This post contains spoilers through “Day 2″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Feel free to spoil beyond that, but please label comments as such. For next week, lets read “Day 3″ and “Day 4.”

One of the things that I like best about this book, which, though I think so far is definitely not Stephenson’s best or most audacious, and in fact, really feels like a parody of Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum (which is a really fun, useful thing to do, but not what I’d expected), I’m enjoying in a propulsive kind of way, is how it handles relationships between the genders. It’s not so much that they’re realistic, or even aggressively subversive. But I really appreciate — even though it may be as much a fantasy for me as the Frat Pack movies are for men — that the main object of a great deal of chivalry is a nerdy Eritrean refugee who knows more about video games that her ex-boyfriend and builds realistic Eritrean deserts in a fictional world.

First, there’s Sokolov’s entrance, which I’ll get back to in a minute and from his perspective:

Over Zula, he made a bit of a fuss, because he was that kind of guy. It didn’t matter why he was here, what sort of business he had come to transact. Women just had to be treated in an altogether different way from men; the presence of a single woman in the room changed everything. He kissed her hand. He apologized for the trouble. He exclaimed over her beauty. He insisted that she make herself comfortable. He inquired, several times, whether the temperature in the room was not too chilly for a “beautiful African” and whether he might send one of his minions out to fetch her some hot coffee. All of this with meaningful glances at Peter, whose manners came off quite poorly by comparison.

This is all sort of funny and horrible and slightly off as well as being charming, because Sokolov is in the midst of an operation that is murdering someone Zula’s been working with, calling her a “beautiful African” is kind of creepy and reductionist, and part of this chivalry ends up being a ploy to drug Zula and put her on a private jet bound for China. But at the same time, there’s something genuine to it, something that’s not exclusive to Sokolov. We already know that Richard has gone to extreme lengths to keep Zula protected. Peter’s gotten them into this horrible mess because he wants to hang on Zula. Sokolov brings her flowers along with the coffee, which is totally unnecessary. And then, they’re joined by a hunky but vulnerable Hungarian who, when he meets Zula, who goes in for a handshake, “bent forward and kissed it, not in an arch way, but as if hand kissing were a wholly routine procedure for him.”
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This post contains spoilers through the “Day 0″ section of Reamde. If you want to spoil beyond that point, please label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through “Day 2.”

This is a brick of a book, and the plot doesn’t really take off in these first two sections of the novel, but as is often the case with Neal Stephenson, I’m not sure really sure I mind that much because I’m so interested in two things that he’s doing: meditating on Midwesternness, and looking at how those values translate into the two main characters, Richard Forthrast and his adopted niece Zula.

Stephenson’s a wild, sprawling plotter, but he’s also a wonderfully immersive world-builder, and it’s nice to see that he still has his touch when he takes on a setting that doesn’t involve thief kings, or mouse armies, a world that’s essentially like our own. It’s hard to tell if the Forthrast ancestral homeland is at an inflection point. Things are clearly changing, as demonstrated by the wind turbines, which Richard sees as “these pharaonic towers rearing their heads above the prairie, the only thing about this landscape that had ever been capable of inspiring awe. Something about their being in motion, in a place where everything else was almost pathologically still, seized the attention; they always seemed to be jumping out at you from behind corners.”

That tension, between what’s enduring and essential about this point of origin, and how much the characters can adapt beyond it, strikes me as something that’s going to be critical to the novel. Richard seems to see the fact that the Forthrasts landed were they did as proof of some sort of animal instinct: “Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat. ” And even when he’s behaving in a way that seems singularly un-Midwestern, as is the case when he goes after Zula’s absent initial adoptive father, he realizes that, in his own Hummer-renting, leather-jacket wearing way, he’s just bringing Forthrastness into a new generation, “manifesting, not as an avatar of Richard, but as an avatar of his whole family.” There’s a wildness to the Forthrast legacy not expressed by “the offspring of Nicholas who had settled down and lived exemplary, stable, churchgoing lives in the upper Midwest,” a sense that the true legacy of the family isn’t in settling, but in the journey that got them to their ancestral home in the first place, Richard’s sense “that it probably had something to do with the farm in Iowa and his knowing, even at that age, that whatever Dad’s last will and testament said—however things were handled after his father’s eventual demise—he wasn’t going to be part of it. If he wanted to own land, he’d have to go out and find some.” And of course, even at home, things are different. As Richard notices when he stops on his drive:
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We’ve got enough response that I think we’re going to go ahead with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde as our next book club book. Because this was a late decision, let’s start at a slower pace and read through Day 0 for Friday, see how it goes, and then go a bit faster in weeks to come.

I know I said we’d do The Yiddish Policeman’s Union next, but would folks be up for doing Neal Stephenson’s Remade instead and Yiddish Policemen’s Union after? I’d really like to read Reamde with all of you. Let me know what you think. If folks are generally OK with this, I’ll post an initial assignment for Reamde on Monday and we’ll get talking on Friday.

This post contains spoilers through the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Ah, the peril of Kindle indexes without page numbers. I didn’t realize how close we were to the end of the novel when I picked our section break last time. But Molly’s “Ruby Tuesday”-like departure does get me thinking about the character. Are the residents of Babylon correct? Is Molly something more than human, Steppin’ Razor, who brings “a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart”? And if so, can a deity be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

Molly is deliberately opaque about her past, and while the story about how she got her enhancements is undeniably traumatic, it reveals much more about the society she lives in than about Molly herself. As she tells Case:

“Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ ’Cause we weren’t finished yet. . . .” She began to shake. “So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.”

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This post contains spoilers through “The Straylight Run.” If you want to spoil beyond that, please label comments as such. And for next week, let’s finish the novel.

As something of a theology nerd, I particularly liked the parts of this section that are about the ways, both beautiful and terrifying, that technology brings us closer to the divine — or at least, redefines the boundaries of what’s considered possible and what’s considered miraculous. The Turing authorities who come to arrest Case are both literally and metaphorically advocates of those boundaries. They hold the guns to the AIs heads not simply because of practical concerns, because they see unincumbered artificial intelligences free to pursue their will to knowledge as a way evil comes into the world. As one of them says: “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”

Of course Case doesn’t accept that conception and forges forward. Wintermute kills his pursuers, freeing him to dive into the ice and encounter Wintermute’s opposite number, a boy on a beach in a dream, as untechnological a vision as we have in the entire novel:

“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What’s your name? Your Turing code. What is it?” The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no malice there. “To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .” “A Turing code’s not your name.” “Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. “The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, “I am the dead, and their land.” He laughed. A gull cried. “Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn’t know it. Neither will you.” “You’re cracking. The ice is breaking up.” “No,” he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed his foot against the sand. “It is more simple than that. But the choice is yours.” The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.

I think part of what I like about this moment is that it is, in a way, a strong statement in support of the appeal of the irregularity, mysticism, and oddness of humanity. An AI’s invested in the power of names, the life story and tragic death of the woman who dreamed him into being, whose youthful experiences he incorporated into the world he’s created for his ghosts. There’s something almost generous about Neuromancer’s wistful desire to provide a refuge for what’s left of Linda. Even technology strives towards heaven.
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This post contains spoilers through the first three parts of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. As always spoil beyond that in comments if need be, but please label your comments for folks who are reading along for the first time. And for next week, let’s read Section 4, “The Straylight Run.”

It struck me reading this section of Neuromancer that I sort of like Wintermute, and would quite like to introduce him — if, as Wintermute’s choice of avatars suggests, he is in fact sort of inclined to present himself as a man — to Jane from Speaker for the Dead. Creating aliens and artificial intelligences that are plausibly not simply people, but people you actually somewhat like, while also making them decisively other is tremendously challenging. It’s also a necessary precondition for a discussion about whether and to what extent robots and artificial intelligence deserve rights that will actually engage the readers’ emotions, so between Wintermute and Dix, Gibson’s rolling.

Dix’s explanation of the AI’s primal urge to learning is moving:

Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.

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This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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We’ve got some pretty serious William Gibson fans in the audience, because Neuromancer it is for the next book club. We’ll read parts one and two for next Friday. After this, we’ll do The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and then another round of nominations. Happy reading!

For this poll, I took the five books that didn’t win but that got the most votes other than American Gods, figuring those seemed to have strong constituencies. I should note that, because however much I love you all, this is not a cheerocracy, I excluded Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on the grounds that while you could do some interesting stuff with analysis of academia and professional societies, I think there just isn’t enough that I feel I can draw enough out of the novel that fits the overall mission of the blog. So, as with the last time, voting is open until noon on Thursday and I’ll announce our new choice and what we’ll read for next week on Friday: