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japan noir
I'm currently reading William Gibson's Idoru. The setting is absolutely a perfect fit with Gibson's set of themes—anyone interested in technology, media, and language is eventually going to be attracted to the zeitgeist of contemporary Japan.
I'm also struck, once again, by Gibson's use of noir tropes. When I was reading Neuromancer and the other Sprawl books, I simply thought that Gibson was borrowing a convenient and time-proven plot structure, but while reading this book, with its attention on information-trawling (the whole "nodal point" thing), it occured to me that the act of making sense of disparate pieces of information is key to both Gibson's SF and the detective stories of someone like Chandler.
It's also key to the writings of Lovecraft, as well, but that's a theory for another day.
(Possibly related?: Frederick Jameson's writings on Chandler's LA.) Labels: book_commentary |
Friday, May 30, 2003
9:49 AM
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