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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! "
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.
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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