Keith Miller
Bypassing a Jackpot
There are worse things, it turns out, than being a prophet without honour. Just ask William Gibson, whose predictions have hit the mark so nearly and so often that his prodigious powers of invention are all too easily mistaken for mere observational skills. His gloomy near-future thrillers are so fully imagined and minutely rendered that they play out like that quaintest of narrative modes, realism – and there is indeed something Balzacian about his work (it is tirelessly informative, and unrelentingly pitiless).
A ‘peripheral’ is an auxiliary device: I have a few chirruping away in a Disney chorus round my computer right now. But in Gibson’s latest novel it’s a synthetic person, or at least a biotechnological entity of some sort, that can be remotely
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553