The Bigend Trilogy-- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson

The Bigend Trilogy-- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson

The uniting character in all three novels is Hubertus Bigend. He is not the main character. All of the books are about special projects contracted by Blue Ant, Bigend's company to find secrets. Secrets are the essence of cool to Hubertus Bigend.  His advertising company and viral marketing company Blue Ant, searches for cool things; thus he is often after secrets.  In the novels, the Blue Ant figurine even contains a listening device.  Bigend creates the backdrop for the stories.

Each book uses the concept of steganography, finding secret things in the larger pattern of things.  Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition must find a hidden producer of video clips.  What is ultimately interesting is that Bigend uses the secrets for marketing purposes.  In Zero History, we learn the video clips in Pattern Recognition are used to sell shoes.  Hollis Henry in Spook Country seeks to find a hidden shipping container.  This leads to cool technology also used for marketing called localive art.  In Zero History, Hollis Henry must track down a secret brand which is an article of military clothing.  This is of course is sold by Hubertus Bigend because military clothing sets the fashion of the street.  I rather like the idea that secrets sell.

The backdrop of the stories is a post 9/11/2001 world where change is accelerating.  Things happen so quickly it becomes hard to recognize the world of a week ago.   The cold war has ended and espionage has moved into the corporate boardroom with various loose factions vying for control.  We get to see this in the novels.  There is a kind of hidden war that is about directing peoples attention.  Reading the books together exposes a pattern in the writing.  In the first book, Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard steps into the shadowy post soviet world of the business oligarchs in Moscow.  Many of them are ex-kgb.  In the second book, Spook Country, Milgrim, interacts with two organizations, one a right wing christian conspiracy, and another a family of operatives that have left Cuba to go into business for themselves.  In the third book, Hollis Henry deals with both corporate espionage and a shadowy military contractor who is trying to go into business for himself after operating in various third world countries. This creates a very different kind of story about secrets.

The action takes place in hotels, factories, shipyards, art spaces, bars; places at the edges of every day life that are easy to miss.  The characters who thread themselves through the story would be easy to walk by and not notice in New York, Moscow, or Tokyo.  Voytek who sells antique calculators, and Inchmale who was part of the Curfew make for excellent background characters that help create the setting.  The descriptions of the backgrounds have a baroque quality to them that are often quite intricate.  It is a juxtaposition of fashion, technology, and every day objects; tweed jackets, tortoise shell glasses, zx81 calculators, GPS, cell phones, 501 Jeans, and other objects mix into a time frame that seems to head toward evening and night.

In each book, as the secrets are revealed, the characters emerge more as themselves.  This is best expressed in how Milgrim moves from being a drug addled captive to being sober and deeply indebted to Hubertus Bigend.  Also, the characters have their goals fulfilled.  Voytek starts seeking out zx81 calculators in Pattern Recognition for his art exhibit and is directly helped by Hollis Henry to build the final exhibit in Zero History.  All of the main characters hired by Hubertus are  indebted to him.  A lot of this debt is focused on medical help.  Milgrim is helped in a  Swiss drug clinic and Garreth has his leg reconstructed.

Some people view Hubertus Bigend as being immoral on many levels.  I find him quite moral, but often hiding it behind other ulterior motives like profit.  He actively moves against a right wing military organization in Zero History, and prevents a right wing organization from getting its money in Spook Country.  He also arranges two people to be cured of their medical problems.

This trilogy is well worth reading.  When I read Zero History, I realized I could not adequately write about it as a single book when I found there were two other books in the series.  Because the publication of the books was spaced so far apart, it was not obvious that they were a trilogy at first.  Pattern Recognition was written in 2003, Spook Country was written in 2007, and Zero History was written in 2010.  There is a very different feel to them when you read them one after another in a series.  You get to see how the characters change as secrets are revealed.

Daily Thoughts 9/29/2010 (Spook Country)

Die Allegorie der Poesie, Raffael 1508 - 1511. Fresco im Deckengewölbe der Stanza della Signatura, Vatikan,Kopie von H.-P. Haackhttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Allegorie_der_Poesie,_Mosaik_von_Raffael.jpg

Daily Thoughts 9/29/2010

I finished reading Spook Country by William Gibson.  I noticed that every single book mentions steganography.  All the books are full of slightly masked details.  They Bigend Series also uses a mix of various acronyms for secretive organizations or law enforcement, the NSA-- National Security Agency (United States), DEA--Drug Enforcement Agency (United States), IXO-- Information Exploitation Office (Swiss), and many other organizations.

Today, I did a little more checking in the 300s, and had someone do shifting in the 800s in the storage area.
It was a quiet, pleasant day.

Daily Thoughts 9/28/2010 (Spook Country, Electric Cars, Directors Station)

English: Painting "Still life with red material", by Russian artist Anatoli Nenartovich (1915-1988), 1979
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nenartovich-Anatoly-Still-life-with-red-material-pos04bw.jpg

Daily Thoughts 9/29/2010

Today I took the train up to Chappaqua.  We had a user group for Sirsi Dynix, Directors Station.  Mostly it was about how to get circulation statistics for books.  There were a few other surprising applications.  Someone was tracking fines with it, another person was generating lists of missing items, another librarian was checking for duplication, and another person was keeping track of the last activity date patrons used their cards to determine if they should be kept on the mailing list.

The reports were exportable to microsoft excel which allows people to change a few things so they are more useful.  The auditorium was fairly nice and it was easy follow.  It was a chance to meet a few of the library directors and people working in the library system.  They served coffee and cake. 

I'll probably try to get a better sense of it tomorrow. 

The day went well.  I printed up some bookmarks on material on AIDS & HIV.  I also did some checking in the oversize 300s and regular 300s.

While reading through Publishers Weekly, I noticed the book Jolt The Impending Dominance of the Electric Car by James Billmaier.  This is very interesting.  If you follow http://www.teslamotors.com/ like I do, you might see some very interesting things coming up with electric cars, specifically the S Class sedan.  Also Phoenix Motors is promising as well http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/  I know it is a bit off topic with this one.

I read some more of Spook Country by William Gibson on the train home. You could call the trilogy The Bigend Trilogy. On P.106 of Spook Country , there is an excellent quote which says a lot about the book."Secrets," said Bigend beside her, "are the very root of cool."  This ties a lot of the themes in the book together.  His characters in the series are partaking of or searching for secrets.  Their jobs are usually cool; fashion is cool, spies are cool, music is cool, locative art is cool, and even advertising is cool in the novels.

Web Bits

Blio the new ereading software from Baker and Taylor was released today.  http://www.blio.com/

Daily Thoughts 9/27/2010 (Spook Country)

Gerard Dou (1613, Leiden – 1674, idem), Painter With A Pipe and Book, Self Portrait, Oil On Panel (1650)

Daily Thoughts 9/27/2010

We have a community program on AIDS tomorrow.  I am putting together a bookmark with recommended book titles and pulling some books on AIDS and HIV for the program.  We also have the Directors Station meeting tomorrow at Chappaqua.  This should be interesting.

Today has been a steady day.  I checked the displays, did some spot checking in the 300s, and did a small amount of weeding in the oversize 300s.  I also did a little bit of checking on BWI.

The book Spook Country by William Gibson came in for me to read.  I also finished reading Third World America by Arianna Huffington on the train in to work.

Spook Country is revealing some common themes in the trilogy of Spook Country, Pattern Recognition, and Zero History.  Each book seeks to find something hidden, has ornate background descriptions, uses music as a kind of subtheme to add to the mood of the writing, and usually has some right wing secretive group as the opposition.

Hubertus Bigend is a kind of representative of a hidden war that is going on in the United States for control of our ideals through advertising, hidden messages, and shadowy deals.  There is a theme of secret brands, hidden artwork, and shadowy figures playing a game of cat and mouse with hacking, corporate espionage, and memes.  It has a very different feel when you look at the books together.

There is a lot to think about.