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Sunday 1 April 2001


apologies to Josh Kirby

The Log of the Mustang Sally, William Gibson (Lancer 0-2468-357-9, $7.99, 527pp, pb) July 2001. Cover by Josh Kirby.

Odds are you never even heard of it, but back in the eighties, William Gibson wrote a first novel called Neuromancer, which some of us thought pretty darned highly of. It was bright, action-filled, and bulging with nifty ideas. Unfortunately, it was also "literary." The hero was an affectless junky, his best friend was dead, and the language itself was a pretentious melange of hipster lingo and noir detective-speak. It sold about fifteen copies, and Gibson disappeared for almost two decades.

But now he's back, and triumphantly so with the first of a new adventure series featuring the captain and crew of the StarSurveyor Mustang Sally. The clotted prose of his first book has been replaced by short, clean sentences of an almost Asimovian clarity. Gone are such weird and unlikely neologisms as "flatline" and "cyberspace," replaced by infinitely more plausible coinages such as "plasteel" and "lasegun." Gone, above all, is the negativity. Commander Bobby Rydell is a hero for our times. Strong as a lion and yet cunning as well, a "Hannibal of Space," as Gibson puts it, the infinitely competent Rydell faces challenge after challenge with daring and aplomb.

The plot, it has to be admitted, is a little slapdash. Essentially, the crew of the Mustang Sally travel from planet to planet, encountering alien monsters which, after initial setbacks, they kill. But so what? This is space opera in the grand manner, and surely only the first in a very long series. You can see the groundwork being laid. Will Nurse Chevette admit her feelings for Commander Rydell? Will Idoru (the ship's computer) ever get the physical body she yearns for? What terrible secret is the alien boy Silencio hiding? There's enough here to keep the pots boiling and the plots churning for decades to come.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say that William Gibson is the A. E. Van Vogt, the E. E. "Doc" Smith, possibly even the Gene Roddenberry of the new Millennium. Just remember, you heard it here first!

Michael Swanwick

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