“Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb.”
Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is a short novel about the hyper of information and getting across New York for a haircut. The hero is a billionaire currency trader driving in a wired car across town. Staff drop in and talk to him, demonstrations slow him down, and leaves his info-limo when he sees his elusive wife. All this time he is loosing his (and his wife’s) fortune on the Yen until he comes unhinged and stalks his death.
The novel read like a short story – compressed around an event and mood. While it was not well reviewed (see Cosmopolis Media Watch), I thought it better than Underworld. It is almost science/speculative fiction – about a life that is all information and lust. At the end it was better than Gibson’s Pattern Recognitions. Eric, the hero, is not even sure if there is a pattern (other than his asymetric prostrate) that he is betting so much on.
Some quotes:
The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of worlds, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed. But he knew that Kinksi was absorbing it.
He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the ye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way the data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment. (p. 80)
“That wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it’s all random phenomena. You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in teh end your’re dealing with a system that’s out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don’t have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we ahve not final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most the time. It’s simply how we live.” (p. 85, Kinski, his theory person talking.)
“People will not die. Istn’t this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. They’re just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyhboard. They’re melting into the texture of everyday life. This is true or not?”
“Even the word computer.”
“Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb.” (p. 104, Kinski and Erick Packer)
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2004. (First published by Scibner in 2003 – I picked this up in an airport in Europe.)
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