Her hair was coppery that night and that night her eyes were green
The belonging kind is the ultimate outsider story
It's the ultimate story of literal alienation in the modern world. It's the story of a linguistics professor
Divorced and adrift he spends most of his nights in bars. There's a sort of irony to his life
He teaches about communication. Studies conversational openings, but as soon as he leaves academia
he finds himself awkward and out of place. When he tries to talk to people, he can't help but come across tongue-tied and
maladroit
And he is as he puts it a sartorial stutterer dressing in clothes that he doesn't realize are outlandish or incongruous
Until he sees the way that people look at him, but one night he meets a young woman at a bar
And she is dressed to the nines
He finally gets up the courage to go up and talk to her, but it all comes out wrong. To his surprise, though,
she responds
She is just as shy and awkward as he is
Until their conversation is interrupted by another patron at the bar and suddenly her mannerisms
Transform suddenly she speaks and acts as if she's from the Midwest with a comfortable drawl and alike for country music
But when she goes back to talking with the professor she is again hesitant and stumbling
No one else seems to notice this, but he does when she leaves he follows her and then on an empty street
He sees her change all of a sudden her dress changes colors her hair
Becomes short and silver blonde he follows her from bar to bar watching her shift and metamorphosize
Everywhere she goes, she fits in. Whatever is right for the place she's visiting, for the people she's near
That's what she becomes. The belonging kind. Each night our protagonist tries to find her again. He searches
He's eating less. He's barely attending his work. He spends each night going from bar to bar to bar
He just knows he'll recognize her. Even though she could look like anything. Until finally,
He does. He sees her and a companion. He follows them back to their hotel, where he finds them.
Roosting. Dozens of the belonging kind wearing whatever they had last changed into. They're perched on every surface.
He sees the nictitating lids over their eyes
And he runs screaming. Over time, the professor slowly becomes more and more
disconnected from the world, drifting away from everything. Leaving the college, working at night at a job
he's not invested in. Until, he gets a call. All he hears is music
Music from the first bar where he ever saw her. He finds her and he comes to realize
He's one of them now
He moves with vapid easy grace, changing his skin, creating money from a membrane in his coat
He has become the belonging kind, and perhaps the most telling sentence in the entire story is this; he ached with
Jealousy for the personification of conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this human wallpaper.
There's a cleverness to Gibson's writing that might not clearly come through when read aloud. What the main character aches for, what he feels
Jealousy over isn't the woman herself. Though,
That's what it might seem like at first. What he aches for is the personification of conformity.
He wants desperately to simply fit in without having to work for it
Without having to give up something or having to know that he's being false
He very literally chases it and in the end he literally gives up his humanity for it
This is what makes the belonging kind Gibson's greatest study of alienation. In his other works
he often explores outsider communities, or has characters that are alienated from society,
But they're often not really alone.
And they very rarely
Actually want to fit in. Here is where we see why, where we see something of Gibson himself
I think. To him, you can't be human and also be one of the belonging kind
To fit in is to be unreal to be part of something he fundamentally can't understand
It's to be part of something so alien and so other that he sees it not even as part of the human experience
And yet fitting in is a huge aspect of modern society
It's the empty patter of small talk in a world so immense and populous that you could spend your entire life
Meeting people and not run into the same person twice. It's the effort to get dressed up and go out
Just to receive validation from strangers
It's the expectation that something exceptional will happen. That this night will be different from all the other nights
There is an unmet desire in us for the world to be more magical than it is
So much of Gibsons' later work depends on the idea that he is playing with here. Without spoiling too much of the man's
bibliography, Gibson is a master at the seemingly chance
encounter. Many of his books are a series of parallel seemingly unconnected
storylines that somehow magically
wind up with all of these total strangers meeting up in the end in just the way they need to. Just like that perfect
Night on the town story. The way that everyone hopes every trip to the bar will go. Now that might seem old hat today
Maybe you've seen stories like this before. But before Gibson there really wasn't much of this in science fiction
It was something that he drew out by making his future histories more granular. By playing with the questions
He faced living in a sprawling and disconnected world
But the belonging kind also brings up questions of the imitation of humanity. Much of Gibson's later work
Explores ideas about our ability to tell a simulacrum of mankind from mankind itself. If there was some great AI
Pretending to be a human agent would we be able to tell? If such things did exist,
how would we even know it and you can see that theme taking shape here in a world where we don't know many people
that well. In a world of casual
Acquaintances and strangers who are a part of your life for the length of a business deal or a conversation at a bar, have we
Made ourselves more susceptible to impostors? To mimics who ate our humanity?
Cyberpunk doesn't work in a small world. It doesn't work in a world of intimate connections
where everybody knows everybody. It only works in the world of the belonging kind. The world of alienation and
isolation that Gibson saw modernity as bringing
But through all that he also brought a message of hope to sci-fi
Because while the belonging kind is a work of rejection
While the belonging kind, is itself, ultimately a rejection of the cost of fitting in, even while acknowledging
how tempting it is to pay that cost. In Gibson's later work those who are left behind by society always
find a society of their own
they create a society just below the surface of this belonging kind-world and that, to me, is the
future history he hoped for. For all the darkness of cyberpunk,
that was the world he wanted to explore. I think that's enough William Gibson for now, but don't worry,
we are absolutely coming back to him later
Until then, join us next time as we hop back in time and talk about the canals of Mars