Bubbles on the Banks

Oh hey, I'm still alive. I continue to be unemployed, and also Not Doing Well. Got an appointment with my doctor to talk about antidepressants in two weeks; will see if that helps with anything.

I'm reading, though.

What are you reading now?

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's gods-in-modern-day comic The Wicked + The Divine. Just into it. It has absolutely hit the ground running, which I appreciate: no explanations, no buildup, just "gods, or people claiming ot be gods, are here; what are you gonna do about it?" The art's decent, the characters are interesting, and I'm deeply curious to see where it goes.

What did you just finish reading?

Read through all of Kieron's RPG DIE, about playing messed-up people who get transported into a fantasy roleplaying world, and how that world reflects and refracts their psyches and traumas and lives. It looks brilliant and I'd love to play it, and even to run it with the right people and more brain energy.

After that, William Gibson's Spook Country and Zero History, sequel-ish to Pattern Recognition. That is, SC is loosely connected to PR, and ZH is tightly connected to SC and has a large number of hooks back to PR as well. These are ... they're good, overall. SC feels less like a novel and more like a meandering collection of character (and world) vignettes. The latter third is set in Vancouver, which is fun to see, but overall I don't think it holds together as a book. It's absolutely necessary setup for ZH, though, and ZH holds together quite well.

Someone speculated that they're set in the present-day because tech had finally caught up to Gibson's vision, but I don't think that's true. I think it's more that the fractures and weirdness of society, social structure, had finally caught up to Gibson's vision. All three books centre around Hubertus Bigend ("bay-ZHAN" though by the third book he and everyone else pronounce it in the English way), a character with more money than God, a deep curiosity coupled with an innate understanding of systems, a hunger for control, and absolutely no sense of morals or ethics whatsoever. "He's traveled so far beyond right and wrong he can't see them on a clear night with a telescope," a character says in a different book, and it applies here. I think these books are about the utterly distorting effect of that much power and money, and the way that people instinctively resist it, or choose not to.

What do you think you'll read next?

Lord knows. I've no shortage of options, though, both dead-tree and electronic.