William Gibson’s The Winter Market

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Published post Neuromancer, The Winter Market has a quasi-cyberpunk aesthetic with its run down market where people sell their wares and its futuristic technology where people’s dreams are commercialized by technology that turns their dreams into films.

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The story is about a film editor who takes people’s dreams and turns them into films and then sells them. The main character meets a woman who has a debilitating disease that requires her to wear an exo-skeleton to walk around. The main character then decides to turn this woman’s dreams into a commercial film project. The main character plugs his brain into hers to see her dreams.

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This is where the story loses me.

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This plugging in is supposed to be some transformational experience that creates a connection between the main character and the woman dreamer. Without this the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense because otherwise why would the main character (and the reader) care about her? The story ends with the woman uploading her consciousness to a computer server and the main character is afraid the woman’s consciousness will contact him (which unnerves him because he doesn’t want to talk to someone who got cremated).

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So, the whole story hinges on the relationship between the woman and the main character. And I’m not buying it. What’s the basis for the main character’s feelings toward the woman? It’s supposed to be the plugging in, but here’s how Gibson describes it: “Words. Words cannot. Or maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came out of her, what she did…” The main character then goes on to explain what the dream looked like: “like your on a motorcycle at night, no lights but somehow you don’t need them … Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge forever.”

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And that’s basically it. That’s the four second dream that is so pivotal to the story. The main character describes the rush but do you feel it? Do you buy it?

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I don’t. Any sort of “Words can’t describe what I’m trying to describe” is just awful writing. It is the writer’s job to describe things. Even if the main character himself couldn’t describe it, the reader should still be able to feel what the character goes through and just saying “words can’t describe it” is a miserable failure.

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The writing tells me that the incident is “Amazing” without actually showing me that it’s amazing. That’s the problem and the problem is fatal to the story. With any futuristic technology like plugging in, the technology and its effects on people needs to be believable. Obviously, it’s hard to show a futuristic technology and its effects on people. It is much easier just to mail it in and tell the reader instead of showing them. But that’s not good writing. Good sci-fi writing will give the reader no choice but to feel the future.

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The Winter Market is a miss. The voters that nominated this for the Hugo had low standards of proof.