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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Funny you should mention it. I thought of Stephenson right after having posted it.
Well, they're very different kinds of authors. I'll try some metaphores.. I'll probably get it wrong: You give a bunch of nuts and bolts to two people and ask them to make "whatever" out of it. The first one comes up with an invention.. a machine of some kind; he's the inventor. The other makes a metallic man-like statue; he's the artist. Both creations are work of creativity, and though the base is the same, the results are very different. The inventor may point out that nuts and bolts can be used as they were intented, but to create something new, while the artist may try to point out some relationship between humanity and technology, using the nuts and bolts as symbols rather than their intended use.
Using these metaphores, I guess I'd say Stephenson is more of an inventor while Gibson is more of an artist. (And well, they both have a bit of both). Oh, and Stephenson is an excellent lecturer.
Anyway, I've read Neuromancer, Pattern Recogtion, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon - and I very much enjoyed all of them.
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...