It’s in this sense, I’d suggest, that the common criticism of him as an author only interested in surfaces is misplaced. Gibson almost always writes in the third person-early short work like "Burning Chrome" and "The Winter Market" being the exception-but he places his camera, as it were, exceptionally close to his protagonists. Every piece of description in there is something that she is perceiving directly or remembering no authorial omniscience intervenes here. Take the paragraph of Hollis’s waking that I quoted. (The Real might burn us out, as in Tiptree’s "A Momentary Taste of Being," or it might defy storying, as in Clarke’s Childhood’s End.) I know of no SF author who (consciously or unconsciously) adheres more closely to this aesthetic, that what can be described is only what can be perceived, than William Gibson. Plato’s argument is that we humans, chained in the cave, cannot perceive the Real directly, only its shadows on the wall. Fifteen minutes of rain and the lower reaches of the Beverly Center pancaked house-sized boulders coasted majestically down hillsides, into busy intersections. It got written up, she knew, in the next day’s papers, like some lesser species of earthquake. Any very pronounced weather, here, worried her. Outside, wind found her windows from a new angle. She sat up, a very high thread count sliding to her thighs. One of its protagonists, Hollis Henry, is waking up in a Los Angeles hotel. Like ourselves, I replied and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?Īnd here is a paragraph from the first chapter of William Gibson’s Spook Country. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:-Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Here is a famous passage from the dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon in Plato’s Republic:
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