So I've just started China Miéville's The City & The City (and yes I do feel weird having to capitalize the second "the" there) and is it weird that is has me thinking about William Gibson? Google and e-mail and Web addresses and mobile phones and dial-up connections (and the funniest "dot-com" joke I've seen in ages) (I've seen funny dot-com jokes ever?) (whatever). What's it saying about our society when authors we could reliably turn to to present irrevocably weird visions of the way the world could be (or couldn't be but still could be) kind of throw up their hands and just start tossing back at us what we've gone and tossed back at them (what Slashdot has gone and tossed back at them)? I say this with nothing but resepct, of course; Pattern Recognition was awesome and The City & The City is still plenty weird, in its existentially/metaphysically conceit(ed) way. But, I don't know, isn't there some kind of towel-throwing-in thing at play, at the same time (one time) (two time)? Or is weird the new normal, normal the new boring, boring the new yeah-that's-right-I-went-there? (What(ever)?) But of course I talk too soon, of course, I'm only 60 pages in, and I'm sure there's a posthistoric dragonmoose with World Trade Organization ties or something that is about to come in and start eating fools off the foggy sidewalks like Lucky Charms from bowls made of thought. Fingers crossed!