Book Review: William Gibson’s ‘Distrust That Particular Flavor’ | The Verge

And don’t miss our interview with William Gibson.

Yet despite the author’s own caveats, much is worthwhile here. As an introduction to Gibson it would probably underwhelm new readers — it simply doesn’t have the coherence or sentence-level precision of his novels. The sustained enthrallment of Neuromancer or Pattern Recognition simply can’t occur in a decade-old Wired article. Instead, the collection reveals other facets of Gibson’s mind. For longtime readers of his novels, this feels like coming one step closer to The Source, or getting a peek behind the curtain, at the cogwork that makes his fiction move. His introduction concludes that as much as it discomfits him to do this work, “later, back in the place of writing fiction, I often discover that I have been trying to tell myself something.” In Distrust That Particular Flavor, the reader gets to eavesdrop on William Gibson trying to tell himself something.