THIRTEEN VIEWS OF A CARDBOARD CITY by William Gibson

If you are a writer and struggle with descriptive language, this is a story that you need to read. It is full of bare-bones language that paints the setting of this story.

It is a story. It might feel, at the beginning, like just a setting in a script, completely objective with references to where and how the camera is placed, but the end composite is more than just a cold look at a cardboard city in Japan.

Sometimes, the world forgets that as it progresses down the shiny techno-laden road on the way to see the wizard, that the gap between classes grows winder. If you have the skills, you will succeed. However, if you do not have the skills needed to shuffle information and organize it into meaning, you run the risk of losing it all.

There is no shame in living in a cardboard community. We all fall on bad times, bad luck. It is what comes next that really matters. What we do to survive in a world that has no use for some and a use for others.

Is this just Social Darwinism at work?

Gibson, William. “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City.” Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2007. p 119 - 128