Damn phpBB decided to log me out.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:
I finally realized why I like Effinger so much more than Gibson: Gibson doesn't give a fuck about his characters. They are just these people he hangs these events upon. It's not because of the fact that Effinger wrote Audran in the first person: Gibson doesn't even give you Case's first name until over a hundred pages in. I know that the big selling point is that they are so full of imagery, but if he doesn't give a shit about these people, how can I? I own three or four Gibson books and the only one I've finished was Neuromancer, and that one definitely took a few tries.
I respect your opinion; I like both Effinger and Gibson (got into them at the same time, late 80s/Early 90s); and I like them for different reasons. Apples and oranges.
Having said that, I'll play devil's advocate here. Disclaimer: my opinions and three dollars will buy you a cup of coffee (at either the Jarre de The, two blocks west of the Chatsubo, or at various fine coffeeshops in the Budayeen, take your pick).
We don't learn much about Case because when it starts out, he can't enter cyberspace, and so much of his identity is tied up in that that he really doesn't have much identity left. A lot of the book is in discovering more about him on the fly. Or about Molly for that matter, whose facade is hard to crack until some of the stuff she reveals at the end, about the Meat Puppet gig she worked, or the story about the coda of her relationship with Johnny that ties that short story into the novel.
I do agree that Case isn't as interesting as Molly, but I think he's supposed to be a little bland and aimless so that we can project ourselves onto him.
Effinger's mainstay to me is an old-fashioned hard-boiled novel transposed onto his particular cyberpunk scene. Gibson tends to draw more on a film noir kind of background (more atmosphere, less detective work), but his real influence seems to be Westerns in some sense. The scene where Molly first speaks to Case in the coffin hotel? If you replace some of the nouns -- e.g. "Close that hatch real slowly, friend" becomes "Close that door real slowly, friend" -- it's got a feel to it like a cowboy movie.
Case is, after all, a console cowboy.
So on the surface, Gison seems more influenced by films (some of them art-films, admittedly) and Effinger is more by novels, specifically meat-and-potatoes genre novels. This is incomplete but a decent capsule summary.
Effinger does his own borrowing from film noir, especially in the Circuit's Edge game (Signore Ferrari at the Blue Parrot, just like in Quest for Glory II: what was it with adventure games from circa 1990 and Casablanca, anyhow?). The character of Friedlander Bey is, I'm sorry, way beyond just a pastiche of Don Corleone: the powerful crime boss clinging to traditionalist values to mask whta he does.
But he's more like the Corleone from Puzo's novel than the one from the film. When I read Effinger, I get the impression that his primary influence is other books: good old fashioned pulp magazines and potboiler novels. Solid, satisfying prose. His literary style reads to me like a direct linear descendant of these types of detective novels. Remember, the guy's descended from policemen; he mentions that the name of one of the villains in (I think) the second novel is the name of the bastard who murdered his police detective grandfather (IIRC).
Writer-wise, Gibson seems to be more influenced by writers whose style is hard to follow unless you're actively deciphering the convoluted language: Thomas Pynchon. Beat Movement writers, especially Burroughs. I can read Effinger's influences, like Mickey Spillane, and get into them. I have yet to finish
Gravity's Rainbow or
Naked Lunch.
Yet I reacted more strongly to Gibson's prose style when I was reading the two of them. Effinger is a traditionalist; Gibson is a radical innovator in the first book (progressively less innovative in subsequent ones, but that's another matter and I haven't read
Pattern Recognition yet). Gibson's flights of poetic grandstanding hit me at the right place at the right time: highfalutin', but just compehensible enough that I could make my way in. Every time I reread through the thick prose in
Neuromancer, I found something new; I remember the second time I read it, I was fascinated by the whole dream about the wasp's nest or the stacks of dusty National Geographics in the Finn's shop.
Now that I'm older, I wonder if this is mock profundity: that I'd only skimmed those sections or overlooked them and so it only
felt like I'd discovered something new. I dunno.
Gibson is good at painting a sketch of a character through a few lean, well-chosen details, as does Effinger. Where they differ is in the selection of those details. Gibson tends to pick obscure little things around the periphery of a character that paint in the big details, and this is a hard enough trick to pull that it almost looks like he's showing off. Effinger shines at giving me the unexpected, usually by way of a joke.
Personal recollection of the moment I was sold on
Circuit's Edge: the line in the very first scene after describing your hole of an apartment: "You make a mental note to stop the drinking and drugs." It's more straightforward than Gibson's descriptions, but I laughed right out loud and knew everything about the happy-go-lucky lowlife I was playing. Fine writing both ways.
One of the reasons that I remember liking Gibson more was the unity of the setting in his books. He makes casual reference to the cultures of Chiba City, the Sprawl, or (in the two sequels) the future analogues of Suburbia, voodoo-infested Project housing gone mega, or the chemical-scented Florida white trash wasteland. The key word is casual: he doesn't explain too much about them. Effinger, by contrast, seems to be writing a hard-boiled novel in a cyberpunk setting, and then shoehorns in details about Islamic culture at odd intervals. It reminds me of the cetology stuff on Whales in
Moby Dick: it's like all the action stops while we get a culture lesson, and then back to the story.
It's not that Effinger is a bad writer, or that I didn't enjoy the Islamic stuff. It's that it seems like he's doing reportage, telling me details about something he researched, and then moving back to the narrative. Gibson flows better because his settings seem more invented or extrapolated out of current events, and he doesn't bother to explain a lot. Effinger never quite lapses into dicacticism, but his style of writing tends to deliver exposition right on the nose. Gibson is less direct and shoots for giving details about the unfamiliar stuff on the fly, and hits the ground running with his story more often than Effinger.
This went on too long, as usual. And remember that I was deep into these guys somewhere between 10 to 15 years ago. I've changed; what I look for in a book has changed. It may be -- in fact, it's almost certain -- that if I'd discovered them at a different time or in a different order I'd have very different opinions.
When I was 14, the writer I wanted to be was William Gibson. When I was 21, I'd discovered Neal Stephenson and to this day he's my favorite living American Writer.
And I'm still going to buy Quicksilver the minute I can, even though his decision to abort the webcast at CMU made baby Jesus cry.