Zero History

Zero History is a novel by William Gibson, published in 2010, and it closes the sequence of books that began with Pattern Recognition and continued in Spook Country.

Former rock singer Hollis Henry has lost a great deal of money in the financial crash, which leaves her unable to turn down a job offer from Hubertus Bigend, the sinister proprietor of the advertising agency Blue Ant. Her assignment is to find the designer behind Gabriel Hounds, a clothing label that has acquired a loyal following without any conventional marketing at all. Milgrim, who also works for Bigend, is looking into military clothing design while Bigend tries to move into the defence contracting business. Their tasks become entangled with corporate surveillance, a rival contractor and the disappearance of a researcher whose work would give Bigend an advantage in the markets.

Gibson sets the book in a recognisable present rather than an imagined future, and the technology stays close enough to the reader's own for the espionage to feel domestic. The novel is the third of the Blue Ant books, and it revisits characters who first appeared in the two earlier volumes.