Zero HistoryA Novel

William Gibson

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Summary

Zero History

By: William Gibson

Narrarated by: Robertson Dean

The iconic visionary returns with his first new novel since the New York Times bestseller Spook Country.

Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own…

When she sang for The Curfew, Hollis Henry's face was known worldwide. She still runs into people who remember the poster. Unfortunately, in the post-crash economy, cult memorabilia doesn't pay the rent, and right now she's a journalist in need of a job. The last person she wants to work for is Hubertus Bigend, twisted genius of global marketing; but there's no way to tell an entity like Bigend that you want nothing more to do with him. That simply brings you more firmly to his attention.

Milgrim is clean, drug-free for the first time in a decade. It took eight months in a clinic in Basel. Fifteen complete changes of his blood. Bigend paid for all that. Milgrim's idiomatic Russian is superb, and he notices things. Meanwhile no one notices Milgrim. That makes him worth every penny, though it cost Bigend more than his cartel-grade custom-armored truck.

The culture of the military has trickled down to the street- Bigend knows that, and he'll find a way to take a cut. What surprises him though is that someone else seems to be on top of that situation in a way that Bigend associates only with himself. Bigend loves staring into the abyss of the global market; he's just not used to it staring back.

Sample Audiobook
Audiobook Information
EDITOR'S PICK // New York Times Best Seller
  • Edition: Unabridged
  • Author: William Gibson (See All Books)
  • Date Released: Sep 7, 2010
  • Publisher: Penguin Audio
  • Genre: Fiction & Literature, Science Fiction

Total File Size: 362 MB (11 files) Total Length: 13 Hours, 11 Minutes

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Scott Esposito

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Scott Esposito has written about books for almost ten years. His work has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, and ...more »

09.07.10
William Gibson, Zero History
2010 | Label: Penguin Audio

A new direction for the prophet of the Internet age
The techno-thriller master William Gibson conjures words like "cyberspace," "futurism," and even "steampunk." But "men's fashion"? Yes, Zero History is a William Gibson book that revolves around menswear (and features blimp-like surveillance penguins), but if Gibson has loosened a button on his normally rigid collar, it's only to accommodate the increasingly bizarre post-9/11 reality that has been his focus since 2003's Pattern Recognition. Here, he uses a quest to find a reclusive fashion designer as a way to probe questions of the militarization of society and the predominance of brands in our 21st Century culture. As obsessed as ever with the shifting codes that operate beneath society's surfaces, Gibson finds fresh new directions, as when he aptly notes "Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones." It's these kinds of observations that make Gibson's blend of culture, commerce, and computers stand out from the lesser worlds imagined by his peers. Notably, he uses fashion's seeming frivolousness as an ideal entry point to an intriguing investigation into brands, underscoring the huge amounts of money and power that image represents in a world more virtualized than ever. The plot zips along despite a purposely fragmented structure meant to evoke our networked world, and Zero History makes a strong, stand-alone conclusion to Gibson’s post-9/11 trilogy, begun with Pattern Recognition and continued in 2007's Spook Country.

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