ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 reads William Gibson’s novel Zero History (2010) alongside Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the parallax view to give a further means of discussing gestalt perception, as well as science fiction’s relationship with time. A duality of imagined views creates the conditions for science fiction, the place where the tensions of a double view are expressed. This dichotomy is repeated in the text as the two main characters view the same events in different ways, offering the reader a parallax view of the text’s narrative. Perception is just as important to Gibson’s work as in any of his other novels, but concerns about the conditions created by late capitalism come to the fore as vision itself is privatised through the profusion of CCTV cameras and the power of celebrity. This chapter also reads Zero History, the final novel in Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, alongside Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), comparing the use of ekphrasis in the novels.
