This catalogue represent roughly a year of Breadtag Sagas: Tales of travel, food, books, art and science… It is intended as an annotated browsing guide.
They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn’t see it coming…
Introduction
Count Zero opens with these words. Turner is one of the lead characters. Previously a security but now an executive extraction expert, he helps technical geniuses to move from one corporation or zaibatsu to another. In other words, as outlined in previous articles, his profession today would be called executive recruitment, but in the Indiana Jones style (just not archaeology).
I introduced the Guardian article by Ed Cumming published in 2014 on Neuromancer’s 30th birthday and discussed it a little in the Further information section of Classic Scifi 4: William Gibson Neuromancer.
Cumming’s begins with the truism:
Prescience can be tedious for science-fiction writers. Being proven right about a piece of technology or a trend distracts from the main aim of the work: to show us how we live now. William Gibson knows this as well as anyone. Since the late 70s, the American-born novelist has been pulling at the loose threads of our culture to imagine what will come out. He has been right about a great deal, but mainly about the shape of the internet and how it filters down to the lowest strata of society.