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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.
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
"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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
Yeah- it's rough when you say "open boat.sea" and you get goatse.cx
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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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
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!
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 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
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.
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
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