Saturday, January 18, 2003

posted 10:24 AM
HORSES, BANANAS, AND THE SUPERIOR STRANGENESS OF THE REAL

In NEUROMANCER, a single passing comment about a moth-eaten stuffed horse clues the reader that horses are extinct (the victims, apparently, of some unspecified equine pandemic).

I can’t remember whether there are any bananas in NEUROMANCER, but it now looks as though bananas rather than horses are more likely to become extinct, and possibly within a decade of this writing. Bananas are sterile mutants, clones as it were of the one original, and as such are unable to evolve, making them sitting ducks for a black fungal rot that evolves like a house on fire, mutating its way around every next generation of pesticides we throw at it.

“SERIOUS” ARCHITECTURE INFLUENCED BY BLADERUNNER

“Serious”, put next to “architecture”, is probably never a good idea. The part of me (the majority of me, probably) that wallows in vernacular imprecision likes to speak of, for instance, “a serious hamburger”. I meant serious in that sense. There’s a fair bit of decidedly non-serious (i.e. not Famous Name) Eighties architecture around that feels almost comically Bladerunnerish to me. Though the most extreme examples are all in Japan, which for some people probably doesn’t count.

In the other sense? Well, how about the work of the LA-based team Morphosis? I met those guys. I think they even gleefully declared that Bladerunner had been a big influence. I liked them.

INFLUENCES GENERALLY

Influences are things to have, and then to get over. The latter being a lot harder than the former. (I, for example, couldn’t even begin to write until I got over J.G. Ballard.)

But influential impact often has little to do with how well a writer or book might be known. Phil Dick’s entire corpus has had almost no impact on me, but a single reading of Thomas M. Disch’s ON WINGS OF SONG, I know for a fact, influenced me mightly.

Has ON WINGS OF SONG turned up here in anyone’s list of “other books”? If not, let me add it. Stunningly original.

VOICE OF THE FIRE

While I’m recommending fiction you may not have read: VOICE OF THE FIRE by Alan Moore, 1996.

You probably know Alan Moore, but most people seemed to miss this. I know I did. Probably because it would likely have been reviewed (in the US at least) as “fantasy”. Actually it’s some kind of psychogeographical Magickal Operation (about which, I suspect, the less we know the better) and a lot like repeatedly sticking your head into a shoebox full of sharp, cunningly-wrought instruments.

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