File under: pleasant surprises

I ordered a few books from the Regulator last week, and they've been trickling in one at a time. Arriving today was my copy of William Gibson's newest novel, Spook Country. I had taken the morning off work to run a few errands in town, and stopped by on my way to Hillsborough to pick it up.

Gibson, who is usually credited with coining the term cyberspace, wrote some of the best science fiction of the 80s. Some reviews of his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, as well as this one, tend to wards claiming he's now a mainstream writer, but really, i think what's happened is that the world we live in has become so much like the world inside Gibson's fictions that for many readers, there's almost no difference. In a recent interview, Gibson says:

If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s--as strange as it may seem to say this--we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.

But that's not the pleasant surprise.

That was discovering that for some reason the copy of the book i received was signed by the author. No idea why that should be, since Gibson's nearest stop on his publicity tour is up in Bailey's Crossroads. And i don't know if all of the Regulator's copies were similarly signed, or if i won the lottery. But it's cool in a nerdy kind of way. I don't really collect autographs, although if i'm at a reading and i buy a copy, it's a bit of an excuse to have a small conversation with the writer. I like the idea that this particular object, which has traveled from keyboard and pixels to a laser-beam exposed printing plate, from 22 x 35 sheets of #70 paper through the press, folding and cutting machines, stitched and bound, boxed and shipped, somehow managed a side detour through the writer's hands on its way to my bookshelf.