that if someone were to play the word-association game with me and mention “Skyfall,” my response would be “blue.” For if one had to pick a single word—both a color, and an emotion—that best sums up the film for me, it would be that: blue. It is the dominant palette of the movie, as well as its defining mood. In the film’s opening frames, Bond emerges from the shadows until half of his face is illuminated by a slender shaft of light, the viewer’s attention is drawn immediately to Craig’s cold, cobalt-blue eyes. Similarly, the last act of the film takes place in the wintery, blue-grey wilderness of Scotland, which surrounds Bond’s ancestral home—the vaunted Skyfall—a land which seems bleached of color, if not life itself.
Everything in between these opening and closing movements is equally cold and blue. The only real counterpoint is the yellow blaze of fire. Specifically, fire becomes an equal, opposite visual symbol in the film. In one scene, Bond stands at the bow of a rickshaw as he is rowed into the dark domain of a Macau casino, itself surrounded by hundreds of tiny, floating candles. Later, a different kind of fire—the flames of the burning Skyfall house—illuminate the cold, night-shrouded landscape in which Bond’s final confrontation with Silva, the villain, takes place. Such moments of stark, warm firelight only emphasize—accentuate—all the blue coldness that dominates the movie physical and psychological fabric. In the battle between fire and ice, the movie warns, ice eventually wins.
The most famous and talked about moment of blue-ness in the film comes in the middle of the second act, during a scene that some action-film-loving bros find maddingly slow. Bond stalks his quarry—an assassin named Patrice—into a Shanghai office tower at night. He follows Patrice to a high-level, empty floor that is completely shrouded in darkness, except for the unearthly, swirling blue light pouring in from a digital ad sign. It’s a completely silent scene that evokes more cinematic antecedents than I can count. There’s a good deal of Blade Runner in it, as well as Point Blank, Klute, The Mechanic, and many others. Beyond all that, even, the glass walls inside the builder make the scene into a classic Hall of Mirrors trope, which has been used repeatedly throughout the history of cinema to represent a journey into the subconscious—the battle against the self. And it works perfectly here, for what is Patrice if not a mirror image of Bond? They are both cold, disciplined killers, separated from any meaningful, human connection.
As the scene continues, Bond takes no action as Patrice prepares to assassinate a man in the building across the street. It’s only after Patrice does the deed that Bond takes action, jumping him and eventually knocking him out an open window. Fortunately, Bond finds a gambling chip that Patrice left behind, which allows Bond to impersonate him at a Macau casino. Thus, the twinning is complete.
The film’s arch-villain, Silva (brilliantly played by Javier Bardem), is also a twin. Another linked opposite. Silva, another 007 agent, was betrayed by MI6 in the same way Bond felt himself to be when he was shot by friendly fire in the film’s opening. And, like Bond, Silva has devoted his life to a single-minded purpose: revenge. The viewer doesn’t know who, exactly, Silva wants to inflict his revenge on, but we suspect it’s M, to whom Silva refers as “Mommy.” Talk about psychological baggage!
In this way, M (again, brilliantly played by Shakespearean actor Judy Dench), the steely-eyed matriarch of MI6, becomes the symbolic heart of the film, and the key to its structure. She represents a mother figure to both men, Bond and Silva. But whereas Silva wants to kill her, Bond decides to protect her.
That’s one reason why the setting for the film’s climax—Bond’s home, Skyfall—works so well. Bond has “come home” both literally and psychologically, protecting the woman who represents a substitute for the mother (and, in some ways, the father, too) that he lost as a child. In the final shootout, Silva “comes home,” too, and inevitably finds himself alone with Bond and M in church. It’s a great scene that feels like an Oedipal love-triangle, or perhaps a re-staging of the Cain and Abel story, or some other classic, archetypal conflict. It’s a great ending to a great film.
In fact, if Skyfall is not the very best James Bond movie of them all, it’s way, way up there. Directed by auteur, literary film director Sam Mendes (whose first film, American Beauty, won him an Oscar), Skyfall is also, in the ways that I have discussed above, the deepest Bond movie. The heaviest. With all its angst, psychologic trauma, and absurdist violence—not to mention all the arctic blues—it almost feels like an existentialist art-film. If Kierkegaard were to make a Hollywood action movie, this would be it.
No, really. I’m serious. The real difference between Bond and Silva (and Patrice) is that he struggles. He wrestles with the central theme of the movie—the question of how can a warrior be sure that the people he serves (M, in this case, and MI6 generally) are any better than the enemies he has been tasked to destroy?
Bond feels betrayed by M, and by the entire system she represents. Over the course of the narrative, though, he slowly regains his faith. When M eventually confesses what she did to Silva (giving him up to the Chinese in exchange for six other agents), he accepts her justifications as moral (if incredibly troubling). He stops seeking vengeance on the world, and he decides to protect M, even at the cost of his own life.
On the other end of the spectrum, Silva is completely selfish in his pursuit of revenge. He has no self-awareness of his own culpability in the ordeal he suffered. (M sold him out, in part, because he was enriching himself using his talents.) Nor does he make any attempt to understand why M did what she did. In this way, he becomes a brilliant, terrifying villain who is, nonetheless, a completely hollow man. He has no real personality, other than a kind of sneering arrogance. There is nothing left of him except his hatred.
Good versus evil. Heroism vs selfishness. It’s all in there. That’s why Skyfall is a perfect film.
Author’s Note: I just learned that Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film Blade Runner will be back in theaters this month (today, actually) in a limited release of the so-called “Final Cut” version. None of the participating theaters is near me, alas. So, instead of going, I thought I would re-post this tribute that I wrote some years ago. I hope you like it…
When Philip K. Dick was shown a rough cut of the classic movie Blade Runner a few months before his death in 1981, he was so amazed by the power of Ridley Scott’s vision that he said, “You would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you.”
Dick might have been amused to know that I did go to see the movie five movies, when it was released in 1982—forty-four years ago. Ridley Scott might be amused, too, especially since I paid full price for every viewing, which means I am completely absolved of the dismal box office totals that the film accrued during that long-ago summer.
It’s hard to look back across so many years and try to remember what it was about the movie that captured my imagination so relentlessly. But I think it was simply this: for the 117 minutes of the film’s running time, I was in that world. I was completely immersed in that dark, crowded urban nightmare of some unknown future.
Yes, I said “unknown.” The opening crawl says that the movie is set in Los Angeles of 2019, but it’s really set in Scott’s imagination—a dizzying collage of 1940s film noir mixed in with 1980s Ginza, Japan, with a good dose of the Weimar Republic of 1930’s Germany thrown in for good measure. Oh, did I mention the Heavy Metal comic books?
Blade Runner was the first movie to actually pull-off this “collapsed time” effect, and it did so mainly thanks to Scott’s own obsessive genius for detail. It is perhaps the most dense visual landscape ever created on film. Every time I saw it in the theater, I noticed different details, whole new layers that I had missed before. Like a dream, this movie really is bottomless.
It’s also just very, very smart. 1982 was a big year for science fiction movies—The Wrath of Khan came out that year, as did E.T. and Tron. I liked those movies (especially Khaaan!!!), but even as a kid, I knew that they were full of crap. Blade Runner, despite being a movie about androids and flying cars and implanted memories, felt like the most realistic film I had ever seen.
Ironically, it’s one of the most human as well. It’s a love story, after all. (Actually, it’s two love stories, if you count Pris and Sebastian.) I found myself caring about all the characters in the film, replicant and otherwise. And despite the fact that he has pretty much disowned the film, Harrison Ford is the glue that holds it all together. Without his low-key, soulful performance as Deckard, the movie might have drowned in one of Scott’s magnificent sets. Ford keeps the movie centered.
Of course, when I watch the movie now, as a middle-aged man, I notice other great things about the movie. As a writer, I am struck by its tautness, its almost total mastery over film time and space. Contemporary directors should study it, if only as a brilliant demonstration of how to improve a film by leaving crap out. Think of all the scenes we don’t see: the replicants escaping from the off-world colony; Tyrell telling Deckard about Rachel’s memory implants; Baty killing Sebastian. All of this happens off-screen, and as a result we are never taken out of that vivid, meticulously imagined cityscape, (which, by the end of the movie, feels as real to me as my own hometown).
There is also no junk dialogue—no thinly-veiled backstory or explication. Scott seems to realize that the viewer is smart, and he asks us to keep up without a lot of summary. As a result, there is hardly a false note in the movie (one exception being the interview scene with Bryant, which clunks in one or two places, through no fault of the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh).
I also love how the script, penned by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, delivers so many genuine surprises. My favorite moment, in fact, is one that I have never seen discussed at length in any tribute or essay. It’s the moment when Deckard drunk-dials Rachel on the video phone in Taffy’s bar. This gesture of neediness and naked humanity is totally unexpected. It seems to have nothing to do with the overall plot of the film. And yet it’s totally believable.
Very seldom does a director allow his film to venture off the rails like this. But Scott often does, with brilliant effect. It’s this kind of realism that gives his movies a totally different vibe than almost any other major-league filmmaker.
Anyway, here is my statement of thanks to Scott, Fancher, Peoples, and (of course) P. K. Dick. It was a great summer. I’m glad the rest of the world finally caught on.
Gainesville has a famous bar called The Salty Dog Saloon, across the street from the University of Florida and just two blocks away from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Back in the 1990s, I spent many an evening at The Salty Dog, shooting pool, drinking beer, and inhaling so much second-hand smoke that, as I soon discovered, I could smoke an entire cigarette without coughing, even though I had never officially taken up the habit.
The Salty Dog also had a great jukebox (maybe it still does). And, this being the height of the grunge era, my friends and I played a lot of Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. Somehow, a joke started among us that the next Godzilla movie should be set in Seattle, where the great kaiju would be battled (and, no doubt, defeated) by the likes of Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, and Kurt Cobain.
It was a dumb joke, but it struck a chord. These guys were the superheroes of rock, cultural warriors that always seemed brilliant, dedicated, and brave. So, in 1993, when two of three, Vedder and Cornell, teamed up to form a super-group called Temple of the Dog, we should have been ecstatic. It was like Batman and Superman joining forces to fight evil (if not Godzilla).
In fact, the band—which was formed by Cornell as a kind of tribute to his late friend and lead singer of Mother Love Bone, Andrew Wood—made very little impact on us. Except for one song: “Hunger Strike.” For a few weeks, it was the practically the only thing on the radio (yes, we still listened to radio in those days). An unlikely duet between Cornell and Vedder, it shows off the vocal strengths of both men, whose voices complement each other in kind of harmonic unity not often heard in alt-rock (and especially not in grunge). I love how Cornell’s magnificent tenor soars high above Vedder’s mournful baritone, which seems to anchor it.
Somehow, through the alchemy of art, the song becomes less of a dirge than a jubilant cry of defiance.
The great sci-fi writer Clifford D. Simak was known for writing novels and short stories with off-beat main characters. Often, his protagonists were cynical, working-class stiffs (often with a drinking problem) who stuck to their own, private, moral code, often at great cost to themselves. One of Simak’s editors once groused that all of his stories were about “losers.”
“I like losers,” Simak replied.
I just read this quote the other day, and I immediately thought of William Gibson’s books—specifically, Mona Lisa Overdrive. I first read MLO back in the early 1990s, just a few years after its publication, and I thought it was great. I never really thought of reading it again, but for some reason—perhaps because I’ve been a bit down, of late—I recently checked-out the book and re-read it. And I’m really glad I did. One of the foundational works of the cyberpunk sub-genre (along with Gibson’s Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and other books), it still holds up, both as a work of speculative fiction as well as just a damned good, vividly imagined, human story.
A lot of people heap praise on Gibson’s novel—and on the Cyberpunk genre in general—because of their ideas, the thematic questions they ask about how humanity can relate in an age of overwhelming, dehumanizing technology. And what are the brutalizing effects of the ever-increasing disparity between the high-tech haves and the lower-tech have nots? Et cetera et cetera.
Myself, I like Gibson’s characters. Often, they are losers, of the sort Simak wrote about. Little people eking-out an existence on the fringes of society. MLO is no exception. The last of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, after Neuromancer and Count Zero, it’s set on a near-ish future Earth where mega-corporations, trillionaires, and criminal cartels have replaced all governments, and most of humanity muddles along in a rat-race of late-stage capitalism. The plot is a complicated skein of four interlocking narratives, each centered on a different character: Mona, a teenaged prostitute; Kumiko, the tween-aged daughter of a Yakuza boss; Angie, a beautiful young star of virtual reality films (“simstims”); and Slick Henry, an artist who sculpts robots and suffers from government-inflicted memory loss. I find it interesting that, of these four characters, two are children (Mona is sixteen), one is addicted to drugs, and one is brain-damaged. Additionally, two of them (Mona and Slick Henry) are poor, while the other two “rich” characters (Angie and Kumiko) are virtual prisoners of their wealth and position, separated from any real friendships or human connection.
Most notably, none of them have real families. Mona is an orphan; Kumiko’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and her father is an aloof cypher.
In short, all of Gibson’s view-point characters are underdogs, one way or another. The closest he has ever come to a real, kick-ass hero is in one of his best supporting characters, Molly Millions, the cybernetically enhanced mercenary who figures so prominently throughout the Sprawl trilogy (not to mention Gibson’s landmark short-story “Johnny Mneumonic”, which first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1981; yeah, I read it fresh off the newsstand). And even Molly is more of an anti-hero, selling her services to the highest bidder, yet always displaying a basic, inner decency and compassion.
It is Molly, in fact, who becomes the physical catalyst that eventually brings the four narrative threads of the plot together in the MLO’s final chapters. I don’t want to spoil it completely, but the story involves a plot to kidnap Angie (the simstim star, whom Mona strongly resembles; hint, hint) and prevent her from reuniting with her boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, whose body lies comatose in Slick Henry’s art studio while his mind is busy in cyberspace. Kumiko, too, finds herself caught up in this plot, if only tangentially.
Having just re-read the book for the first time in thirty-odd years, I find myself liking it even more now than I did back then. I am awestruck by how deft Gibson’s prose is (he is surely one of America’s most underrated writers), as well as how quickly the story sucks the reader in. Almost every pop-novel out there these days is written from multiple, shifting points-of-view, but very, very few manage to draw their individual characters so vividly, or keep the reader as invested in the plight of each.
And, yeah, Gibson’s ideas are really, really cool. My favorite revelation in the book is when Slick Henry’s friend, Gentry, figures out that the L.F., the device attached to Bobby’s skull, is really an aleph, referencing the 1945 short story by Jorge Luis Borges. (If you read enough cyberpunk novels—or urban fantasy novels, for that matter—you’re going to run into Borges eventually.)
To sum up, Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of my favorite novels, sci-fi or otherwise. Check it out…
Ash Clifton, Writer 