poorboyoftroy

...at the seam by some sibylline strength at imperceptible speed.  Projecting that sound on to a two-dimensional plane dangling in front of the Walmart semi storming south carelessly through the corner of SE Morrison and Grand, he saw the gaping seam transform into a portal on the other side of which lay the perimeter of space and time.  There was no more proper way to conceive of death than as a radical repositioning of the self.  Best not to dwell on its organic realities.  Never a process, always a new geography.  That was death. But he didn't pass through that plane, not this time or any time before.  The adrenaline that had flooded his system for a split-second subsided as he realized the semi had passed and that he had, regardless, remained firmly planted on the sidewalk, toes akimbo.  Most Portlanders, being non-native, couldn't remember a time when this neighborhood had not been the province of pedestrians but of commerce-serving trucks that used MLK and Grand as int

I just finished re-reading William Gibson's excellent 1993 novel  Virtual Light , one of the books I was certain, as a 16-yr old in the 90's, foresaw the contours of post-millennial Pacific Rim society.  The book depicts a highly dystopic yet nevertheless engaging   2005 troubled by many of the common tropes of near-future speculative fiction: deadly contagious disease (though HIV/AIDS has, thankfully, been annihilated thanks to the unique blood of a messianic figure in the form of a gay male prostitute), lifestyle-altering pollution, and the collapse of national and state governments and correlative, unchecked rise of evil transnational corporate entities to supplant them.  It's not an objectively desirable place to live.  Ultimately, these are some of the less interesting points of the book.  Its handling, too, of future technology is also only marginally interesting, especially in re-reading it in 2011, given that we now have smartphones with many of the reality-augmenti