Hubertus Bigend is a fictional character appearing in the third trilogy of novels of science fiction and literary author William Gibson. Bigend is the antihero of Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. In an interview Gibson says "I've always had a sense of Bigend as someone who presents himself as though he knows what's going on, but who in fact doesn't. It's just my sense of the subtext of the character: he's bullshitting himself, at the same time as he's bullshitting all of us."
Character history
''Pattern Recognition''
Bigend is introduced in Pattern Recognition as the charismatic founder of the fictional "viral advertising"/coolhunting agency Blue Ant, from the perspective of protagonist Cayce Pollard: Bigend hires Pollard to track down the source of haunting film fragments known as "the footage" that have been appearing anonymously online, though she loathes him and suspects that his motivation is mercenary; the exploitation of the art as a marketable commodity. Bigend and Blue Ant benefit from Pollard's work both by the discovery of the origin of the footage and by a relationship he establishes with a Russian oligarch. In Spook Country, it is revealed that Bigend successfully harnesses the footage to sell shoes.
''Spook Country''
Gibson did not anticipate Bigend appearing in Spook Country, but realised when writing about a non-existent magazine named Node—characterized as a European version of Wired—that it was "way Bigendian". Thus, Bigend appears as the backer of the ethereal magazine. Again seeking out the origin of a new artwork, Bigend hires protagonist Hollis Henry for the ostensible purpose of writing a magazine article on it. Of Bigend, Henry is told that "he doesn't want you to have heard of him". To sate her curiosity, Henry accesses his fictional Wikipedia entry: The book also reveals that the correct pronunciation of "Bigend" is "bay-jhan", though this is seldom used even by Bigend himself.
''Zero History''
Bigend again featured prominently in Zero History, Gibson's 2010 follow-up to Spook Country, again as the employer of Hollis Henry. In it, he wears a suit in the color International Klein Blue which he likes because it is a color that cannot be represented on most computer monitors.
Bigend is described by Times Union reviewer Michael Janairo as a "hyper-connected, ever curious, multigazillionaire", and by biopunkwriterPaul Di Filippo as amoral and egocentric. Other appellations include "imperious", "enigmatic", "pontifical Belgian ad mogul", "filthy-rich man-behind-the-curtain", "untrustworthy corporate spiv", "accentless Machiavellian fixer with unnervingly white teeth", and "information-sucking android-like advertising guru and godgame magus". Academic Alex Wetmore identified a parallel between the relationships of Bigend and Cayce Pollard and that of Case, the protagonist of Gibson's Neuromancer and the entity which recruits him, characterizing both Bigend and Case's recruiter as "mysterious and potentially untrustworthy". Wetmore observes that Bigend "espouses a curiously communal and transnational approach to marketing" compared to that of the money-hungry dot-commers whose frontier individualism the corporate universe has rejected in favour of the Bigendian approach. The character of Bigend thus represents for Wetmore "a shift in the nature of capitalism and, consequently, a change in the way postindustrial technologies deployed by capitalism interact with the self."
Footnotes
Spook Countrys Node was the inspiration for the real-life literary project Node Magazine.
