More than quarter of a century later, 1984 remains firmly fixed in the future, fiction having provided a more vivid view than our memories of the year which actually happened.
Even so, a couple of things from the real, boring 1984 were memorable: Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer (with a celebrated advertisement based on Nineteen Eighty-Four) and William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, which popularised the idea of ‘cyberspace’, a term he had minted.
Both seemed like science fiction then. Apple’s machine, with its 128 kilobytes, now seems antediluvian. Some of Neuromancer still seems futuristic, but much of it simply describes the world we live in (often brought to us by Apple), rather vindicating Gibson’s remark that ‘The future is already here — it just isn’t evenly distributed.’
Zero History is the conclusion of a trilogy which began with 2003’s Pattern Recognition, one of the first novels to address 9/11 directly. They are not science fiction, but I don’t know whether that is because Gibson’s books have become less, or the world become more, science fictional.
Contemporary confusion is one of the mainsprings of the trilogy, linked by the lurking figure of the Belgian marketing man Hubertus Bigend, simultaneously sinister and preposterous, who has an unerring eye for a trend, but has had ‘taste removed by elective surgery’.
Bigend’s obsession is the digital age, and the counter-intuitive media it has spawned: viral marketing, virtual networks, secret brands, anonymous filmmakers, invisible artists. The present, in Bigend’s view, has so many competing narratives that no single history, or indeed any definitive shared reality, can any longer be agreed. If he can draw a map for these new territories, he will anticipate the goldrush.
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