Yesterday I finished reading William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor. I’m on record as being a Gibson fanboy and a completist for all of his fiction, to the best of my knowledge. Yet Distrust That Particular Flavor had been sitting on my virtual ToRead pile for quite a long time.
The book is a collection of articles, book introductions, and speeches by Gibson, across a variety of venues: Wired, The New York Times, Time, Book Expo America, etc. As a former Wired subscriber, I was familiar with his style of journalism and had already read many of the articles, admittedly quite a while ago. Gibson self-acknowledges that he’s not really a journalist and is in fact not quite comfortable writing non-fiction. Thus, these snippets are truly of a distinctive flavor.
Overall, these are mostly interesting just as a time capsule of technological and cultural shifts, the most recent dated from the year 2006. Anybody remember AltaVista? There are a couple of standouts like The Road to Oceania but nothing earth shattering.
The collection also provides some insights into Gibson’s thinking as particular novels developed. William Gibson’s Filmless Festival is a useful precursor to Pattern Recognition.
Ultimately, Distrust That Particular Flavor is worthwhile if one is deep into @GreatDismal, Gibson’s handle for his prolific Twitter output. If not, no worries if you skip it.