I should say that if you plan on reading the book, don’t read this post. I won’t necessarily spoil anything, but I also don’t want this post to be superficial.
As I mentioned, I want to follow Patrick’s book summaries with my own attempt, in the Ryan-style, and see if they’re valuable. I already do this somewhat on goodreads, but they’re very brief usually.
I read Pattern Recognition in an afternoon during college almost a decade ago. With that, Gibson had brought his language into the near-present day, intermixing already-real and about-to-be-real which for me made me read it as if he had pulled back a thin veneer of coating on the reality that I know, explaining some inner clockworks of society and people mixing that I take for granted. It was around the same time that I learned about the Pantone color projections and the like, understanding the notion of design and marketing and aesthetics all being connected intrinsically and out of necessity when planning multimillion dollar budgets.
Theories about the Illuminati, only applied to every day modern consumer culture.
Zero History closes out the Bigend trilogy, wrapping it all up nicely. It read very well as a sequel, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it to you unless you’ve read the first two. The main thread (pun not intended) for the book was the relationship between men’s streetwear and military uniform fashion. When the connection is made, it clicks – I can see it clearly in non-dressy wear immediately.
It was entertaining, and again, felt more revealing than prescient, into areas of our society that I wouldn’t otherwise think much about.
At some point, Bigend was explaining that there’s a large demographic that finds the idea that they might be mistaken for being [ex-]soldiers on the street, and that being embedded in their consciousness, and something clicked in my own head.
The book was a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy, starting with familiar characters, and building from there.