crumbz writes "It looks like the grand master of cyberpunk has a new novel coming out entitled Pattern Recognition. Apparently, reviewer copies have been making the rounds on ebay and the word on the street is that it is his best work in years."
Personally, I'm waiting for a 'Neuromancer' movie to be made, but it would have very high expectations to live up to.
But a new book is still pretty good;)
-- Be you Admins?
nay, we are but lusers!
reading Gibson
by
technoid_
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Reading Gibson is something that drew me into computers when I was younger. I find myself picking up Neuromancer or CZ (sometimes MLO) to just read a certain scene he has painted in my head. I once found myself reading Neuromancer page by page backwards just reading his descriptions of the scenery of our future.
After the article about the FCC letting the telcos merge back, maybe Gibson predicted the future more accurately than most think.
So will SBC be the next Tessier-Ashpool?
-- Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Ask Slashdot? Other great sci-fi/cyberpunk author
by
aSiTiC
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Has there been a discussion of recent good sci-fi/cyberpunk authors on Slashdot recently? I'm constantly on the search for good books but the genre of scifi is definitely cloudy as far as quality. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Tessier-Ashpool
by
No+Such+Agency
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have to admit that while Gibson's vision of a bizarre corporate clan, so detached from normal morality and laws as to be rendered barely human, is certainly great writing, it seems less and less likely as time goes on. Corporations grow more and more transnational, less and less attached to physical reality, and in doing so they become ever more like acerebral beasts run by a hippocampal mass of shareholders with short-term profits as the overwhelming driving force. CEO's and VP's are disposable plug-in modules, and hereditary family ownership of significant blocks of shares grows rare.
Hmm, I grow weary. Time to climb back in the cryo-pod and activate 2No Such Agency in my place...
-- Freedom: "I won't!"
i have to say...
by
stonebeat.org
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
the excerpt from the book, didn't give me enuff motivation to actually go and buy the book.
maybe one day it will be on gutenberg, and i will read it;)
But don't take my word for it, cause i am no expert in litrature. Maybe you will love the book.....
Is He Even Relevant?
by
Tremblay99
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Neuromancer blew me away -- it was awesome. And clacked out on a manual typewriter. Count Zero was a little less so. Mona Lisa Overdrive was a decent read (awesome, awesome cover on the original hardcover, mind you). The Difference Engine was a slog. Idoru and Virtual Light blur together.
In lit-crit circles, it is often said that a poet's best work is his earliest (think Coleridge or Bob Dylan)... while novelists take time to mature (Dickens, P.K. Dick, or Kim Stanley Robinson). I think Gibson's a poet -- people read him (at least I do) for the descriptions, the images, the language, not the story.
Of course, if he's become a novelist and has learned how to tell a story... with fleshed-out characters, with substance over flash and some hook in the story to hold on to, he might yet become a worthwhile read again.
william went to singapore
by
hfastedge
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Singapore is a high tech nation.
In 1994, the fledling (but well backed) wired magazine sent william to the tiny island nation. I was browsing wired archives a few weeks ago and found this.
Re:william went to singapore
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Slightly off topic, but from this article it seems like the guy is totally into sleaze and dumps. He seems to be equating colour and vibrancy with heterosexual hand jobs and shonen knife.
I'm a singaporean and though i have to say that the place can have the cultural personality of a dead dwarf on certain days, i would personally like to tell WG this:" dude, we do have shonen knife. We even have john zorn, makesnd and the limited edition woven ep. Plus, electronic equipment here is dirt cheap. Where else can you get a region free shinco dvd/vcd/cd player for 150 bucks, and a viewsonic LCD monitor for 300 and a 1G+ athlon for 450."
Rants aside, WGs books have been going downhill recently. He constantly rehashes his content and the writing style has become more like the enid blyton of cyberspace. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash was a more satisfying read than any of WGs books, and i recommend Tad William's Overland series about a sentient computer and a cult ( what else ) to anyone looking for masterful storytelling.
It's like comparing an apple II to today's athlons. It was good while it lasted, but can it do GLTron?
Met the guy 12 years ago...
by
teutonic_leech
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I met William Gibson 12 years ago in Austria at the Ars Electronica conference. Everyone was all dressed up and stuff and the guy shows up to hold a speech in sneakers and a beat-up pair of jeans that I bet he still wears today. Really shy - not the extravert type - I liked him right away:-)
Anyway, can't wait to read his latest work - if it's anything like Neuromancer, it's a must read.
Is He Even Relevant? sure
by
layingMantis
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· Score: 3, Interesting
All Tommorrow's Parties was recent and pretty cool, it had organic buildings and the Golden Gate bridge was a big ramshackle city unto itself. It's been awhile since i read it, but every one of his books has good (technological) ideas in it (many of which have now become rather prophetic) I think that's plenty good enough to make him relevant. Plus, his descriptions of food are original and always make me really hungry, heh.
I agree his prose is poetic; it is also complicated, terse, and often infuriatingly ambiguous. This is why these AC's are trashing Gibson: they aren't advanced enough to read him.
Re:Ask Slashdot? Other great sci-fi/cyberpunk auth
by
st.+augustine
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· Score: 5, Interesting
After hearing about Bruce Sterling I found a copy of Islands in the Net in a used bookstore... I've never been able to bring myself to read another one by him. Anyone with thoughts about his other books?
His short stories are excellent -- check out the collections Globalhead and A Good Old-Fashioned Future.
As for the novels, personally I think Heavy Weather and Zeitgeist are brilliant, but I've had trouble convincing other people of this. Schismatrix, which is rather older, is also quite good -- something like what might have happened if Heinlein's juveniles had been written by William S. Burroughs.
(Oh, and if you like Sterling, or even Stephenson, you should also probably check out Charles Stross. You might call his stuff post-Slashdot cyberpunk.)
--
--
Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible
to rational proof.
Its a crime to call him father of cyberpunk
by
rufusdufus
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I like William Gibson's books, but it is totally ignorant to call him the father of cyberpunk. Please go read (for example) Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar". Compare and contrast with Gibson's story. Then look at the copyright dates...
Cyberpunk is dead
by
Animats
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Cyberpunk is over, and it's been over for quite a while. Now that everyone has Internet access, it's
like reading railroad stories. Besides, punk died over a decade ago. Give it up.
"In the future, everyone will carry tiny radio-telephones in their pockets!"
We badly need a new vision of the future. We seem to be headed for Orwell's vision:
"You want a vision of the future, Winston? Imagine
a boot stepping on a face for eternity". That's no good.
Re:heard that before
by
analog_line
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The Difference Engine was actually a collaboration between Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Did you actually read it? It was pretty obvious, at least to me, which parts Sterling wrote, and which parts Gibson wrote. Sterling just can't write sci-fi. I've forced myself through more books of his than I wish to remember. The only ones I could stand reading more than once were The Artificial Kid and Islands in the Net, and that was barely. In other words, don't blame Gibson for the Difference Engine. He had "help."
Gibson had the guts to try for something different after the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa trilogy. For that I give him a hell of alot of credit. I admit that I really didn't like Virtual Light and Idoru on the first read through, but I reread them and I got most of it, and i've got a much better opinion of them now. All Tomorrow's Parties was one of the best books i've ever read. I practically flew through it. The less fantastic the setting, the more thoughtful it is.
But different tastes for different people, so there you go, eh? Personally, I say give the guy more computers. I'm eager to see what the new stuff is. If you aren't up for it, such is life.
Gibson's Novels and Japanese Pop
by
skSlashDot
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Neuromancer et al. were great. I read Virtual Light a couple times, but still can't remember a damn thing about it. Something about sunglasses, right?
Idoru is okay, but it's a much better book if you're already a fan of Japanese Pop, or a fan of HEY! HEY! HEY! MUSIC CHAMP. It's kind of like the American Bandstand equivalent for Japanese pop music. (For a quick English description, try here). I watch HHHMC on International Channel on cable, and even if you don't speak Japanese (which I don't, really) it's alternately fascinating and hilarious. Want to watch Japanese pop stars give the show's hosts haircuts on the island of Guam? You need to watch it!
I also really liked The Difference Engine, but it's an entirely different kind of book. I'd recommend it to any programmer, though. They just don't teach the young people enough about Ada Lovelace these days! (Okay, so Gibson's work is fiction; does that really matter these days?)
Re:Ask Slashdot? Other great sci-fi/cyberpunk auth
by
303
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· Score: 2, Interesting
greg egan. every book of his i have read has made my brain hurt severely. which is a good thing;-). he usually starts of with one mindblowing idea and just when you kinda get a grip on that, he smacks you upside the head with another. a couple of my favourites are "permutation city" and "diaspora". you can check out some of his short stories (and cool applets he has written to demonstrate the concepts from his books) here: greg egan awesome writer
True, but then what changes it from piracy, really?
I just thought about that not too long ago when I was in a store and saw Arcanum for sale. I tried the game out for a little bit before, but I never got anywhere with it. But I really did like it. So I was considering to buy it to support the makers, and because it's nicer to actually own it. Now I could get it used for less then half the price new. (Since it's rather old it's in the bargin bin.) But then I knew that the producers wouldn't get anything from it.
So really, if I had copied the game and sent money (say half of the buying price for the used copy) to the makers wouldn't that have been a better way to show my appriciation?
Now I don't try to claim that it's unetical to sell used games, or that it's the same to buy used games as to pirate games. I guess it's just dependent on what you want to do 1) own the product or 2) benefit the producers.
Yeah, but he is the father of "cyberspace"
by
MisterSquid
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
True, people had envisioned many of the post-noir themes in literature before Gibson. Even high-literary types like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow plays around with the idea of uploading consciousness into a machine.
But it took someone who could recognize exactly where in the network our culture was positioned to be able to coin a term that captured and shaped our collective sense of what was happening. That term is "cyberspace" and it was invented by William Gibson in Neuromancer. For all Brunner's prescience, he did not come up with the word that defines an entire era of human history. Gibson did.
First line of the novel:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
That is just fucking brilliant writing. You won't find the same in Brunner.
Where it all started (beginning at the novel's 16th paragraph, page 4 of the Ace Books 1984 impression, i.e. the first):
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.
Cultural history was made and, as a result, Gibson's name will be transmitted for hundreds of generations to come. Brunner's will be the work of literary historians.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm waiting for a 'Neuromancer' movie to be made, but it would have very high expectations to live up to.
;)
But a new book is still pretty good
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Reading Gibson is something that drew me into computers when I was younger. I find myself picking up Neuromancer or CZ (sometimes MLO) to just read a certain scene he has painted in my head. I once found myself reading Neuromancer page by page backwards just reading his descriptions of the scenery of our future.
After the article about the FCC letting the telcos merge back, maybe Gibson predicted the future more accurately than most think.
So will SBC be the next Tessier-Ashpool?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Has there been a discussion of recent good sci-fi/cyberpunk authors on Slashdot recently? I'm constantly on the search for good books but the genre of scifi is definitely cloudy as far as quality. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Already noted William Gibson, will check out.
Where the Music Matters
I have to admit that while Gibson's vision of a bizarre corporate clan, so detached from normal morality and laws as to be rendered barely human, is certainly great writing, it seems less and less likely as time goes on. Corporations grow more and more transnational, less and less attached to physical reality, and in doing so they become ever more like acerebral beasts run by a hippocampal mass of shareholders with short-term profits as the overwhelming driving force. CEO's and VP's are disposable plug-in modules, and hereditary family ownership of significant blocks of shares grows rare.
Hmm, I grow weary. Time to climb back in the cryo-pod and activate 2No Such Agency in my place...
Freedom: "I won't!"
the excerpt from the book, didn't give me enuff motivation to actually go and buy the book.
;)
maybe one day it will be on gutenberg, and i will read it
But don't take my word for it, cause i am no expert in litrature. Maybe you will love the book.....
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
In lit-crit circles, it is often said that a poet's best work is his earliest (think Coleridge or Bob Dylan) ... while novelists take time to mature (Dickens, P.K. Dick, or Kim Stanley Robinson). I think Gibson's a poet -- people read him (at least I do) for the descriptions, the images, the language, not the story.
Of course, if he's become a novelist and has learned how to tell a story ... with fleshed-out characters, with substance over flash and some hook in the story to hold on to, he might yet become a worthwhile read again.
Singapore is a high tech nation.
m l?person=laurie_anderson&topic_set=wiredpeople
In 1994, the fledling (but well backed) wired magazine sent william to the tiny island nation. I was browsing wired archives a few weeks ago and found this.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/gibson.ht
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
I met William Gibson 12 years ago in Austria at the Ars Electronica conference. Everyone was all dressed up and stuff and the guy shows up to hold a speech in sneakers and a beat-up pair of jeans that I bet he still wears today. Really shy - not the extravert type - I liked him right away :-)
Anyway, can't wait to read his latest work - if it's anything like Neuromancer, it's a must read.
I agree his prose is poetic; it is also complicated, terse, and often infuriatingly ambiguous. This is why these AC's are trashing Gibson: they aren't advanced enough to read him.
As for the novels, personally I think Heavy Weather and Zeitgeist are brilliant, but I've had trouble convincing other people of this. Schismatrix, which is rather older, is also quite good -- something like what might have happened if Heinlein's juveniles had been written by William S. Burroughs.
If your wondering whether you'd like Sterling, probably the easiest thing to do is check out some of his nonfiction online.
(Oh, and if you like Sterling, or even Stephenson, you should also probably check out Charles Stross. You might call his stuff post-Slashdot cyberpunk.)
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
I like William Gibson's books, but it is totally ignorant to call him the father of cyberpunk. Please go read (for example) Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar". Compare and contrast with Gibson's story. Then look at the copyright dates...
"In the future, everyone will carry tiny radio-telephones in their pockets!"
We badly need a new vision of the future. We seem to be headed for Orwell's vision: "You want a vision of the future, Winston? Imagine a boot stepping on a face for eternity". That's no good.
The Difference Engine was actually a collaboration between Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Did you actually read it? It was pretty obvious, at least to me, which parts Sterling wrote, and which parts Gibson wrote. Sterling just can't write sci-fi. I've forced myself through more books of his than I wish to remember. The only ones I could stand reading more than once were The Artificial Kid and Islands in the Net, and that was barely. In other words, don't blame Gibson for the Difference Engine. He had "help."
Gibson had the guts to try for something different after the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa trilogy. For that I give him a hell of alot of credit. I admit that I really didn't like Virtual Light and Idoru on the first read through, but I reread them and I got most of it, and i've got a much better opinion of them now. All Tomorrow's Parties was one of the best books i've ever read. I practically flew through it. The less fantastic the setting, the more thoughtful it is.
But different tastes for different people, so there you go, eh? Personally, I say give the guy more computers. I'm eager to see what the new stuff is. If you aren't up for it, such is life.
Idoru is okay, but it's a much better book if you're already a fan of Japanese Pop, or a fan of HEY! HEY! HEY! MUSIC CHAMP. It's kind of like the American Bandstand equivalent for Japanese pop music. (For a quick English description, try here). I watch HHHMC on International Channel on cable, and even if you don't speak Japanese (which I don't, really) it's alternately fascinating and hilarious. Want to watch Japanese pop stars give the show's hosts haircuts on the island of Guam? You need to watch it!
I also really liked The Difference Engine, but it's an entirely different kind of book. I'd recommend it to any programmer, though. They just don't teach the young people enough about Ada Lovelace these days! (Okay, so Gibson's work is fiction; does that really matter these days?)
greg egan. every book of his i have read has made my brain hurt severely. which is a good thing ;-). he usually starts of with one mindblowing idea and just when you kinda get a grip on that, he smacks you upside the head with another. a couple of my favourites are "permutation city" and "diaspora". you can check out some of his short stories (and cool applets he has written to demonstrate the concepts from his books) here: greg egan
awesome writer
True, but then what changes it from piracy, really?
I just thought about that not too long ago when I was in a store and saw Arcanum for sale. I tried the game out for a little bit before, but I never got anywhere with it. But I really did like it. So I was considering to buy it to support the makers, and because it's nicer to actually own it. Now I could get it used for less then half the price new. (Since it's rather old it's in the bargin bin.) But then I knew that the producers wouldn't get anything from it.
So really, if I had copied the game and sent money (say half of the buying price for the used copy) to the makers wouldn't that have been a better way to show my appriciation?
Now I don't try to claim that it's unetical to sell used games, or that it's the same to buy used games as to pirate games. I guess it's just dependent on what you want to do 1) own the product or 2) benefit the producers.
True, people had envisioned many of the post-noir themes in literature before Gibson. Even high-literary types like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow plays around with the idea of uploading consciousness into a machine.
But it took someone who could recognize exactly where in the network our culture was positioned to be able to coin a term that captured and shaped our collective sense of what was happening. That term is "cyberspace" and it was invented by William Gibson in Neuromancer. For all Brunner's prescience, he did not come up with the word that defines an entire era of human history. Gibson did.
First line of the novel:
That is just fucking brilliant writing. You won't find the same in Brunner.Where it all started (beginning at the novel's 16th paragraph, page 4 of the Ace Books 1984 impression, i.e. the first):
Cultural history was made and, as a result, Gibson's name will be transmitted for hundreds of generations to come. Brunner's will be the work of literary historians.
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