multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the door…
“What were those things?” Chia asked…
“An advertisement…and a sub-program that offered criticism.”
“It didn’t offer criticism; it ate it.”
“Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes advertising. Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser.”
Idoru has several hooks to Virtual Light , and can be thought of as the second in a new series of Gibson novels. Idoru ’s ending promises more to come. It seems like Rez and his supernally intelligent “software dolly wank toy” are going to find a way to reproduce, perhaps biologically. With just a little DNA nanomanipulation it could be done. Although predicting the final somatic effect of a change in a fertilized egg’s DNA is a rather radically difficult problem in the analysis of algorithms, I’m sure that the child will turn out most wonderfully hale and gnarly.
Here’s a toast to the alchemical marriage of man and machine!
John Shirley’s Silicon Embrace is so strange and shaggy a magpie’s nest that it must needs be published by a smaller press.
Someone unfamiliar with the field might expect that science fiction novels would tend to be about the kinds of weird science you see in mass media such as TV shows and supermarket tabloids. You might expect, in other words, that there would be a lot of SF novels about aliens and UFOs. In point of fact, most SF writers are too persnickety to want to write about the repetitious fever dreams of the mass public mind.
In Silicon Embrace , Shirley boldly goes where few writers have gone before, and gets right down to nuts-and-bolts UFOlogy, complete with the canonical little aliens. “It was a Grey, the classic Grey described in close encounters, an alien…with improportionately big oval eyes of whiteless onyx, and something that might have been a nose, and the slit of a mouth, and no hair, and holes for ears…” But this is not going to turn into some cloying, conning UFO-nut miracle tale. Shirley’s aliens aren’t devils and they’re not Disneyland mummers in shiny masks. They’re businessmen, and they like to smoke cigarettes, which make them terribly intoxicated.
One of the more satisfying aspects of the hit movie Independence Day was the way in which it incarnated and elaborated our tabloid myth about the Roswell UFO that allegedly crashed and was preserved by government agencies—who performed an alien autopsy and who have a few alien pilots in suspended animation. Silicon Embrace delivers the same thrill, but in a more artistic way. Here’s that government-owned UFO: “There was a frightening smell about the saucer, though Farraday could smell nothing…It was as if the saucer gave out an irritating sound, though it was soundless; it was as if it glared a painful light into his eyes, but it glowed not at all.”
The book has lots of other threads besides the aliens. For some of the first hundred pages, Shirley goes off on a fairly bloody tangent, perhaps the effect of his having spent so much time in the airless, flickering caves of Hollywood, where troglodyte producers mistake sentimental violence for deeper truth. But soon, thankfully, Shirley’s violence busts out of this box and exfoliates into the bizarro territory of underground comix and Grande Guignol:
Anja opened the back of the van, and…pressed channel 7 on the remote clipped to her jacket; responding instantly, Sol came roaring out and sank his teeth into Noseless’s neck…and in a few minutes more Sol had pulled his head right off. Anja patted her ex boyfriend on the head as Sol knelt over the body, shaking, mouth streaming blood. “Good boy. Good boy.”
Sol has a chip in his neck, you wave.
As well as the Grey aliens, Silicon Embrace features a higher, nobler kind of alien, a crystalline life-form known as the Meta, one of the Metas’ avatars is a traditional lab-built mutant creature known as a land octopus or prairie squid. “It looked like an independently
“What were those things?” Chia asked…
“An advertisement…and a sub-program that offered criticism.”
“It didn’t offer criticism; it ate it.”
“Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes advertising. Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser.”
Idoru has several hooks to Virtual Light , and can be thought of as the second in a new series of Gibson novels. Idoru ’s ending promises more to come. It seems like Rez and his supernally intelligent “software dolly wank toy” are going to find a way to reproduce, perhaps biologically. With just a little DNA nanomanipulation it could be done. Although predicting the final somatic effect of a change in a fertilized egg’s DNA is a rather radically difficult problem in the analysis of algorithms, I’m sure that the child will turn out most wonderfully hale and gnarly.
Here’s a toast to the alchemical marriage of man and machine!
John Shirley’s Silicon Embrace is so strange and shaggy a magpie’s nest that it must needs be published by a smaller press.
Someone unfamiliar with the field might expect that science fiction novels would tend to be about the kinds of weird science you see in mass media such as TV shows and supermarket tabloids. You might expect, in other words, that there would be a lot of SF novels about aliens and UFOs. In point of fact, most SF writers are too persnickety to want to write about the repetitious fever dreams of the mass public mind.
In Silicon Embrace , Shirley boldly goes where few writers have gone before, and gets right down to nuts-and-bolts UFOlogy, complete with the canonical little aliens. “It was a Grey, the classic Grey described in close encounters, an alien…with improportionately big oval eyes of whiteless onyx, and something that might have been a nose, and the slit of a mouth, and no hair, and holes for ears…” But this is not going to turn into some cloying, conning UFO-nut miracle tale. Shirley’s aliens aren’t devils and they’re not Disneyland mummers in shiny masks. They’re businessmen, and they like to smoke cigarettes, which make them terribly intoxicated.
One of the more satisfying aspects of the hit movie Independence Day was the way in which it incarnated and elaborated our tabloid myth about the Roswell UFO that allegedly crashed and was preserved by government agencies—who performed an alien autopsy and who have a few alien pilots in suspended animation. Silicon Embrace delivers the same thrill, but in a more artistic way. Here’s that government-owned UFO: “There was a frightening smell about the saucer, though Farraday could smell nothing…It was as if the saucer gave out an irritating sound, though it was soundless; it was as if it glared a painful light into his eyes, but it glowed not at all.”
The book has lots of other threads besides the aliens. For some of the first hundred pages, Shirley goes off on a fairly bloody tangent, perhaps the effect of his having spent so much time in the airless, flickering caves of Hollywood, where troglodyte producers mistake sentimental violence for deeper truth. But soon, thankfully, Shirley’s violence busts out of this box and exfoliates into the bizarro territory of underground comix and Grande Guignol:
Anja opened the back of the van, and…pressed channel 7 on the remote clipped to her jacket; responding instantly, Sol came roaring out and sank his teeth into Noseless’s neck…and in a few minutes more Sol had pulled his head right off. Anja patted her ex boyfriend on the head as Sol knelt over the body, shaking, mouth streaming blood. “Good boy. Good boy.”
Sol has a chip in his neck, you wave.
As well as the Grey aliens, Silicon Embrace features a higher, nobler kind of alien, a crystalline life-form known as the Meta, one of the Metas’ avatars is a traditional lab-built mutant creature known as a land octopus or prairie squid. “It looked like an independently
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