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William Gibson Interview @ AICN
Well, the slashdot crew is all out killing time and brain cells giving away the Beanie Awards at LinuxWorld (Best Real Propeller Beanie: Jay Sulzberger of the NYLUG). Look for the chock-full-of-fun wrap-up tomorrow, but in the meantime, forge5 writes "Ain't It Cool News has an excellent article on Alexandra DuPont interviewing William "FREAKING" Gibson. They talk about The Matrix, his books, and his X-Files episode. Check it out! "
Why do we like Gibson?
Perhaps because "The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel".
The metaphors, language, and constructions are both fresh and elegant.
All the characters seem somewhat unrelated until they all come together in
one crystal-clear moment. And then you probably need to read the book
again.
The immersion in the virtual world is impressive, rich, and visceral--the
difference between Literature and Gibson is like the difference between
VRML and Quake 3.
Actually, let me extend that analogy. VRML is precise, painstaking, slow
and boring. Gibson is beautiful, realistic, fast-paced, and exciting
while still being completely unbelievable.
Maybe it was cooler in the 80's. Maybe it appeals to the little cyberpunk
in me, chatting on the BBS, checking out PGP for DOS, watching ANSI
movies, and wondering what the future would be like... But I think it's
still awesome.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man. William "FREAKING" Gibson.
I would *love* to see Molly in a movie. (for those who don't know... if Trinity were really a badass, she'd have permanent, Woverine-esque claws to go with the leather pants and bad attitude...)
Heck, that was worth it, just to hear Gibson make fun of Johnny Mnemonic. Maybe 'The Matrix' was how Keanu chose to make up for his sins there.
Or, even better, the gov't would never have funded The Internet as it is today... maybe. But it sure has helped the economy.
Man, Gibson entertains me. You know, when he got his Apple ][, he expected some kind of pulsating crystal inside. Man, was he disappointed. He's a visionary alright. We even get to read Neuromancer for my Science Fiction class. Yes!
Thank you slashdot, you've made my day.
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I definitely agree with you on the point of Gibson's writing. I've read "Neuromancer" and wasn't all that impressed with his style either. He's certainly a visionary, but I like Stepenson's writing style much better. I'm reading "Snow Crash" right now and it is awesome! It just flows much better. Easier to understand. Gibson's style is choppier, if you will. Of course, I'm a simpleton :-)
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I beg to differ. Of his mainstream fiction I've read The Wasp Factory and Walking On Glass, both of which I have found excellent -- gripping, entertaining and impeccably crafted. I've read one of his scifi books, Consider Phlebas, and while the scenery and concepts were impressive (the megaships, for example), the story itself seemed too much the standard space opera to be very interesting.
Back in 1992, I did a philosophy subject (Metaphysics) at university. We were handed a booklet of photocopied essays and writings. One of these (which we covered in the "nature of identity" part of the course) was Gibson's The Winter Market.
There were also two stories about time travel -- one by Bradbury and one by Heinlein -- showing the wrong and right way to cover such a concept.
I must agree with you here. Jeff Noon's writing has a lyrical quality reminiscent of Gibson at his finest, and manages to mix ultra-gritty realism with amazing flights of fancy, and make it all credible. (One particularly apt word I've seen used to describe Noon's writings is kaleidopunk.)
In particular, Vurt and the Pixel Juice story compilation are essential reading.
Though they're definitely not hard sci-fi.
I think he was in the right place, at the right time, with enough talent to pull it off.
He's science fiction's Linus Torvalds (or Rob Malda).
crypto means hidden. crypto-fascist means hidden fascist.
Standard plot device: a secret fascist conspiracy is gonna take over the world, call in FEMA, suspend the constitution, and Kris Kristoferson will star in the movie they make about it.
Matrick plot device: a not so secret artificial intelligence already took over the world. I call this the decrypto-automatic menace, because I don't think anyone's named that one yet. For example, Terminator and T2 used the decripto-automatic menace as a plot device.
22:59 and I'm still at work. Can you tell?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Well, maybe he meant that since the basic mesage of the movie is that knowledge is a double-edged sword and is not necessarily desirable, the moneyed creators of the movie might have been advocating crypto-fascism as a means of maintaining popular ignorance.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
People can't get over Gibson for a number of reasons. First because he practically invented modern cyberpunk. I have not read Neal Stephenson, but from what I see in the comments, he writes cyberpunk novels. Well, cyberpunk basically didn't exist before Gibson, so Gibson is one of the giants whose shoulders Stephenson stands on. Gibson, in turn, is standing on the shoulders of Philip K Dick and John Brunner. Would anyone care to add to that list?
But he didn't just invent it, he writes about it in a compelling and convincing manner, drawing out the social and psychological impact of the worlds he descibes. He explores the deeper issues, rather than just moving on the plot. And then he weaves the philosophical issues in to the plot. Gibson isn't just trying to write page-turning sci-fi, he's trying to write literature. And IMHO succeeding. Neuromancer, for example, isn't just held in high regard by the fans. It won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K Dick Memorial, that's a lot of critical acclaim. That, I feel, makes it very hard to justify your claim that Gibson's stories are not well written.
The question he was asked about the nanites which he answered by saying he might notice peoples' clothes illustrates a point you seem to have missed. Gibson is an artist, not a scientist. In fact he doesn't seem to be interested in science or technology, but the effects that they have upon people and the world. It seems that you dislike him because he isn't a geek. Why do you consider him to be "hard" science fiction? He doesn't really write about science or technology, just situations. In his recent appearance on BBC Radio's 'Desert Island Disks' he accepted the suggestion by the interviewer that he writes about "the cutting edge of the now". That really sums it up for me.
NPR featured an interview with William freaking Gibson on their Talk of the Nation program way back in November. There might not be enough Gibson in the interview to satisfy the die-hard GibsonPhile, as he shared airtime with David Brin, Anne Simon, and a whole lot of callers (it's a call-in talk show). But if you're still interested (and if these links work) you can go to their Talk of the Nation site, or listen to the RealAudio version.
Oh Shit. I've started a flamewar, haven't I?
So WHY do you prefer Gibson? Sometimes Stephenson's stories have slightly weak endings - I'll give you that. Apart from that, I just don't see it.
Gibson seems to do a Katz - use lots of long, cool sounding words & phrase - and the story seems to come a distant second. With Stephenson, at least you'll get a decent storyline.
Nice. Good for a few belly laughs.
However, I feel compelled to point out that sendmail was written by Eric Allman, not Eric Raymond.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
You can read the interview (and download a Palm doc of it) here. The raw transcript is here.
</shameless plug>
Wow, I decide to read at -1 for once and I'm rewarded with this. That was great. You should post it to Segfault where it has a higher probability of being seen, though.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
So he invented a couple of cool words: "Neuromacer" in particular. Apart from that... his writing is... average, I'd say. Neal Stephanson's stories are much easier to read, and make a lot more sense.
I'd like to say the same thing about Gibson AND Stephenson. I just picked up Stephenson's "Snow Crash", and after the the intriguing first chapter or so, it degenerates into all the standard cyberpunk cliches, with the standard monotonous plot and cardboard characters.
Ok, I might sound stupid here, but...
"[the matrix] didn't have the kind of crypto-fascist subtext that one might expect with that kind of money. "
Does anyone know what he means by that?
Since the movie was produced by Warner Brothers, and they are part of MegaTimeAOLWarnerBigEvilCompany(tm), he would have expected it to look a lot more negative at 'evil hackers'. But contrary to what Gibson expected from such a big corporation, they actually produced a movie in which 'hackers' who fight the existing order are portrayed as positive, even as heroes.
Of course, that's my interpretation, Gibson might have meant something completely different.
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
I think Gibson's strength is his ability to portray the interactions between society and technology--both on the macro level and also on the individual level.
His stories aren't about tech so much as they are about people interacting with, and reacting to, tech. This is something that's easy for techs to overlook--this fact that the end-user experience is so much different from the specialist's or the designer's experience. Not to mention the experience of the culture as a whole--an experience that occurs simultaneously with the tech's changing of that culture, and the culture's changing of the tech.
Gibson comes closer to telling us what tech means, really, to all of us as a group and to each of us as individuals. He sees a world we all live in but can't really visualise.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
This is the best out-of-context quote I think I've ever seen:
"Well, I'm playing with it, but it hasn't yet completely entangled me. If I play with it sufficiently, it probably will."
-- William Gibson
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
So WHY do you prefer Gibson?
I am not the poster you are answering, but I'll give it a try. Stephenson writes very cool, highly entertaining plot-and-software/technical-gadgets-driven fiction. I like Stephenson very much. Gibson, however, writes high literature as opposed to just fiction. He writes imagery, mood, concepts and feelings that are not expressable in three-word sentences. The genres are different -- you can like both (I do), but Gibson is much more classy.
Gibson seems to do a Katz
Oh-oh. If you don't understand the difference between Gibson and Katz, it's going to be hard to have a meaningful conversation with you. Read both. Think. Reread. Repeat as necessary.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
8 hours before story posts? I can't deal with that. I know the /. crew is busy at linuxworld and all - but for those of us who work for a certain company in redmond, that's not considered a good excuse.
It's been awful. Around 7:00 PST one of my developers started twitching and muttering 'need slashdot, need slashdot.' By 8:00 he was screaming about being attacked by snakes. Then he went nuts and started attacking us. By this time the rest of us were shaking so badly we couldn't fight him off. We would have been in trouble if my non-techie boss hadn't arrived and beat him senseless with an unsold copy of MS Bob. (see, it is good for something.)
Please don't do this again.
I need my fix.
--Shoeboy