The Black Campbell

I just finished reading William Gibson’s Zero History. It’s the third in his latest series.  Like the last two — Pattern Recognition and Spook Country — it’s modern day in setting, but with a sci-fi style and sensibility…Elmore Leonard with a tech fetish.

This novel revolves around Hollis Henry, heroine from Spook Country, who is once again hired by marketing mogul Hubertus Bigend to ferret out a designer of a non-brand of stealth marketed clothing so he can use their branding techniques.  Along the way, she is paired up by Bigend with Milgrim, a recovering drug addict also from Spook Country, who has been doing corporate espionage for Bigend.  Bigend’s Blue Ant company is looking to get into military clothing contracts and are studying their competition.

The military clothing competitors take this amiss and start messing with Milgrim and Henry, assuming that they are trying to cut into their business and through a series of mistaken intentions, the two sides wind up involved in kidnapping and half-assed prisoner exchange operations.  It’s farcical and entirely believable.  Like the first two books, the action revolves around something, that on the face of it, is ludicrously lacking in value (but think it through on the military clothing contracts worldwide… that’s potentially billions of dollars!)

It’s a well-constructed novel that, when you think back on it, has very little happen.  The interest in the book is generated by the way Gibson looks at culture, branding and merchandising, and pop trends with the same eye he brought to giving us believable cyberpunk worlds.

Of the three, Spook Country is probably the best of the bunch, but all three are worth a read.