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William Gibson on his Tech Life and Latest Novel
An anonymous reader writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a brief article on William Gibson. In it he discusses his tech life, the ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, 'Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer. I don't find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good.'"
He's running a 286, and that copy of MS Word 2.0 is suiting him just fine.
Uh, no. Any type of creative writting is difficult enough w/o having to worry about voice recognition's general suckyness.
Although he's not really well known nor as critically acclaimed, I really like Kilgore Trout. I don't think his books are in print anymore, he died a few years back.
So it goes.
I have been pwned because my
Gibson used to maintain a fairly interesting blog, but he quit to work on his "day job", which is really too bad - I like looking in on the lives of the writers I read, although it feels a little voyeuristic at times (and that's when I stop). It's fascinating seeing the creative process in action.
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Don't know about you, but I can type faster than I can dictate... have you tried using BOTH hands?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
if a male in the family doesn't find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does any good, it's the sour-grape effect!
"I remember seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc".
:) Rumor has it he has another book on the way... and one with a movie deal in the works. Maybe they'll pass on Keanu this time and get a real actor and his next book-based movie won't suck so bad.
Just goes to show what using an Apple can do for you.
Still working on how to get my new 512Mb USB 2.0 memory stick to interface with my brain.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
" I realized no one had tried to write a science-fiction novel as if Lou Reed and David Bowie were writing it."
I suppose you could say that about a lot of things-
we need more software that was written as if Lou Reed and David Bowie had written it
"I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good."
Indeed.
I am at the 6th semester of Computer Science and I see a lot of guys who got low grades and don't know even how to code really basic programs looking for top computers. I belive all they want is to play games.
Personally I don't need a top-ultra-fast box to get my programs working or improve my programming skills, and even get some fun (ie. MUD).
Of course if you work with production servers, high definition graphics or movies you need power machines, but regular and ordinary users who only surf on the net, compile some code, edit some texts don't need that all IMHO.
Just out of curiosity... am I the only one for whom Neuromancer fell flat? The first 50 or 100 pages were impressive, and... then... it... went... nowhere...
I really admired how I had a feel for the world in just a coupla pages, but the book seemed to end up in a how-weird-can-you-go mode.
disclaimer: I just read this 6 months ago... maybe having read/seen other/better stories had jaded me.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
And what I wish Pattern Recognition was going to be about was the take over of the corporation. I think Gibson's real contribution in his neuromancer trilogy was the complete and utterly believeable and scary description of the "Corporation as the World".
When I re-read his stuff I am most impressed and awed by how clearly he was able to create a world in which the corporations ran everything and were god-like beings. I know this isnt new now but back in the 80's when Governments were the big powerhouses, saying that someone like Nike was more powerful than the US (say someone like Halliburton) was a bit of shock since we were seeing the US and Russia go at it from Gov't run models of economies.
Anyway, just pick up his early books and you can taste the corporations presence everywhere and how so soaked into the culture that no one is his books ever saw it.
Anyway, getting back to his more recent books, I miss the fact that he no longer seems to be fascinated by the corporations (his fascination with AI's was most explicit [ie the AI, as a real being, representing/being the corporation])
and he now is more of a Tipping Point type writer (much like Crichton, ie spot a trend and write about it )
Anyway, just my thought, would like to hear your replies
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Many many reasons.
I think the main one is that talking and writing come out of two different brain pathways. Somebody who is an excellent writer on the written/typed page may not be able to talk very elequently when asked.
I tried to write fiction using voice rec but I didn't like having my incomplete and random bits of story broadcast to the rest of the world until I was ready for it. I didn't dictate a single word, in fact, because my then-roomate was in the room and I realized how dumb it was.
Also, you can't use voice recognition in a cafe.
Gentoo Sucks
So we can ask him why all his books since Mona Lisa Overdrive have sucked so badly.
"I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc". Just think... if he'd seen an ad for the G4 Notebook with a Linux logo instead, then second two Matrixes (no he didn't write them, but they take from his ideas) might not have sucked so bad. Or maybe Keanu's brain could've been unloaded to an iPod and all the data shared on the internet. :)
For one thing, language style used in speaking and writing are remarkably dissimilar. Second, depending on how you dictate, there can be quite a bit of extraneous sounds like ah, umm, like, etc. that can gum up the works. It may be more difficult to go back and edit what the SR software interpreted than typing from scratch.
The real tough thing to get used to is that when you write, you get realtime feedback for the text. When you use SR, it lags behind your voice, and even further behind your thought processes...it tends to trip you up.
I occasionaly use SR to dictate a draft of different documents, but I do so only if I can do it fairly seemlessly (no ummms) and I NEVER look at the screen. I bet Mr. Gibson's writing style just doesn't accomodate the workflow needed to effectively utilize SR. Just my $.02.
It's not the type of glitch you expect from the Orwell of the Internet, the Vasco da Gama of cyberspace, the man who virtually predicted virtual reality.
Nice pun... but not true. He may have HELPED the term gain some popularity,
but History says he was far behind a lot of others.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Also, when writers switched from typewriters to computers, a number said that their process of writing changed. (Some fell in love with cut'n'paste, bleh!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
There's also a pretty good interview with4 _2.rm
Gibson on Tech Nation here
http://www.technation.com:8080/ramgen/02100
He just doesn't like technology. Like you can't figure that out from reading his books. Sheesh. His stories often portray the darker, grimmer aspects of technology. His writing is great, but he is more poet than scientist. He also didn't invent cyberpunk. Try 'Ooblik' by Phillip K. Dick for a VERY early cyberspace concept. Or read 'True Names' by Vernor Vinge. Much better story by someone who actually likes and understands technology, written way before Gibson.
Don't get me wrong, I love Gibson, but he is more of an anti-science fiction writer.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Gibson anticipated many concepts, such as cyberspace, that are now commonplace
That's saying a bit too much... The term "cyberspace" was coined because of Gibson's popular book, and at the time, anyone who knew anything about the internet laughed at the media people who bandied the word around as though Gibson's vision had anything in common with SMTP, NNTP, or HTTP.
Then we all watched, horrified, as the word set up shop, settled down, and refused to go away... Leading to all manner of cyber-this and cyber-that.
Sigh.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
You might try it sometime. I find the best way to write is to just go at it, damn the spelling errors, not having the perfect word (leave some ** or something to remind myself to come back to it later), screw punctuation, etc. Just go!
Now it may not be a bad idea to just speak it into a recorder or digitize it and then try running it through speach rec. later.
Best advice I can give, just go, don't rely on anything that can hang you up. Nothing kills momentum like having to deal with something like "no goat, not boat, goat, geeez, GOAT you daft machine! ..."
Just get it out of yourself, first then worry about how to assemble it after then momentum has run its course.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Writing isn't often done best while immersed in that which is being written about. Contemplation, the space to imagine and build worlds in one's mind, is the key.
Sometimes playing with toys can get in the way of that.
It's easy to get drawn into the whole cycle of newer-better-faster-cooler, with musical instruments, computers, whatever. Can be very distracting to actually creating with those things!
At the present time, there is still a large part of society that knows nothing about computers. They may be able to turn them on, click the icon that says "double click here for aol x.x" or even check email. However, most of them don't know the inner workings of the technology, nor do most care.
That is why I think people can relate to William Gibson's writing - not just geeks. People can actually read it from someone who sees things in a way that they can see them as well.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
You mean it should be depressing even though you have a million flashy skins to choose from?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
He was also interviewed on Unscrewed last night. Unscrewed Wednesday Episode Not much at that link, but check the schedule to see when it'll be replayed.
The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff.
To speak of visionaries, this is actually an important theme in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. Of course, even PKD had a tendency to (unknowingly?) refashion ideas that were first put into writing by Plato and Aristotle. I guess it is true, in some sense, that there is nothing new under the sun.
Maybe I'm an insensitive clod but "Pattern Recognition" and "All of Tomorrowies Parties" didn't do much for me. I'm still in love with his ground breaking early work but I don't think he's kept up as a truly continuous quality-giving writer.
The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." [snip] "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder.
That sounds amazingly like my process as user interface designer and developer. Except that, in the first stage, I'm grumpy just because I have to mediate so many heated design meetings.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Speech recognition engines are actually primed with textual language models. This is simply because large databases such as newspapers are available. So while they don't do so well for natural english, they do better for written style such as..well newspaper print. So a writer, especially a jounalist, may find that speech recognition works better for them than the 'masses'.
This is a pretty common occurrance from what I can tell. The rejection / posted by someone else two days later thing has happened to me once or twice.
I heard he was on teh spoke. Can anyone confirm?
Whoah.
Gibson owes his remarkable career to a bus-stop epiphany. "I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc," he says. "Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. Apple at the forefront again, another item you can add to the list of Apple firsts!
Jonathanjk.com
Also, you can't use voice recognition in a cafe.
Sure you can:
The moon rose over the dark warrens of the urban sprawl that emanated from the city's bright center what's the difference between a latte and a cappucino hey can you keep it down I'm trying to write a novel here a latte is basically a cappuccino with more milk oh then I'll have a latte hey I asked you to keep it down well excuse me this is a cafe you know hey phil how's it going could you please be quiet too I'm trying to write my novel geeze oh hey yeah I'm a writer, just working on my book are you here alone can I buy you a cup of coffee oh I see you don't go for the artistic types fine she'll be sorry when I'm a published writer damn stuck up girls
Is the the fact that the protagonists from Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition are phonetically identical just a coincidence?
Don't miss the adventures of Kaice in his next novel! Or is it Quess?
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Hmmm...
Well, I don't claim to be a pro, just somebody who has written fiction in the past. Most people do, even if it's just explaining to their mother why their checking account needs another infusion while in college.
I'm mostly interested in pointing out that, despite god-knows-how-much money folks have poured into voice recognition software, that it doesn't work very well at all, nor does it properly work in every situation.
(posted anonymously because I'm feedin' the trolls and goin' offtopic)
IMHO, one of the great things about Gibson is that he really isn't into a lot of the technology he describes. I guess it allows him not to get too distracted by knowledge. I mean, for a hacker, it would probably be tough to write something interesting involving computers, without putting them in a boring context (too techy for ordinary people, and too ordinary for techy people). But if you have the ability to look upon technology as something unknown and new, you can let your imagination fill that black hole of ignorance and come up with something truly creative. So that's Gibson for me. A n00b script kiddie with a beautiful imagination:)
nothing was really acomplished and there weren't any real insights at all gained on anything. maybe because he was writing about the present day instead of the future, or maybe because he was traumatized by sept 11th, who knows. I didnt really see the point in basing so much of the book on sept 11th anyways. it seemed tacked on.
The main character, was like a last refugee from the dot com bubble. i remember her just walking in, saying yes or no to things and then getting a huge check and going home to her studio apartment. it seems like he wrote half of it before sept 11th and then added a bunch more to it after.
of course i have no idea imho and all that.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I don't think I am alone among Gibson's fans in being of the opinion that the more hip the author became with tech, the less hip his writing became.
Although they are based on similar themes,
"Neuromancer" was a psechedelic ride through things unimagined before, "Pattern Recognition" is a familiar drab story about internet fanboys.
For Gibson, I say, write what you don't know, please!
The best one by far is is to own the processor programming guide and use "cc -S" on code you want to know how to write the assembly for, and look at what the compiler output.
If you're too lazy for that, though, http://www.int80h.org/bsdasm/ is a good resource.
-- Terry
Is it just me or does he look like Stephen Hawking without the chair?
Am I the only one surprised that professional writers don't utilize voice recognition software?
Some do, most don't.
I handle the voice dictation for a large hospital using a voice recognition system called Talk. It seems really hit or miss. Some doctors love it and can dictate reports as fast as they can say them without missing a word. Others can't go an entire sentence without saying one word and having a different one show up. Those doctors refer to the program as Type and hate it with a passion.
A good deal of this is because voice dictation actually takes more effort than typeing. The good ones learn from your speech and modify themselves to how you actually talk. trouble is, if you don't pay attention to what you're doing and train everything that goes wrong when it goes wrong the first time, it's going to blow up on you. There is a high training curve besides the initial hour and half training that can really slow you down at first. Typeing is pretty simple, little training, and it doesn't matter if you are a female with an indian accent and the speech engine is based on an American male voice.
I've heard of authors using it, particularly those who have trouble typeing because of problems with their hands or are otherwise immobilized. I'm sure there are some people out ther that use it that don't have to. Besides the differences in speeking to writing, there is plenty of resistance to learning a new program that costs a decent amount of money. It's still a niche application that has its uses in certain instances, but not to replace typeing all together.
Talk about using a sledghammer to kill a fly. Keanu's brain could be uploaded to an old 5 1/4, single-sided, 160K floppy....
My 667 Mhz Pentium III is considerably faster than what I require for all the development work I've done since I bought it in 2000.
There was a time when it mattered to programmers to have high-end equipment, because computers of that day were so constrained for resources. There was a time I was overjoyed to have bought a used 135 MB (you read that right) hard drive off the Usenet News, because it meant I could develop code on my Mac Plus without being limited to two floppy drives and no hard drive.
Sure, a faster machine would mean faster compiles - but how much of your time is spent waiting for a compile, as opposed to the time you spend thinking about your code?
The great nightmare that all the hardware vendors have is that the day will come when everybody realizes their machines are fast enough, so they don't need to upgrade anymore. The result of this is that both Apple and Microsoft are putting more and more CPU-intensive eyecandy into their products, to burn up those cycles.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The Fact Checkers at the Philly Inq missed something: there is another movie based on a Gibson short story - "The New Rose Hotel". Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and the delectable (OMFG where does that tattoo end) Asia Argento. The film was a commercial failure - it's rather slow and amateurish, but it's much better than that awful Keanu/Ice-T mess. I have the DVD right here in my sweaty little hand. Excuse me, gotta go watch Asia in the swimming pool again. Oh, and many thanks to my old buddy Marrow who gave me his copy.
-The Mad Duke
since I doubt he runs Linux or any OS that doesn't support speech-to-text software.)
One should always be careful of making bold statements in public forums that
are glaringly wrong.
See for yourself.
Festival
ViaVoice
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Ink wire?! no no no. Read obscurestore.com. I read that article days ago. That Romenesco guy culls all the inkwires for our pleasure and benefit.
;)
The rejection/subsequent post thing is so common, I decided to make a joke on the Skywalker Ranch Vineyards (you may not have found me as witty as I found myself. But trust me. It was witty
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Neuromancer was a terrible, terrible book that was in exactly the right place at the right time. Everybody was jumping onto the informationcybersuperhighway and this book rode the popular wave to success.
But it's very, very bad. I've tried and given up reading it in disgust several times.
I eventually made it through by borrowing a friend's audiobook version and listening to it as I worked. I've listened to it twice now to pick up on the bits that I missed first time through. And I think you're right - the story starts off okay, somewhere in the middle you stop caring about the characters, then it sort of runs down a slope of self-depression and decay until it eventually comes to an end.
And the biggest negative effect of listening to him read it is that if I ever hear William Gibson say "underneath a television sky" (again) in person, I'm going to punch him.
While I won't deny that Gibson is important to the genre (barring the awful "hack the Gibson!" line from the movie Hackers), I think that Neal Stephenson (Snowcrash / Diamond Age) belongs on the cyberpunk throne - he has a better grasp of technology, building characters - and is also a much better author and storyteller.
Read some of Neal Stephenson's work. Start with In the Beginning was the Command Line (which is available free online) and go on to Snow Crash. I'm worming my way through Cryptonomicon right now.
Stephenson describes technology -- real and fictional -- in a very detailed, precise, knowledgeable, and methodical manner. But he does it in a way that is in a literary sense engaging and fascinating. He can put into words the kind of beauty that hackers and engineers see in technological systems all the time, which is generally seen as dull and boring by the non-technical crowd, in such a way as to make it understandable to non-techs, and let them see the beauty too.
Gibson? Feh. He's for candy ravers.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
"Also, you must be a Jew too. Why do you people ..."
You must be French.
I remember reading an interview with WG yeeears back when he was talking about his relationship to technology (I'm sure this topic is covered many times in interviews with him). He said that when he was writing Nueromancer (I'm paraphrasing here, because I read this sometime in the early 90's) he didn't own a personal computer and didn't even have a practical understanding of what they were. All he had was this romantic notion of an "almost crystaline entitiy" where everything was nearly silent and whooshed and whirred pleasantly as you worked. Nueromancer was written on a typewriter!
When he finally did get his first pc it was, needless to say, a letdown. Clanking, grinding, loud, slow, and chunking out computer errors this machine was an introduction to the real world of computing for this technological romanticist. But I personally am glad that he never really soured on romanticizing technology. Though he has been criticized for an overly uniform body of work stylistically, I personally like and am drawn into the worlds he creates.
Along with video games, books by Gibson and other authors like Stephenson (yes even Quicksilver is building up into computer related themes...starting from the mid 1600s!) and movies like "Hackers" and "Wargames" keeps the notion of computing romantic and fanciful enough that (personally speaking) I retain a bit of that playfulness to what I'm doing even when I'm editing config files!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Gibson is great, so is Stephenson, but if you like either one of them you should branch out and read Vernor Vinge.
Vinge wrote True Names way back when - *the* seminal work for hacker culture.
That work alone would make the man's efforts worthwhile, but Across Realtime, A Fire On The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky just completely blow that one out of the water.
If Gibson is working with his personal binoculars focused on the future, Vinge is doing the same thing using his own personal mental Hubble Telescope.
Stop clicking that mouse, get up, and get yourself to a bookstore RIGHT NOW!!!
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
I wish I could download it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've always found people complaining they need to compile their code all again (wait a lot) when they make a small change on the code.
;-)
The advice here is to split your code in several files and use make. It'll just compile the (small) file you've changed, which takes much less time. Using gcc option -O0 also helps (when you don't care about the generated software performance).
It looks a no brainer advice but people still complain about that
Damn! You stole my response so I can only top you. keanu's brain could fit on an 8" floppy. So there.
Ah, a real SF fan. Nice.
Have you ever read A Logic Named Joe?
The first story to have home PCs and the Internet. Oh yeah, and computer viruses.
Written before there were computers.
...such as the fact the festival is speech *synthesis* and not speech *recognition*..........
Actually most science fiction writers are... Neal Stephenson seems to be the more cyberpunkish writer who seems to get his facts right...
"Try 'Ooblik' by Phillip K. Dick for a VERY early cyberspace concept."
Actually that book is called Ubik.
Ubik is excellent but i think that Dick got it even better with Scanner Darkly or Radio Free Albemuth!
I don't think it does justice to Dick to compare him with cyberpunk writers. After Neuromancer Cyberpunk is a childishly repetitive and cliche-filled genre when compared with the original visions of Philip K. Dick. I think that Neal Stephenson is the only cyberpunk writer with original ideas. Besides Gibson of course. Cryptonomicon is soooo "cyberpunk in the nineties and forties"...
Thanks, herraukuli2061. Ooblik was from a Dr. Seuss book wasn't it? Heheheh, whoops! Right on about Stephenson. And the decline of cyberpunk.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is pretty interesting, and shows why william gibson is a pretty widely read author; other posters have called him a luddite, while you talk about him romanticising technology. Me, I see a little bit of both in him.
Books that you understand immediately can also be interesting of course, but books that are something of a challenge are often the ones that stay with you -- irrespective of whether you finally agree with them or not.
Danish authoress Suzanne Brogger once said, a propos her book Ja, that since it had taken her 10 years to write it, she couldn't understand why it shouldn't take people 10 years to read it. Not that I necessarily think that for me personally that would apply to either Ja or Neuromancer. But it might for you -- after all: you seem to be re-reading after
The liver is evil and must be punished.
DeadVulcan is claiming to reminisce back to the day when Gibson coined the term "Cyberspace" and that people who really knew internet stuff like HTTP were laughing.
The laugh is on you youngster.
Neuromancer was published in 1986, and HTTP was first used in 1990.
though if you ever see the numeric displays from the cabs out there in vancourver you will immediately understadn where many of his visions come from
Exactly why Neuromancer was great, and better than the others in the series. No concessions. No dumb narrator everything has to be explained to, no long explanations, just enough background to give a clear picture if you actually read it.
I like Stephenson's stuff, and Gibson's other books (and Sterling's), but Neuromancer is better because it was not written for the masses, it was written for people who would read and think. Beautiful book, and sort of like Douglas Adams' later stuff, most people say "I didn't get that one, but I liked X (where X is one of his other books that sold better)."
This is not elitism, either, it's not a matter of intelligence it's a matter of liking the stuff enough to dig a little.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
>...after the early scene in Neuromancer where Case is on the run for his life because of three megs of stolen RAM.
Insert RAMBUS-litigators joke here.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
is almost universally acknowledged as Vernor Vinge's novella True Names. No cutesy terms like "matrix" or "cyber-" anything, but all the ideas are there. Not as overtly gritty as Neuromancer, either, but I found it equally depressing.
You can find it in a number of anthologies. The most recent is called something like True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which has the novella and a bunch of nonfiction essays by interesting people.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
you are not truly a Nerd until you have hacked the Garbage file of a Gibson. You never know what you'll find. Rumor has it that that is where the leaked Windows code is from.
After reading VL, the entire thing gave me a super feeling of deja vu. I havent read another Gibson novel since then. Its a shame how somebody who had once been such a good writer could stoop so low.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Gibson is one of the all time great sci-fi storytellers.
To this day neuromancer remains one of the best sci-fi tales of the modern age. Reading it for the first time when I was 13, I didn't understand it all. In fact I didn't understand most of it until I had re-read it a few times. Perhaps this is why it was not a critical success immediately. Either way, they eventually came around, and within two years the book had won the big three.
The real reason I loved the book as a kid was because of Case! He was one of the guys who made me want to grow up to be a code cowboy (even if I didn't come close). Gibson gave the nerd a sexy and dangerous side that put the cyberpunk genre on the map, soon after every would be 'hacker' was longing for 'cyberspace' just like Case was:
A year [in Japan] and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.... He'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hot el, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.'
A master at the top of his game.
at some lackluster book signing (can't even remember which book) he was attending at a store in Washington DC. I asked him to sign my copy with "Dear Stranger, Sorry I had this book printed in such a terrible typeface. It won't happen again, Thanks, WG" He got mock-defensive and I apologized profusely at which point he grinned and talked with me for several minutes about why he had selected what he called the "East Berlin Street Sign Font", most of which I proceeded to forget although I do remember that he mentioned something about having traveled there shortly after the wall came down. I doubt I'll ever come face-to-face with another well-known writer who's cool enough to talk to some random schmoe the way he did, so mad love to you, Bill! And there ends the one and only semi-namedropping post I could ever hope to make on Slashdot...
Oh, and he chose to sign my book with a simple "BAD TYPE! William Gibson".
Smart-ass...
PS, anyone checking out his oevre should definitely not miss his short stories
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
My 600mhz Duron pc works fine for the vast majority of things I do with it.
But a faster machine would be nice for some of the programs I do write. One, using Java's JPG decompression for a 'pr0n viewer' I use to help with Autopr0n is pretty slow, and a faster machine would help with that.
And for some of my AI classes, wow. I was craving a massive cluster to do these genetic algorithms.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It amazes me how many technical types go ga-ga over Gibson's writings or the Matrix movies. They're all atmosphere and no substance. Wow! Hot chick assassins in black leather and shades! Kewwwl!
I've spoken with Gibson. He knows little about either technology or Asia and doesn't deny it. He's not a phony. All he claims to be doing is "creating a mood", and he thinks it pretty odd that techies would consider him some sort of visionary.
I do, too. I don't mind atmosphere, but only when it's a natural-feeling background to a world that is substantially believable and interesting. For it to really grab me, it needs to feel like a sneak preview of a future that, based on what I know of the technologies and cultures, I consider to be enough of a realistic possibility that I want to pay attention. I want to learn about that future from the book and walk away with my head buzzing with new ideas.
Instead, I get black leather clad Bad Boy and Bad Girl rebel anti-heroes in sunglasses battling the Evil Big Corporations. Whoa. Deep. [yawn...]
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
No - I don't mean dumbed down. I don't think that using a narrator (or, for that matter, devoting 1/3 of a book getting into a detailed, arcane history of neuro-linguistics) equates to something being dumbed down. I just think that it's a different style of writing. And, I believe, the intent behind 'Snow Crash' was not as much to write a thought-provoking book but to write a cool sci-fi novel.
Anyway, to use a truism (bad debating technique, but hey) just look at the number of people, even on Slashdot, who say "I liked Snow Crash, but it took me so many re-readings to get/get into Neuromancer". I'm saying that Neuromancer was less accessible, and I'm basing that on my observations of the number of people who found it that way.
Yep, definitely French
So I got one wrong.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Thanks for the best laugh today. You probably SHOULD be a writer!
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There should be IQ tests to screen moderators.
I am amongst the many people who were quite dissapointed with pattern recognition. One could, however, have seen it coming for quite a while now as his second trilogy, the Bridge series, was quite a step down in terms of interest (who really cared about the bridge), innovation (wow, vr glasses and vrml websites!! how cool) and tension (the pro assassin is sort of like a gap model with a knife).
The things that really made Neuromacer and Count Zero for me (MLO was starting to get boring, somehow) were the grimy, gritty texture of the settings (this got translated marvelously into the matrix), the interesting characters (Case, Molly, the Finn, The Count etc) who were all from a criminal strata, the plot that is extremely well thought out and paced, the AI's (Neuromancer and Wintermute make excellent characters) and his ability to describe minute details in a setting that could conjure up a visible image of the room or place in one's mind.
So what if there weren't any cell-phones. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973 and used musical tech from that era, and I still love it.
Even in the bridge trilogy there were parts which were true Gibson where he was describing the hard luck times of the male hero working for the store as a security man.
I think that what started Gibson off on his journey of boredom is when he had made enough money to no longer have to write at his very best level, in order to survive. He started then writing about rich boring people.
Perhaops about the time he became one too.
You don't need a faster computer, unless you're multi-tasking like mad... the number one thing you can upgrade to increase productivity is is adding another monitor.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
He wrote neuromancer with an old Hermes typewriter.
The typewriter appears in the book.
/* don't ask me how I got this */
/* really, you don't want to know */
void main(void){
while( expression == void){
sleep(5);
fprintf(SILVERSCREEN,"Whoa!\n");
}
return blank_stare;
}
Anyone ever play Shadowrun? Either the RPG or the Genesis game? We have Mr. Gibson to thank for that incredibly fun (and eerily accurate prediction of a futuristic) universe. The Matrix movies never impressed me because of the lack of originality - it came from William Gibson, not Keeanu!
It's those ligature vowels that always screw me up. Would you like some feedback on your own writing problems?
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Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
And I think that it contributed to the quality of the narrative that it was not accessible. I liked Snow Crash, but I thought Neuromancer was special, in part because it is not "accessible." There is nothing terribly complicated about the narrative, people don't get through it because they don't think (and not because they can't think) about the story as they read it.
Product of modern media, I guess. Films, as an example, repeat everything so many times to make sure everyone gets it that the plotlines are boring just due to repetition. A number of movies (eg Enemy of the State) are more fun if you miss the first half hour and only hear the stuff once.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Some of the questions were about:
One of the main points of the talk was how he would hate to be thought of as a didactic writer. He likes to shape the characters and let their motivations move the story along.
He denied being the creator of his own genre, but he said it was something he aspired to.
I had bought Pattern Recognition the week before and I hadn't known he was coming into town, so I spent the last few days fininshing it before seeing him speak in person. It's an excellent book and the reviews are quite right when they say that it's his best book since Neuromancer.
i just picked up neuromancer after rereading snow crash. i love the synchronicity of find william gibson as a headline. and i like that he got the idea from the IIc, which was my first computer
I'd have to give it a mixed review. He discusses some ideas in the first third which seem really profound, until you realise that its something you were already familiar with and he is just really eloquent. The last third is almost entirely about the writing process, which I found pretty interesting but my girlfriend swears was boring. It might as well be a radio interview given how boring the back of the limo is -- they bluescreen the windows in order to do weird stuff with the outside, but it doesn't really help.
Personally I'd advise consuming it as you would a radio interview (while you're washing dishes or whatever) and in three parts (the DVD is mysteriously divided as such). I think that would have made it a more pleasurable experience.
Also, when I heard that Bono and The Edge were in it, I figured that guest'd be popping into the back of Gibson's limo, but instead they just intersperse some video of Bono reading from Neuromancer.