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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.'"
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
Actually, my largest problem with Neuromancer was that it took many many readings, starting as a grade school student, before I finally really started to understand everything.
I still re-read the book to pick up new things. I finally realized exactly what Case was talking about when he told Molly to "take advantage of my natural state." lately.
Gentoo Sucks
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
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!
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.
You have to look at it from the point of view of when it was written. Many of what are now cyberpunk cliches exist because of Neuromancer and its sequels. William Gibson created a whole new world, that was fresh at the time, and he did it with style. For me, the Neuromancer trilogy is to cyberpunkian sci-fi what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy.
BTW, I've just started Snow Crash, and from what I can see, this is just Gibson's style pushed over the top, done with less class, and deserving of far less credit given that he has obviously read Gibson's books and is essentially imitating them with a moderate amount of success.
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
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...
A very, very hip book, but not a good one. Its' just not clever enough or plotted well enough. Plenty of cyberpunk counter-culture (which is neat) but that's all I'd have to say for it.
Needle Nardle Noo
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.
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!
read your own link:1984 William Gibson wrote about "cyberspace" in Neuromancer
William Gibson coined the very term "cyberspace"
I think that's a bit harsh. It's probably fair to assume that Neal Stephenson had read Neuromancer before he wrote Snow Crash, but they are quite different. Snow Crash should belong in a different sub-genre of sci-fi than Neuromancer - it's only marginally cyberpunk in the way Gibson is, and it's a lot funnier and plays on that side of things more. Also, Snow Crash deliberately tries to be 'cool', and succeeds, while Neuromancer is much more serious and sedate.
Compared to Stephenson's later work (especially The Diamond Age, which could almost count as a sequel), Snow Crash also feels very much like an early novel - and it was. Anyway, I found it much more accessible and enjoyable than Neuromancer when I read them both back in the early-ish 90s - and I've re-read it more often since.
I used to make a big deal out of having an awesome computer. I think I grew up. The only problem is now I am 24 years old and having to go back into college. I wish so much that back when I started college I had paid more attention to attending class. I always did very well in CSCI courses but unfortunately did rather poorly in the math side of things. Oh well, in a couple of years when my fianc ee finishes her graduate work I will go back and do things the right way.
Great article. He laid the whole thing out in plain English. He didn't mention his Steely Dan fetish though, present from day one (bars named "The Gentleman Loser" and "The Western World", Klaus & the Rooster... Ahem.)
What Gibson did, his big cultural contribution, was portray computers and the people who know how to use them as *glamourous*. And he filled that world with dangerous, edgy people.
Instead of cute little nerds, a la movies of the time like "War Games" and "Short Circuit".
In Neuromancer, the underlying metaphor is "computers == really good drugs".
Get that mighty Zion dub boomin, mon...
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.
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."
I just finished Mona Lisa Overdrive, Molly is in Mona Lisa (with the pseudonym Polly), and the Count is in both Mona Lisa and Count Zero, but I dont remember Molly being in Count Zero.
As a side note, I think it is a great trilogy. Gibson really makes you work hard, he tosses in throwaway lines about the state of the world, different technologies, jargon for new technologies (microsofts, stims) etc. which other authors would take pages to explain. It makes it much more difficult to read as the reader is left to infer the meaning, and it gives the reader a feeling of culture shock because you dont fully understand immediately everything that you see. But I think this adds to the gritty reality of the books, and Gibsons cyber universe.
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.
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.