Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
"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
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
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/
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.
In a previous interview with Gibson, he said he had no clue about computers when he wrote Neuromancer. He described his disappointment upon finally using a computer. He was expecting some magical star trek experience, instead he got slow, spinning floppy disks and cumbersome interfaces.
I was never clear on this...Kilgore Trout was originally a character in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novels. And yet I know that *someone* published books under the pseudonym. Was it actually Vonnegut or someone else?
Philip Jose Farmer wrote _Venus on the Half Shell_ as Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut gave him permission, but hasn't let anyone do a Trout book since.
I agree as well. Offtopic, but here's my 2 cents.
If you have a good computer "know-how", you know how to squeeze the maximum performance out of what you have already.
Back when I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, I had a job as a Residential Computing Consultant. You know, tech support. You wouldn't believe how many people had top of the line (at the time) Pentium 3s that felt much, much slower than my AMD K6-2, because their windows installation was stuffed full of stupid utilities, realone, popups, popup blockers, popup blocker blockers, the list goes on.
I am now a unix systems administrator, but to this day, I have yet to buy an athlon, thunderbird, or a pentium 4. My friends always wonder why I'm always on the top of leading edge technology, but alwyas using old, slow, outdated computers. Last computer I really bought was a pentium 3 - it did everything I needed it to do, quickly too. My main workhorse PC is a cyrix 6x86(ugh) 233mhz running freeBSD. Its not as if buying a box with a pentium4 will let me do things I wasn't able to do before - it just does the things I need to be able to do, but faster.
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'.
he is quite clear in how something quite extraordinary and beautiful happened with the virtual 'star' that suddely appears in 100 different places each setting out on a new life. He's quite clear this could not happened without tech and perhaps it is Tech's reason for existance.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
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.
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
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:)
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
I guess 640k of RAM really is good enough for anyone...
I think that we really need to get past the whole distinction between "authentic" and "fake," especially in terms of moral or aesthetic judgements.
It's just silly. "Authenticity" is itself a socially-contructed phenomenon. We determine authenticity by referencing authorities to which we assign the ability to place their stamp of approval on something. That stamp of approval is based on comparing the item in question to an abstract, socially-constructed ideal of what the "real" thing is supposed to be. Bauddrillard's work on the precession of simulacra is useful here.
I read a great interview with Negativland a while ago where they were discussing marketing and youth culture, and the increasing prevalence of things like prominent logos on clothing and mass-media pop culture references in casual conversation and so forth. They talked about how they had always tended to look at that sort fo thing as this horrible co-opting of youth culture and the evils of the corporate marketing machine, but they were starting to wonder if they were just making inappropriate value judgements and that this may not necessarily be bad, but instead it may just be different, a new sort of symbiosis of marketing and "authentic" pop culture that really makes the whole issue of authenticity or co-optation irrelevant. I think they were on the right track with that supposition.
I said, "Cyberpunk? What is that, you mean sorta like Blade Runner?"
And you know what, turns out I was pretty much right. The ideas and stories of the big "cyberpunk explosion" (and those of you who used to haunt SF bookstores back then know what a media hype machine it was, for a while) just didn't strike me as being anything particularly revelatory.
OTOH, I found Count Zero to be a helluva enjoyable book, and it's still my favorite of Gibson's.
Pattern Recognition didn't impress me too much. I found Gibson's non-technical viewpoint was too pervasive in it. His characters, working in the graphic design industry, really probably would have heard of digital watermarking before.
What would have surprised them (and what confused me) was the idea that digital watermarks could somehow be used to trace data as it moves through the Internet. How does that work, exactly? Last I heard, the purpose of digital watermarks is to identify a given image, to prove its origins. If the creator of the images doesn't want to be identified, then why watermark them?
Breakfast served all day!