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The International Currency of Bad Shit

Gibson's latest might just be his best. Concise, three- or four-page chapters in the compact style he's perfected, rotating through the unfolding fortunes of a technopop star-turned-journalist, a Chinese-Russian-Cuban Illegality Facilitator and an Ativan junkie who translates Volapuk, the Roman text approximation of Cyrillic used for SMSing. Augmented reality locative art, surveillance during the war on terror and intimations of heavy dealings. It seems more angrily political than anything he's written before, and of course it's insanely clever.

 

With a wallet full of them, I was delighted to read the hero's friend opine that the US hundred dollar bill was the International Currency of Bad Shit.

 

Being a game designer traveling to Istanbul to meet his friend the telecoms savant, I'm feeling beautifully Gibsonesque myself, at the moment. Or maybe a bit Couplandy.

 

I'm only half-way through, and I fully expect objetsmart to beat me.

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Uploaded on November 11, 2007
Taken on November 10, 2007