Hubertus Bigend
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Hubertus Bigend is a character introduced in cyberpunk science fiction and literary author William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition (2003). The character features heavily in Gibson's 2007 sequel Spook Country, which contains a fictional Wikipedia entry for him.
[edit] Introduction of the character
"Hubertus Bigend", the founder of the fictional "viral advertising" agency "Blue Ant", is a character introduced in Pattern Recognition[1]
She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates.[2]
He reappears in Spook Country as the backer of a non-existent magazine named Node, characterized as a European version of Wired (and inspiration of literary project Node Magazine). The book reveals the following on the correct pronunciation of "Bigend":
Angelina re-iterates her concern about your being, however indirectly or only potentially employed by le Bigend, which she points out is more correctly pronounced "bay-jend", sort of, but seldom is, she says, even by him.[3]
[edit] Fictional Wikipedia entry
Gibson included a fictional Wikipedia entry for "Hubertus Bigend" in Spook Country, which protagonist Hollis Henry accesses:
She tried the link for his Wikipedia entry.
Hubertus Hendrik Bigend, born June 7, 1967, in Antwerp, is the founder of the innovative advertising agency Blue Ant. He is the only child of Belgian industrialist Benoît Bigend and Belgian sculptor Phaedra Senyhaev. Much has been made, by Bigend's admirers and detractors alike, of his mother's early years with the Situationalist International (Charles Saatchi was famously but falsely reported to have described him as "a jumped up Situationist spiv") but Bigend himself has declared that the success of Blue Ant has entirely to do with his own gifts, one of which, he claims, is the ability to find precisely the right person for a given project. He is very much a hands-on micromanager, in spite of the firms's remarkable growth in the past five years.[4]
[edit] References
- ^ UK Hardback edition, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-670-87559-7
- ^ Pattern Recognition Chapter 1: The Website of dreadful night, page 6
- ^ Spook Country Chapter 13: Boxes, page 62
- ^ Spook Country Chapter 15: Spiv, pages 74 - 75
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