specs 's review for:

Zero History by William Gibson

4.0

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I loved all three of the Blue Ant books, although Pattern Recognition was my favorite. This shouldn't be worth noting, but I kept stopping to wonder & try to pick apart why his women characters felt so real to me. Best I can come up with is a) they remind me of myself (so ymm) and b) he writes them as people who happen to be women. I kept finding myself stopping reading to figure out how, exactly, Gibson accomplished (b) but I still don't have a good example or explanation. The best I can do is how Cayce & Hollis get ready for their meetings with Bigend -- they actually put thought into what they wear & how they look, but Gibson doesn't sexualize the process or make them fret over anything. Most of this is his style, which I love anyway, but I especially love how it keeps the characters all feeling like people rather than characters in Scene A or Standard Romance Plot 47.

I'm not explaining this well, but suffice to say that a large part of the reason in love Gibson's books is because of what his style does to his women characters -- it strips away the conventions and annoying tricks that other male authors use to convey what they think is an authentic women's experience and forces readers to meet these characters as logical, thinking, flawed, people.