Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of fiction (2010)

As soon as a character in Zero History asserts that it's possible to erase a rival's corporate network by firing a Taser into a LAN socket, you're straight on Google and reading Information Warfare - Part 1-almost certainly the same document that Gibson read. Quite soon, you realise that this is true for pretty much everything in the book. Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. Zero History is Network Realism because of the way that it talks about the world, and the way its knowledge of the world is gathered and disseminated. Fiction constructed in real time, by and in the network. Network Realism lives in the near-future practicality of Cory Doctorow's Makers-the first third, at least. It's realism because it's happening right now; it couldn't exist without the network. Network Realism feels, to me, like something genuinely new in literature, and we're only just seeing the edges of it.