William Gibson

Quotes

1. “Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.”

   “I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said.

   “I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp."

2. 

   “Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”

   “They think Homes was building drugs?” Flynne said.

   “How else do you finance the United Nations taking over?”

   “There’s hardly any UN left, Janice.”

   “UN’s got deep roots in the demonology.”

3. 

   Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years…droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.

4. 

   “It is,” said Lowbeer, “as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is."

5. 

   But science…had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping.

6. 

   So Flynne sat with Wilf (in the Wheelie Boy), and started to explain what he called the jackpot…That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event. And in fact the actual climate…had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

7. 

   Netherton was looking at the oversized bronze head of a bearded man, its neck having been crudely severed from whatever figure it must once have topped.

   “Lee,” said Fearing, noting the direction of Netherton’s gaze.

   “Lee?”

   “Robert E.”

   The name meaning nothing to Netherton.

8. 

   Netherton saw the glowering bulk of Newgate…the structure’s pitted granite flanks, spiked with iron. At the City’s westernmost gate, for more than a thousand years, had stood a jail, and this its ultimate and final expression. Or had been, rather, as it had been torn down in 1902, at the start of that oddly optimistic age before the jackpot. To be rebuilt a few years before his birth. The klept having deemed its return a wise and necessary thing.

9. 

   “You communicate with it?”

   “Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”

10. 

    "I dislike calling them stubs,” Lowbeer said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are."

11. 

    "Gavin described the product, that’s you, as a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar. Target demographic power-uses VR, AR, gaming, next-level social media. Idea is to sell a single unique super-avatar. Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”

12. 

    “He's a criminal?”

    “Financial services,” Eunice said, “but on the street side.”