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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Favorite William Gibson Novel?
dryriver writes: When I first read William Gibson's Neuromancer and then his other novels as a young man back in the 1990s, I was blown away by Gibson's work. Everything was so fresh and out of the ordinary in his books. The writing style. The technologies. The characters and character names. The plotlines. The locations. The future world he imagined. The Matrix. It was unlike anything I had read before. A window into the far future of humanity. I had great hopes over the years that some visionary film director would take a crack at creating film versions of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive . But that never happened. All sorts of big budget science fiction was produced for TV and the big screen since Neuromancer that never got anywhere near the brilliance of Gibson's future world. Gibson's world largely stayed on the printed page, and today very few people talk about Neuromancer, even though the world we live in, at times, appears headed in the exact direction Gibson described in his Sprawl trilogy. Why does hardly anybody talk about William Gibson anymore? His books describe a future that is much more technologically advanced than where we are in 2017, so it isn't like his future vision has become "badly dated." To get the conversation going, we rephrased dryriver's question... What is your favorite William Gibson novel?
...perhaps.
yup.... the classic.
As much as I like the genre, I think they are all bad.
What can I say. Don't know who he is, don't know what kind of books he writes, impossible to say which I like best.
I wish someone would turn Neuromancer into a film, it would be far better than a lot of the garbage we get at the cinema these days.
The movie is good too.
In a slight departure from his sci-fi novels, I really like the plot and character development of Pattern Recognition.
I liked Pattern Recognition a lot. Reminiscent of a side plot in Count Zero, it is very unobtrusive, and very memorable.
and then Neuromancer
Re: "Why does hardly anybody talk about William Gibson anymore? "
Because he is active on Twitter as @great_dismal and the discussion has shifted to links to the unevenly-distributed future?
I know the neuromancer and the bridge triology and like both. Perhaps the Bridge triology is a bit better because the scenarios described are more plausible, as is the character of Chevette in "Virtual Light".
Then again, in the neuromancer triology all three books where quite memorable, whereas Idoru was sort of meh IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
But Neuromancer is one of my favorite books,
He has not made one dud book and if I was to choose one to be best I would say The Peripheral but I could change my mind in 2018.
Please keep writing Bill.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The Difference Engine . . .
Personally I never really enjoyed his dystopian stuff. I prefer the Bigend trilogy. "Pattern Recognition" is in my top five books of all time and "Zero History" is in the top ten.
even though the world we live in, at times, appears headed in the exact direction Gibson described in his Sprawl trilogy. ... so it isn't like his future vision has become "badly dated."
It appears the opposite is true. Governments have been asserting themselves over the corporations increasingly during the last two decades. Additionally the people have generally become more aware of their rights and the methods of enforcing them through the courts during the last few decades. Oh right, it depends from which part of the world your are observing it. So "It depends" is the right answer, once again.
I am really enjoying not reading a William Gibson novel right now. Thus, my favorite is None. I hope to continue to enjoy not reading William Gibson for a while. He is indeed one of my favorite authors for not reading.
Bruce Perens.
I have a signed edition of "Virtual light", yes I still read books printed on paper. WG is a true visionary I would say all his novels are good.
Also, I'd like to throw in Phillip K. Dick into the same mix. I recently read some of his books for the first time and I'm amazed how much the state of the art in Sci-Fi has advanced since the time of trashy novels.
What is your favorite William Gibson novel?
Who?
Actually, although I wouldn't have been able to place the author's name, I did consider reading Neuromancer when I came across it, many years back. Didn't do so, but I might pick it up, now that I've been reminded.
You just slip it in...
Mona Lisa Overdrive is my second favourite book of all time (after Lord of the Rings.) He's the only author I haven't read my daughter because I want her to read him herself when she's old enough to appreciate his unique writing style.
not a novel but i like it better than neuromancer even.
Johnny Mnemonic with Kaenu Reeves is kind of that :
it's an adaptation of a Gibson's short story that introduce the universe and a few characters that Gibson will later use for its Sprawl trilogy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I also came across Gibson's Neromance in the 90's. It is one of my all time favorites. Still have the book. Read it about 3 times. Absolutely love the characters and plot. Like all dystopian SF it shows the dangers of technology (rogue A.I. anyone), the enormous gulf between the haves and have -nots etc Sure. It's pure SF what with the Matrix, the vat-grown assasins (eye's etc I can go for, but complete humans?...) and the hive-bound rich guys in orbit, but I love it nonetheless.
Space Merchants, eat your hearts out all you Cyberpunk latecomers :-)
Was not explaining why there was no watchdog circuit to drop you out when things got unpleasant.
Would have been easy to explain - it makes virtual sex less exciting.
Other than that, it's not that far from what we can do now. Given time I suspect he'll be rated up there with HG Wells.
And the original Neuromancer.
Great story and I found nearly every paragraph could be isolated like a very deep poem.
I'm a bit surprised it hasn't been mentioned.
At the bottom of the page I see today's fortune is ""The Street finds its own uses for technology." -- William Gibson" which sounds too perfect of a coincidence.
Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
"Three megabytes of hot RAM"
He was a science fiction author who was mildly popular in the counterculture scene a few decades ago. Sadly, he passed away from complications related to AIDS about ten years ago.
Science fiction is for losers. Cyberpunk in particular is shit. It got nothing right - as science fiction always does - and it's embarassing how it is removed from reality.
Burning Chrome
(atmospheric lead-in)
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/3s4xju/the_sky_above_the_port_was_the_color_of/
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Can we just talk about how bad his X-Files episodes were? The books are amazing, but his writing seems to translate really poorly to other mediums.
Probably an unpopular opinion with most purists. It was just a great premise and engaging idea. I loved the characters, the texture as always, and it made you think about the nature of existence. I'll have to read some more Philip K Dick until Gibson gets to making that a trilogy. :D
This was the book that opened my eyes to reading novels in the language they were written in. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" just doesn't translate that well...
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Neuromancer will always be a standout piece of speculative fiction and iâ(TM)ll always love it. His newer works are probably âoebetterâ and more nuanced. The wilder dystopias traded for something far more familiar (but still dysfunctional in their own ways). Pattern Recognition is great and a roughly contemporary story. The Peripheral a good mix of both (though perhaps an increasingly uncomfortable one given what has happened in the world since it was written). Not sure I particularly want any of them turned into movies though.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The real world tech we have satisfies his vision. It was interesting before the tech we have today. If someone projects the automobile, it is interesting. If the automobile surrounds us, it isn't.
E Proelio Veritas.
The opening line of Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." I mean, why not say the sky was a clear, bright, uniform blue? :-P
- Tal Cohen
His shorts stories were better than his novels. The early novels, especially, contained far too much filler in order to stretch out what was really a novella into commercial length.
Among his short stories, I think Hinterlands is still one of the best bits of any sort of fiction I've read.
maybe because of the 'young kid turns into bad ass by hanging out with elite' classic structure that Gibson has brilliantly spared himself from in all his others...
I'm a huge fan of Gibson, re-read the sprawl three times, always sucks me in in a few lines.
That's the problem with near-future fiction. Japan appeared to be racing ahead of the world, before its social and structural stagnation became apparent. Nowhere is this more visible than in technology - Japan isn't central to innovation or manufacturing in electronics anymore, and never really got out in front of computing. Like 'Blade Runner', younger generations can't really relate to the future aesthetic that's presented.
You read it on the internet, it must be true. Except for the being dead part.
Off topic a bit, but I noticed that on Amazon, Burning Chrome is cheaper as a paperback than the Kindle version.
I'm seeing $9.49 for the Kindle and $8.11 for the paperback. As a Prime member, shipping is $0.00.
https://www.amazon.com/Burning...
Trees would seem to be more expensive that bits down the wire. Dystopia.
BlameBillCosby.com
I have an almost novel Gibson Stratocaster that I like very much.
Or was it "Emma"?
For a long while it was Neuromancer, if for no other reason than that opening line, and the overall tone and mood. Good science fiction? No. Beautiful prose, definitely.
The Blue Ant trilogy, including Spook Country, took the lead not too long ago. Solid writing, better story, still just on the cusp of our world.
But the Peripheral is damned brilliant. Wild-ass SF ideas, great writing, probably one of my favorite books of all time.
Design for Use, not Construction!
this is the man that helped coin the term cyberspace. His influence with just this series alone can directly be seen in movies like the Matrix and The Lawnmower Man (the movie, not the Stephen King novel), as well as manga/anime such as Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop. so much of his futuresight is intertwined with modern pop culture and we don't even consciously know about it.
List all William Gibson books and let people vote!
Ha Ha! I said it,
The question is directed at all Slashdot readers, even those who have no favorite Gibson novel. How he became regarded as the Correct cyberpunk author is beyond me.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K Dick
But seriously, I read Neuromancer for the first time ~8 years back, and it came across as visionary for the period in which it was released. That is to say, it was kind of a slog to read now, and most everything new in it has been done to death since. Maybe his other stuff holds up more? Maybe I was in a weird headspace and I'd like it a lot more if I re-read it?
I tried reading Snow Crash as well, by Neal Stephenson, and distinctly thinking "This would have been revolutionary to read back in the 90s". Reading it nowadays, it seems more tired and silly.
Dick, though, holds up really well, despite being a lot older. So if you're a freak like me who questions the premise of this article, and you haven't read his stuff, give it a shot :)
"All sorts of big budget science fiction was produced for TV and the big screen since Neuromancer that never got anywhere near the brilliance of Gibson's future world. The Matrix Trilogy? Pedestrian trash. I Am Legend? I laughed so hard at this idea that I almost fell off my water polo horse." 'To get the conversation going, because we feel our audience is a mob of knuckledragging simpletons incapable of expressing thoughts of any order higher than what you like or do not like, we rephrased dryriver's question... What is your favorite William Gibson novel?'
I read a lot of SF and Fantasy, so I feel little shame in saying I've read no Gibson outside of Neuromancer.
It was OK I suppose. But I wasn't really fond of his protagonist. Dude wasn't sympathetic at all, and in the end I just did not like him. I think I would have enjoyed it more if he'd written it from the point of view of his female bodyguard. Also his universe was dystopian and ugly. I already have one ugly dystopia narrated by people I don't like, I don't need more when I go to read.
OTOH, if that is your kind of thing, I'd suggest picking up Charlie Human's Apocolypse Now Now. Human can at least write a bastard narrator that I still somehow want to follow.
i like the one with the airplanes. ... and movie-time "deep snowfall winter" shot during end-of-spring real-time is wrong. ...
also, maybe scout the (filming) location first, make adjustments to the plot to fit the correct location(!) and please also keep the (real) time of year in mind; if the shot is not completely CGI
some people can actually see the period of time
dialog, please, good dialog.
there's a correlation (for me anyways) if you can "watch" a movie as a "audiobook" with your eyes closed: the correlation is that if the sound effects and dialog allow to "see" the movie with eyes closed,
that it mostly turns into a movie i like
In the Burning Chrome Anthology, this short story, of all of Gibson's work, had a greater impact on my research than any other story he wrote.
He only co-wrote it too. It was written by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
The Sprawl Trilogy (like a lot of Cyberpunk) hasn't aged well. It's the future, circa 1985.
I do like the bridge trilogy a lot. It seems to have kept relevant. The Blue Ant trilogy is also a lot of fun. Essentially, I like the stuff he isn't famous for
I read all of William Gibson's books from Neuromancer all the way through All Tomorrow's Parties, and I gave the hell up. None of them even approach the quality of Neuromancer. The only one that was any good at all was Idoru, and that was no Neuromancer.
At this stage I am convinced that William Gibson didn't actually write Neuromancer, at least not on his own. I think, at best, it was a joint project with John Shirley and Bruce Sterling, and Gibson himself may or may not have been involved.
"The Peripheral" is surprisingly good.
I couldn't remember the name of the book or the author. When I searched for Neuromancer, The Difference Engine was on the list. So, this would be my current favorite by William Gibson. I have Neuromancer on hold at the library and will read it soon.
Not a novel, a short story: The Gernsback Continuum (in burning Chrome). There is a probably a great film in there, maybe with Alex Cox directing?
Not just the short itself (which is so excellent that it is how i explain the genre to friends) ; but the collection of the same name explored a variety of different cyberpunk realities. I really loved Dogfight, (the one about underground drone fighting) and New Rose Hotel is a thrill.
I only read _Pattern Recognition_ and it sucks
that i liked them all, but it's been 20-odd years since i've read them, i've been meaning to revisit.....
maybe this is my sign that it's time...
Neuromancer by far. I read many other (Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, The Difference Engine and others) but Neuromancer was the most visionary I think.
Agrippa, a short story, is fascinating to read. I read just an ordinary text version I found online a decade or so ago but IIRC Gibson originally wanted it released on a floppy disk that would erase itself after it was read once (you'll have to read the story to understand why). The whole concept was very inventive.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
How is this even a discussion?
So you fell for that scam too? I'm sorry but whoever told you he is still alive was yanking your chain.
R.I.P. William Gibson 1942-2007, beloved brother, father, grandfather, professor, doctor and actor.
Pattern Recognition, Count Zero, Spook Nation, all speak to the anxieties of the early 21st century and the rise of lifestyle branded technology. I think the Bigend trilogy is better than the Sprawl in focusing on technology and the anxiety that comes with it. Masterful works.
I think they are an evolution of thought. In "The Peripheral," his worldview has been updated to reflect the timestream since "Neuromancer." He's still right on target. And "The Peripheral" is much more polished, so I guess it's my favorite today.
I can't pick a single book out of the trilogy. It all goes together for me.
the blue ant books haven't reached re-read status for me yet, but at the same time, they were particularly salient for me as I was studying design in grad school.
Always looking forward to new books from Gibson.
M favourites are:
Johnny Mnemonic and Virtual Light
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So is the book - it is fantasy material for children, nothing more. Those not actually of teen or earlier years who find it entertaining are simply immature.
There are very few really great SF works. There are even fewer adequate, much less great, SF movies.
It's turtles all the way down. Stupid turtles.
Not quite right. The main thing about Gibson's stories is they're written from the view of secondary characters, the "main story" happens to the other characters, often hidden. Once you realise that it makes thing clearer.
It's not how you expect stories to be written, but it can be effective. There's a Young Adult book called "Me, Earl, And The Dying Girl" like that, the entire story is about Earl and how the "dying girl" (Rachel) forces him to sort his life out, and the book's narrator (Greg) is completely unaware of all of that. (the book was made into a movie, but had to follow the Hollywood formula, so was refocussed - still a good movie of its type, but I missed the book's twist)
The FAQ for the Usenet News group alt.cyberpunk has been updated and is now in Version 5 preview 7:
ftp://guest:guest@collectivecomputers.org:21212/Cyberpunk/Alt_Cyberpunk_FAQ_V5_preview7.htm
Contributions are welcome. This is the first update for more than 5 years.
Neuromancer is my favorite.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Also, he's a wizard with puns
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
> To get the conversation going, we rephrased dryriver's question... What is your favorite William Gibson novel?
The original question was interesting, this is like rephrasing the entire US healthcare policy debate as "What's your favorite medical procedure?".
You're going for a "light side of the force" / "dark side of the force comparison"?
... although _The Peripheral_ is a close second, and certainly the best he's written since Neuromancer.
'Pattern Recognition' is a wonderful study in writing with the use of present-progressive tense and other techniques. "Pouring boiling water." I read it only recently and thought the references to 'video footage' being dispersed and discussed in 'chat rooms' was oddly old-hat for Gibson. Then I saw the publish date of 2003 - two years before YouTube.
By Gibson? Probably Neuromancer; Some great imagery and characters there. The others were okay but didn't grab me as well; I kinda miss Case and Molly.
Not my fav. book in that genre tho; That is still taken by Snow Crash. It's less serious but more entertaining and is written from an unusual perspective; I want to say 2nd (As opposed to the more usual 1st or 3rd) but I'm not sure if that is correct. Diamond Age is pretty good too but harder to read/get in to. Took me a few chapters before my brain started really paying attention!
Everything before Spook Country.
Boy, I was dead.
The Difference Engine, his collaboration with Neal Stephenson.
Holmes-era Scotland Yard employing a huge analog computer that runs on steam!
that there aren't *any* other video programming alternatives out there...
So sad. Guess to feel better, I'll go watch "American Gods".