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?

Comments

Re:The one he has not written

[Applehu Akbar]

Can you give an example of writing where there is concrete stuff and substance?

Neal Stephenson. Gibson was a master of creating atmosphere, and then in many cases not taking the story much farther than that.

Re:The one he has not written

[Bright Apollo]

I find the opposite to be true. Wm Gibson is extremely literary, and it requires closer reading than someone like Neal Stephenson, who is very happy to explain his created worlds in as much detail as you can handle. I find Gibson's work to be more of a challenge, but worth the effort, much in the same way I find classic literature and even poetry to be worthy challenges.

You don't have to like it, of course, but you also can't knock it as lacking literary value. That kind of comment is more of a reflection of you than the target.

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