penitent, turbulent, multiplex!

Just finished up Virtual Light, the first part of William Gibson’s second trilogy. Not as breakneck as anything in the Sprawl trilogy, but it was interesting nonetheless. One thing that really stuck out is that, in the Sprawl trilogy, the characters can barely even be considered participants in the events that are unfolding — usually they’re being manipulated by something or someone. So, it doesn’t seem strange at all when they pull off a daunting escape or some other superhuman feat.

Not so in Virtual Light, which makes some of the more adventurous scenes appear overconstructed. One that sticks out in my mind the most is when an assassin asks his soon-to-be-victim for a Coke, giving her the chance to spike it with a massive overdose of drugs that she just happened to find a few moments earlier.

I also FINALLY finished Eric Brighteyes, after starting it almost 6 months ago now. It was good, but very, very long. The Broken Sword is a much more distilled experience, and more interesting to boot, but it’s also a hundred-odd years more recent so it’s hard to knock Brighteyes for that…

It’s weird how I won’t read any fiction for a year, and then I’ll suddenly devour thirty books and then stop again. Like, whoa.

Seeing it from up there, a certain nostalgia came over me, a wistful rag-tail of a dream accompanied by a faint longing for the place that was this place’s namesake to me in a vanished shadowland of long ago, where life had been just as simple and I happier than I was at that moment.

But one does not live as long as I have lived without achieving that quality of consciousness which strips naive feelings as they occur and is generally loathe to participate in the creation of sentimentality.

“Here, it would seem, is nothing but hate and strife, weariness and bitter envy to fret away our strength, and at last, if we come so far, sorrowful age and death, and thereafter we know not what. Little of good do we find to our hands, and much of evil; nor know I for what ill-doing these burdens are laid upon us.

Yet must we needs breathe such an air as is blown about us, clasping at this happiness which is given, though we may not hold it. At the worst, the game will soon be played, and others will stand where we have stood, and strive as we have striven, and fail as we have failed, and so on, till man has worked out his doom, and the Gods cease from their wrath, or Ragnarok come upon them, and they too are lost in the jaws of grey wolf Fenrir.”