Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

 

27. “The Winter Market” by William Gibson

So far the only stories of William Gibson’s I’ve read are the two published previously in this anthology series and I’ve yet to like any of them.

This one might suffer from coming at the end of the anthology when I am especially weary of the battered, wired, struggling cyber-future of the US of A.

Here we have a disabled, dying woman, her mental landscape of drive and suffering and determination, her hate for pity and charity, some of that bafflingly popular dream-weaving trope, and a protagonist who’s a bit at sea wondering if her uploaded self will be really her. Okay, he’s pretty sure it won’t be, but this woman who passed through his life like a corrosive fluid boring through his heart, ah!

But there were some flashes of phrasing I quite liked.

(with an author like William Gibson I wonder about my reactions. is it a case of “you had to be there”? like how Pat Cadigan’s story bounced off me only subtler so I don’t recognise? and how much is built upon the huge influence he had on the genre before I got there, so that perhaps his reflection is all over and when I see the thing itself I mistake it for just another image? and yet, better than meh.)