2003-05-26
... ? LRB | Christopher Tayler : Genderbait for the NerdsProse-nerds, in other words, may feel neglected. Still, a lot of this stuff can be put down to observational exuberance, which gives the novel its distinctive, collage-like texture. Gibson knows that using an Internet chatroom feels 'like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet'. He knows that Japanese websites appear on English-language screens as 'a frantic-looking slaw of Romanic symbols . . . It looks like fizzing, apoplectic rage.' He likes to write about things that aren't yet standard properties in literary fiction, and it would be wrong to sneer too much at his commitment to putting things in novels that haven't been in them before. True, some of them may seem trivial, of geek-interest only, or instantly dated. But such are the perils of being, as Gibson might put it, an early adopter.
