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325 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1993
“The problem is that a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to go, of where it should go, as you do. Which is to say, very little. There are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of plan even exists. Then there's the business of real estate...”
“And that bridge, man, that's one evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists, cannibal motherfuckers out there, man...”
“The bridge's steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars... Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air...
“Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones Rydell had ever seen, some with only four stools and not even a door, just a big shutter they could pull down and lock... Now that he looked around, he saw lots of narrow little stairways snaking up between stalls and shuttered micro-bars, and no pattern to it at all. He guessed they all led up into the same rats-nest, but there was no guarantee they'd all connect up.”
“We are come not only past the century's closing, the millennium's turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure... Modernity was ending. Here, on the bridge, it long since had.”
"Look at her, Rydell. She knows. Even if she's just riding confidential papers around San Francisco, she's a courier. She's entrusted, Rydell. The data becomes a physical thing. She carries it. Don't you carry it, baby?"
She was still as some sphinx, white fingers deep in the gray fabric of the center bucket.
"That's what I do, Rydell. I watch them carry it. I watch them. Sometimes people try to take it from them."
The music, some weird hollow techie stuff that sounded like bombs going off in echo-chambers, started to make a different kind of sense.That's the way to describe a future that hasn't come about yet. Just specific enough to make it vivid but without enough concrete descriptors for it to be identifiable. I could see myself as an old man on the block yelling at the kids to turn the volume down and how could they call that noise music anyhow. To the concrete-grey, oppressive sheen that coats Gibson's future, he'll toss in something like this:
Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they'd seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C... The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell's class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities.Funny. Sad. Livens up the story but makes you even more despondent about society. There was enough of that to reward a reader who makes it to the end but not enough to make it the tell-tale mark of the book or writer.