Brian Howell > Recent Status Updates

Dogfight - Broken protagonist finds obsession in a holographic WW I air combat game, working his way up - reminds me of Vincent in The Color of Money - not caring about people he steps on along the way. Finally getting to the “top” realizing he has absolutely no one to be happy for him.

Winter Market - drug addicted paraplegic records her nightmares becoming a new media superstar, and Casey - the narrator - is her editor. A paragraph that gobsmacked me had to do with people who don’t read the manual, and find unimagined ways to use new technologies.

New Rose Hotel - mega corporations control entire countries, and human capital is the target of espionage, double-cross, and desire

Red Star, Winter Orbit - legendary but aging cosmonaut forgotten by his government as budgetary cuts leave him stranded in space

Hinterlands - people taking a trip down a mysterious highway, returning with artifacts from an unknown source

The Belonging Kind at first makes me think of the girl who becomes a dog story I tell, but this story is about finding your people, where you fit in. Was he always one of them and didn’t realize it, or did he become one of them?

Fragments of a Hologram Rose is Gibson’s first published piece. The story features a man whose girlfriend has left him and a simstim technology called Apparent Sensory Perception (ASP). He posits these glimpses into someone’s life as showing the entire life, but from its own perspective.

The Apology Tour by Nnedi Okorafor was the reason I bought this issue (pp 189-218)
“The sentient AIs were personal assistants who could migrate from phones to computers to vehicles, wherever digital connections could go” This description is so close to what I had envisioned sitting at my computer in my upstairs office some twenty five years ago. The “sentient” part is where this story gets interesting though.

The Gernsback Continuum is the story of a photographer on assignment to capture the 30’s idea of the future, evidenced in decaying architecture, when the veil is pulled back and he sees the “80s that never was”. It’s a juxtaposition of how America has envisioned the future, and the reality of that future. I think this is Gibson justifying gritty sci-fi over the utopia of authors that came before him.

Johnny Mnemonic didn’t follow the same plot from the movie, but many of the main characters are there, and the big ideas are the same. The story moves along quickly, not explaining much, but referencing elements of the world in an as-matter-of-fact manner that can feel alien. I can see that I might benefit from reading the story again in the future.