Zero History (Blue Ant) Paperback – International Edition, October 2, 2012

I've just finished reading Zero History by William Gibson for the third time. I've been giving it a lot of thought.I got hooked on William Gibson starting with Neuromancer all the way through his Bridge and Sprawl trilogies, and now what is loosely referred to as the Blue Ant Trilogy (which is sometimes referred to as the Bigend Trilogy) consisting of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. One of my favorite characters in all literature, Milgrim, was introduced in Spook Country and becomes a fascinating key character in Zero History as well, but I'm getting ahead of myself already.So let me address Zero History specifically. The entire Bigend series has been an extreme, and I would guess, very deliberate departure from the previous Gibson dystopian-based books such as Neutomancer and the Bridge and Sprawl Trilogies. Those were all great books to be sure. Zero History is, plot wise, a real puzzler for many Gibson fans. There is the sense by many that Gibson has "lost his way" and perhaps even grown "contemptuous" of his own readership; the very ones that made his name famous. I'm really not sure what his motivation has been in writing these books and quite frankly, I don't care. Gibson's writing skills are such that Zero History still represents the same brilliance as his previous works. I've watched a couple of interviews of Gibson and he rambles on in such a manner and at such length that it is hard to follow his reasoning as far as his own writing process goes. When Gibson speaks of his own writing style he seems to be saying that he doesn't really start off with any specific plot or work on any of that beforehand but he says he allows the narrative that takes place as he writes to move the story forward (if I understood him correctly). In any event, as for Zero History, he seems to be fascinated with exploring the common standard global practice of corporate espionage, innovative marketing techniques, etc., which are the very foundation of our current global infrastructure and capitalist societies.Zero History proves again that Gibson is, as always, a master of the English language. He constructs some of the most interesting sentences I have ever read. In addition, his vocabulary is absolutely awe-inspiring. I have often said that I would hate to go up against Gibson in a Scrabble game (not that I'm necessarily any good at Scrabble in the first place.)The man is absolutely a walking dictionary and encyclopedia. He seems to know about more obscure trivia than anyone I have ever read. It may be a good idea for some to either read his books on an e-book or have a good dictionary and encyclopedia nearby when reading.There is a common complaint about Zero History that keeps cropping up again and again: many have commented on on what I feel is an unfair and even ridiculous criticism of Zero History for it's use of popular product placements throughout the book. Apple products in particular seem to be a prime target of those criticisms. However, Apple is a perfect example of what this book is about in the first place. Just so you know: I have never owned an Apple product in my life. Anyway, like the Gabriel Hounds products that are the primary focus of Bigend's corporate espionage, Apple seems to act as a kind of literary corporate counterpoint to the whole obscure Gabriel Hounds jeans thing. Both products are highly desired products for those who can afford them and who are also among the "hip" and "in the know" kind of people who chase after the latest, greatest products. The desirability of these products increases proportionately to their higher cost and even better: their hard-to-find/get nature.I initially had some problems with some of the characters in Zero History, but by the end of the book, I realized how brilliantly these characters were realized. As previously mentioned, Milgrim is my all-time favorite character in the Gibson pantheon. Milgrim is a kind of archetype of sorts. He is a man-child being reborn; initially a true enigma; a burnt out drug-addict with a serious panic/anxiety disorder. It is fascinating to observe Milgrim's rebirth and development under the control of Bigend, the man behind the scene. Milgrim IS the man with zero history being put back together--reconstituted/rebuilt--by Bigend just because Bigend has the money, power and curiosity to do so. Bigend is, in this particular guise, a kind of Dr. Frankenstein. Instead of putting together a human being from dead men's parts, however, he uses the dead soul of a drug addict (Milgrim) instead just to see what will become of it all.While Milgrim is perhaps the most fascinating character in the lineup, the key protagonist actually Hollis Henry, a former singer with a band called the Curfew. She reluctantly becomes another one of Bigend's corporate agents--a corporatespy if you will on a very specific mission-- for Bigend. Bigend himself is the creepy, spoiled Belgian super wealthy corporate magnate who is constantly coming up with all of these what-if schemes to satisfy his own curiosity. Money, however, is not really Bigend's motivation: Bigend has so much wealth and apparently such a lot of time on his hands that all he has to do is find means of satisfying his own obsessive compulsions and curiosities about things that matter little to the vast majority of humankind. Hollis is really not a terribly strong character and falls in with Bigend once more simply on the basis of financial need (like most of us). The inability of Hollis to say "no" to Bigend renders her as little more than another one of his pawns in his game of corporate dominance. In fact, the bulk of the characters in Zero History are little more than the puppets of this Grand Puppetmaster, "Just Call Me Curious", Bigend. They seem to lack any real will of their own when they're in the presence of this master manipulator of their minds and wills. Bigend always finds a way to keep them hooked and interested in his missions.There is no question that Zero History is different than his previous "cyber-punk" writings. The entire Bigend Trilogy is different and a distinct departure from his previous writings. I do not think that justifies dismissing Gibson simply because they are so different. Why lock writers or any artist into a rut? I enjoy it when artists spread their wings and explore different things. I especially do not understand those who claim that they simply stopped reading Zero History after 30 minutes or some such nonsense. I mean, to each his or her own, but in my opinion that invalidates their opinion entirely. That reminds me of those people who rave on about this or that movie who have never actually gone to see it but are reacting only to the opinions of others or some media hype. As I've said before, I loved all of the previous writings of Gibson, and I initially had some readjustments to do with this trilogy, but having thoroughly given it a fair examination, it has become another favorite of mine in my Gibson collection. I respect it's differences. I do not see it as some kind of cheap, sell-out product endorsement of Apple products or any other product. Again, that misses the point of the use of Apple products as a iconic type of product that Gibson is purposely using as an example from which to base his mysterious Gabriel Hounds products on. I get the fact that many of you don't seem to be interested in things corporate. But again, corporations are one of the key components of the fabric of our society and Gibson explores it brilliantly. Please read Zero History ALL the way through before judging it. Better yet, read the entire trilogy--Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History--before making your opinions known.As for me, Zero History is a very fascinating read and now that I've read it for the third time, it will remain among my favorite books. It just keeps getting better with every new read. Highly recommended for those who simply enjoy great writing.

I marked up every page of this book as I plowed through it."Plowed," not because the concepts were so difficult, but because the writing is rather of opaque, and also because it reads like a Russian novel, with constant references to some person who was briefly introduced 213 pages ago, and my memory isn't good enough to keep them all in mind! It's such a hodge-podge of cutting edge real science and woo-woo guys without credibility.My main complaint is that so much of it reads like "If we can for the moment assume..." and "Could it really be that...?" that I have to take it as a work of science fiction. And, as such a work, I enjoyed reading it very much.Here are my comments on those of the main claims that I know anything about:1) Optical cloaking is not a crazy idea at all. However, it's very recent that objects have been able to be cloaked, but it has happened. It's on the very forefront of optical physics, the last few years. I heard about it first in St. Petersburg at the Laser Optics Conference there in 2008. The Russians, as they often do, first did the mathematics about materials with negative refractive index, and then people began to see the implications of that in the laboratory - in the microwave regime. Still, only small objects and only at one wavelength. It works optically only on tiny objects at one wavelength of laser light - certainly not for a whole ship. I would love to think people did that sixty years ago, but I think the probability is very small. "Stealth" is a different concept from cloaking, in which a craft is designed with several flat surfaces with low radar reflectance so that what energy is reflected goes off as a beam that is unlikely to point in the right direction to be received.2) Regarding "foo fighters" and so on, I keep an open mind. I've always thought the coincidence between the start of the work at Los Alamos and the first reports of zero-inertia flying objects deserved some thought, and that it is possible that the unique emanations from such tests, even in the lab, might have drawn to us observers with different technology than ours. Or, maybe, the fear and paranoia associated with war produced hallucinations that fulfilled wishful hopes that "the government" or "the Germans" were way, way ahead of what we ordinary people knew, in their secret projects. Having been a part of government science for so long, I'm a bit cynical about that, which leaves the other possible explanation.3) Fleissiges Lieschen: great idea. The Germans seem to have originated the vast majority of great ideas with practical application (Vertical takeoff and landing planes, ICBM's, jet engines, inertial navigation, random key codes, organic chemistry, cruise missiles..) so I'm not surprised that a small version of the Jules Verne "Columbiad" was a German first. Then came Freeman Dyson during the original "ORION" project down in La Jolla about 1958, when he envisioned propelling a 5-m diameter spaceship to the moon with a nitrocellulose driver in a cannon 3km long. Finally, Gerald Bull was killed in 1990, probably by Mossad, for actually building a 1-m bore cannon 156m long for Saddam Hussein.4) T. T. Brown and "electrogravitic lift?" or antigravity for the B-2? No, I think not. Crazy people have been inventing new physics for decades - my job at Navy Electronics Lab back in 1963 was to answer letters from people who had, for example, invented "electrohydromagnetic" forces and demanded that the Navy fund them. A typical real result involved a spinning eccentric mass which, placed on a bathroom scale, reduced its weight by 5% or so when it was turned on. It could be explained by resonances in the workings of the scale, which was not designed to weigh a vibrating thing. Unfortunately, generals almost never had technical educations in those days, and were very vulnerable to the woo-woo guys, sometimes giving them undeserved credibility.5) Avro Silverbug radial-flow gas turbine "flying saucer"-shaped aircraft? Great idea! The photograph of the design had me thinking for several days. If built, of course, it would not turn corners instantly because it has mass. If anyone had ever developed a way of annulling mass, we'd have a whole different world, not just rumors of super-secret projects.6) German directed-energy weapons: maybe. No one had even thought how to make a laser yet, I'm sure of that. But a microwave beam that could generate a few kV at distance and mess up vehicle ignitions? Possible. The fascinating thing I learned from the book is how creatively organized and energetic the German weapons research effort was - many research projects funded in parallel to give the maximum probability of one useful result in the short time available.7) Hal Puthoff and "remote viewing?" Yeah, well... I try to keep and open mind on Hal, whom I know, not for this stuff but for his ideas about zero point energy, the idea that the force of acceleration itself is "the wind of the zero point" in your face so to speak. He's not all crackpot. He began as a good semiconductor physics person. I used to call him up once a month or so in the early 70's to hear the latest on his ESP experiments, which he could only get published in Hungary at the time, where it was shown that polygraphs attached to plants responded dramatically to thoughts of, say, cutting down the tree, or approaching with a lighter. He managed to show that ESP thought transmission was possible in one experiment on two separated people that I find credible. The point that made the results believable to me was that he eliminated the effects of the conscious mind (which, I believe, will always screw up such an experiment by trying to "show off"). He did that by having the "transmitter" person watch a flashing strobe light while the "receiver person" simply sat there in a distant barn. Then the receiver's brainwaves were cross correlated with the strobe waveform to give a chance of one in a billion that he or she was not receiving information from the person who was watching the light.8) Spinning superconducting disks, "torsion fields," "the Repulsine," etc.? This guy Marckus sounds a little quacky to me, making statements that don't sound like those of "an eminent scientist," but he makes a great character if you look at the book as a science fiction effort. I also know Mark Millis and through him NASA's breakthrough propulsion program, to which I've pitched a few projects that never were funded. He has funded lots of things, but to my knowledge nothing "breakthrough" in the sense of this book has ever come out of the program. Supposedly, he was hoping for a nonconservative gravitational field with nonzero curl, perhaps using "negative mass." The program was terminated in 2002.Some of these fantastic claims about the possibility of tapping the vacuum energy for weapons seem to me most likely to have originated, as Nick Cook himself admits somewhere, as cold war disinformation.9) Project Paperclip: hundreds or thousands of nasty Nazis imported into U.S. research programs up until the 1950's instead of being hung? That is interesting, and likely. Of course, it's easy for people in the U.S. to forget that Huntsville, Alabama spoke mostly German for quite a while! Von Braun became our hero. And Oberth and...10) The Black world? Oh yes, it exists. According to the internet sources, $40B or more a year go into black programs in the U.S.11) Finally, the "Blackbird": It indeed did what Nick Cook claims, flying to Paris and back to California in 2-3 hours. See the attached powerpoint, which I love! It was retired because satellite technology simply made fast, high reconnaissance planes redundant.If you don't take every word seriously, you will enjoy this book! The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology [HUNT FOR ZERO POINT] [Paperback ]

Gibson can write there is no doubt about that but with the blue ant trilogy he has shown that he is unable to craft an interesting story. It's as though he has taken a complex idea and removed the parts that should lead to a satisfying conclusion and concentrated on the remaining parts. This will be my last Gibson book.

Zero History is the third novel in William Gibson's sequence involving the octopus like Blue Ant PR agency, and its vaguely sinister owner, Hubertus Bigend.Hollis is a rock singer employed by Bigend to find the designer of an achingly trendy denim brand. Milgrim is a fixer with a mysterious past, involved in shady dealing for Blue Ant and assigned to aid Hollis. The story is told, in alternate chapters, from the viewpoints of these two main protaganists.In his iconic sprawl novels, Gibson wrote something that was unequivocally science fiction, albeit virtually inventing the sub genre of cyberpunk as he did so. Zero History is barely, if at all, a work of science fiction. His world is very recognisably our own, driven by iPhones, the internet, and twitter, although he writes in the margins of society, where shady power brokers trade real violence in battles for brands and for market position and information.If that makes this sound like a techno-thriller, it is a long way from the works of Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. It is more as if Gibson has taken the real world which has evolved in a parallel manner to his cyberpunk vision, and has created a new version of what the semi legal nether world looks like and how it underlies and interfaces with a mainstream market economy.Although this is barely science fiction, it is closer to Gibson's sprawl trilogy than any of his other novels since. Both are based in the fringes of an interconnected, networked society, the former the fictional cyberspace, the latter what it has in reality become. It is interesting to note that the importance of branding and marketing is the major development which Gibson didn't foresee in the 80's. The street samurai of the Sprawl is re-incarnated as a female despatch rider. At the start of Neuromancer, Gibson set out his stall with his famous simile about the sky over Chiba city, and here his trademark imagery of a man-made environment, is very much in evidence, based, for example, on the colours of urban decay. Bigend is almost a human Wintermute and finally, Zero History ends, like Mona Lisa Overdrive, with a game changing "something big" and it can surely must be a conscious decision that the human catalyst in both cases is called Bobby.The genre of Zero History is difficult to define. It is more intelligent and less reactionary than a typical techno-thriller. It is too much based on the contemporary world to be science fiction. It could be described as socio-fiction, using an SF style to comment on today's society. Whatever it is, it is an easy reading, fast paced, exciting thriller (of some variety) which makes intelligent observations about where we are today.It is not entirely successful. Like many of Gibson's later works, it it something of a road movie of a book; the story-telling journey is more interesting than the eventual denouement, which feels somewhat rushed. Also it is one of those novels which would benefit from a cast list at the start. A number of characters make one appearance, disappear for half the book and then re-appear, leaving me thinking "now who was that again?" Or maybe I'm just getting old.So, I would definitely recommend Zero History as an entertaining and interesting read. It will probably be more palatable to those with an ear tuned to SF, but Gibson is a unique writer with a vision and street smart style which should not be ignored by a wider audience.

Only 3 stars for this I'm afraid. I'm a massive fan of Gibson's (ground-breaking) SF work, but I haven't much liked the Blue Ant novels (Pattern Recognition and Spook County) and this is the weakest of the trilogy. Set in contemporary London it follows Hollis Henry and Milgrim (both of whom appear in Spook County, but this book can be read standalone) as they follow the trail of iconic new fashion at the behest of the enigmatic Hubertus Bigend.I thought the English stuff was fairly well done in terms of location and dialect, but the plot didn't really engage me and I found it somewhat confusing at times. There is something (big) that Bigend really wants, but it's hidden away and almost inconsequential.Having said that there is some excellent writing: "[The Neo phone]....was also prone to something Sleight called "kernel panic" which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with."; "Milgrim....was caught in some frustrating loop of semi-sleep, slow and circular, in which exhaustion swung him slowly out, toward where sleep should surely have been, then overshot the mark somehow..."; And my favourite: "These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them."And there are good ideas - not so much the fashion stuff for me, but the "Order Flow" is clever and the idea of the hideous T-shirt having an impact on surveillance is wonderful - although both of these ideas are credited to others in the acknowledgements.Ultimately the book just didn't engage me and I wondered if Gibson was trying to say something about society by deliberately writing in this almost dreamlike manner - if so it went over my head.I'll probably still buy every novel he writes still, but a fairly disappointing end to a so-so trilogy. Maybe he'll return to SF - I do hope so.

I loved this book, as I've loved everything Gibson has written, but there is the irony of real time catching up with fiction.Virtually everything in this book is doable with present technology, unlike the 80's stuff which was so prophetic in so many ways but outlandish in others.The beauty of the prose is still in it's complex weaving of many seemingly unconnected threads into one explosive climax, but the jewels that adorn it are more style and esoteric knowledge than technology and unimaginable ( to people who aren't William Gibson!) cultures and concepts.The trademarks of descriptions that make you want to stop a while and savour them, and strong female characters trying to overcome their maternal instincts to their uncharacteristically intuitive but physically inept wards are still present and correct thankfully.I read recently someone stating that Cyberpunk was misogynistic, and was flabbergasted that someone pretending to be an authority on Cyberpunk had managed to misunderstand the entirety of the body of work of Gibson.I don't think anyone could say he wasn't one of the most well known pioneers in the genre!

As ever, Gibson's taut, poetic prose is utterly unique, and a sheer delight. I simply do not know of anyone who can weave together the coolness of modern life and the drabness of modern living with such terse perfection. Gibson's books are ones I return to again and again - I can open them at a random page and bask in the way he expertly skewers some aspect of contemporaneity. I also enjoyed the plot - I don't think it's quite as daft as some have said. However, I did feel that there was a slight whiff of deus ex machina in the closing stages. The final chapter (which is in effect the epilogue) was for me unnecessarily high camp, too.But it still gets five stars. I just love his use of language. Even an average Gibson novel is still head and shoulders above almost any other writer, in my opinion.