William Gibson C/D

(didn't know he had a new book out, never finished all tomorrow's parties)

Why is the sky BLUE, aha!

raleigh scattering.

Alan - I have a mental image of you explaining raleigh scattering to a bemused three year old. "But Daddy, WHY do the particles reemit the electromagnetic waves?"

And yes, for someone who claims not to be much of an internet user (?!?) he's got a great grasp of online forum dynamics.

Some of the best lines are (paraphrased):
"We had no idea that the Internet, developed by the DOD in case of nuclear attack, would be primarily used by Midwestern Art School girls flashing their tits."

"I didn't dodge the draft in Canada for any kind of sympathy for the Viet Kong... It had much more to do with hippie girls and hashish.. much more."

And of course it has the obligatory appearance by Bono and The Edge, who are just gushing WG fanboys.

The whole Lord of the rings thing bores me to death too Alan.

¹REIFIKATION!

His strengths are in 'cool' geeky concepts extrapolated from now to whenever his story is set. As Ess Kay touches on above the biotech-fetishists have him as a grandaddy. He was writing about chip implants/bio interfaces long before they had been seriously considered (AFAIK).

Whatever, "Pattern Recognition" is great. If you live in London, Tokyo or NYC and read message boards, you will love it.

Jordan - did you know the Curta is a real calculator? Look 'em up - you can get them on ebay!

I told my editor the heroine was allergic to Prada and she wasn't happy about it.

and it's great. started it late last night and am 222 pages into it already, would've been more but i had to go and sign on 8)

particularly fond of the cover and the way all the london places he mentions (apart from the vegan restaurant) are places i know well. and the way that every other page he'll just throw a phrase in that has never been coined before but which is just perfect and instantly recognisable ('Zaprudered', the whole 'mirror-world' thing...)

andy

Did anyone else who's read it see the bits about 'Fetish:Footage:Forum' and just think of Ilx?

Some else recommend me more William Gibson. I'm liking this one so far. The London-ness, and the fact that it's not set in the future, surprised me. I always thought his books would be all about hackers 'jacking in' to 'CyBerSpace' whilst on the run from the Feds and mainly feature flying taxis driven by androids.

I really like the Difference Engine too although I don't know if anyone else does.

I found a digital camera in the woods [not for 56k]

Definitely classic.

I haven't actually read the nineties ones.

steer clear of the neuromancer trilogy then 8)

actually, no, it's well worth a read. it was written in 1986 by someone who wasn't that up on the technology and it's interesting to see how well he 'predicts' (or not) how things turned out. plus it has space rastas in it.

> Gibson's real strength to me is presenting outrageously bizarre
> concepts as though they're commonplace, like that thing in orbit
> that does nothing but make wooden boxes.

Liz to thread. she once pointed out to me that this is a reference to some real artist. and he does a lot of this - there's a passing reference to Duchamp's Large Glass in Neuromancer for instance.

I finally read Pattern Recognition earlier in the year, It was great. The thing that stands out in Gibson's writing the most, more than any other writer I can think of, is his attention to artifacts. For example, his detailed description of the Rickson jacket. Not only is there description of the Cayce's personal connection to the jacket, but also a strange genealogy of the jacket's manufacturing history and the cultural motivations that created such an item.

When Gibson describes these artifacts (some technological, some not) I get a sense of the world of the narrative. He shows the output of a strange set of equations that are fundamental processes of the setting. And it's even more interesting when he's talking about present day stuff.

Just that it got me into Joseph Cornell is like reason enough for me to love Gibson forevah.

;)

and i just finished Pattern Recognition! details: incisive, insightful. story: a little too well made i think. Should a novel self-conscioiusly documenting Our Time tie everything up neatly in the final chapter?

i think i did read MLO before Neuromancer but it's been so long and they've been reread so many times i don't remember what it was like. not that different, prob! they're only obliquely related, nicely...

Lucas just stood there, facing the doorway, his face expressionless, the tip of his cane planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop the other on a brass knob. "First thing that you learn," he said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, "is that you always gotta wait..."

I liked Pattern Recognition, though, so maybe we'll see some improvement soon. A friend of mine once remarked that Gibson writes female characters the way others write about sports cars, but he's gotten better at it and it shows in this book.

molly was certainly some kind of sportcar fantasy tho, yeah.

xpost - You might like Cryptonomicon better, it's a little more grounded in reality (if a bit too long). And yeah, Snow Crash can be a little out there, and sort of burns out at points, but the momentum it built up in the first half was enough to keep me going through its slightly less than stellar conclusion.

in re: Stephenson being "more well-researched"

I once asked a twenty-something computer geek if he'd ever read any Stephenson and he replied that he specifically avoided him because of the technological inaccuracies in some of his books. As a big science fiction fan myself I don't really regard "accuracy" more important than, say, plot theme or characters, so I wouldn't really give a shit how accurate Stephenson's books are. But is this an issue with others?

For ex., Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe (did someone refer to it as the cantos upthread?) seems rather wildly improbable but outstanding nevertheless.

But I agree with you - technical accuracy does not the good scifi novel make. Witness: Michael Crichton.

_Snow Craash_ starts out with one of the most irritatingly-written scenes ever committed to paper but becomes deeply engrossing once you hit chapter 2.

"The Diamond Age" is better, though, I think

Wait, you think the pizza delivery car chase that Snow Crash starts out with is irritating? SACRILEGE. You have to at least respect the fact that when YT is looking for a vehicle to latch onto she picks a minivan in some expensive suburb, and the narrative goes on from there to presuppose that:

1. the minivan's erratic driving is due to some idiot chode of a 14 year old who secretly stole it from his mom for the night

2. he probably takes horse steroids

Have some respect for the her and the Deliverator, man. It's a 20 or so page passage that masterfully describes the privatized, libertarian/anarchical world of Snow Crash almost incidentally to what's actually happening in those pages.

I spent the first chapter rolling my eyes and thinking "Why should I care? Who are these people? Is the whole thing written this way? For fuck's sake!" then did an abrupt about-face on the entire book once Hiro and YT were actually given personalities.

xpost:

"then did an abrupt about-face on the entire book once Hiro and YT were actually given personalities."

I see what you mean. But like you said, to Stephenson's credit the characters are developed more fully throughout the book. Personally, I suppose I was a little more used to (or less jaded with) that sort of trick, having grown up on some relatively substance-free Robert Heinlein and Harry Harrison books and being a great fan of cheesy action sci fi movies and shows. I've still got to say that that's one of my favorite passages though, especially in light of how the mostly excellent book drags down towards the end (for me, the doldrums come right around the time they get on the giant floating ship/island).

Hahahahaha wow I guess I haven't babbled as much about my personal faves on ILE as much as I thought! (fave book: _Starship Troopers_; read oodles and oodles of Heinlein, Harrison, Key, McCaffery, Anthony, Brooks, Saberhagen, Cherryh, Weis/Hickman, etc when growing up; am #1 ILE Doctor Who zombie; usw)

_Snow Crash_ is IMO a book that starts awfully, then kicks into high gear and doesn't let go through the ending; I LOVED the entire sequence on the ship. Pash picked out my favorite part of the first chapter (and I agree that hax0r would have made it even better).

I think the sex scene between YT and Raven is one of the best ones I've read in a scifi novel. I also just love the way Hiro becomes this absolute badass by the end of the book. The entire sequence between when he buys the motorbike to the end is just perfect.

The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was written by hand on 100% cotton paper using three different fountain pens: a Waterman Gentleman, a Rotring, and a Jorg Hysek. It was then transcribed, edited, formatted and printed using emacs and TeX. When it was totally finished, the TeX version of of the ms. was converted to Quark XPress format using an emacs LISP program written by the author. Some share of credit thus goes to the people who made the GNU/Linux operating system and to the originators of LISP. Maps were produced by Nick Springer with useful input from Lisa Gold, who also organized the family trees and assisted in the preparation of the Dramatis Personae. The geometrical illustrations (Apollonius of Perga's conic sections and the woodcuts from Newton's Principia Mathematica) were prepared by Alvy Ray Smith, working from scans or photographs of old books.

WTF!!!

Gibson, I've only read Neuromancer, which I liked. Stephenson, only Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon; Snow Crash is fun, but the writing is rough. He hadn't figured out how to integrate his digressions and history lessons into the flow of his stories (he doesn't even try, he just keeps sending Hiro to the library for a lesson whenever there's some cool thing he wants to explain). The integration is a lot smoother in Cryptonomicon, and the characters are more well thought-out. I don't know how "accurate" his stuff is, but as a techno-idiot, I found a lot of Cryptonomicon fascinating -- it made me think about computers differently.

anybody else read the new one? was very similar to PR but with vancouver standing in for london.

I'm just starting it. The first few pages read like a Gibson piss-take. I read it under the light of a Philips quad 18-watt bayonet-fit bulb, while drinking a Kia-Ora orange drink. I'm just checking the time on my vintage japanese digital watch, which has been painstakingly restored by an Inuit-Filipino collective etc etc

i wish i'd known about this thread when i was writing an essay comparing gibson's short story 'the gernsback continuum' with pynchon's 'the crying of lot 49' :(

i have 'burning chrome' but i've only read a few of the stories. he definitely has a better writing style than stephenson, but i enjoyed 'snow crash'.

[for some reason, i kept reading the title 'neuromancer' as 'necromancer' for a really long tiime]

Gibson's technique is definitely above almost all the other sci-fi writers out there, but that's probably because Gibson was an English Lit major in college, and in the interviews I've read, he keeps up with theory, journals and all that shit (I still hold Lit gives you better background to write with than an MFA or workshop).

There's probably a whole other level to appreciate his writing on, but people don't often get into that kinda detail with sci-fi type things.

i enjoyed it, but it did feel, slightly, like a remix of PR.

terrible piece on the guardian web site (one of their jokey (?) 'digested read' things, which seem to exist just to drop spoilers and take the piss) and a better interview here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2146989,00.html

although he must really be pissed off about being asked the same question for 20 years.

and he still, as i mentioned way above, drops in something every page or so that makes you stop and think 'did he just make that up? or does it really exist?'.

i loved his idea of 'semiotic ghosts' as being a representation of cultural artefacts - the results of the mass consciousness (from 'the gernsback continuum'). it was a really cool theory for explaining ufo sightings and the like.

great interview at slate

Listening to Idoru today.

> I think there's some passage in Virtual Light about Skinner being around
> for the first transistor radios or some such nonsense. What it boils
> down is basically either the characters being used for flashbacks to
> the past are incredibly old, or the near future being described by the
> writer is incredibly close to ours and completely improbable.

-- Slim Pickens (Slim Pickens), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:35 (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

salon interview:
"My fourth, fifth and sixth novels were written in the early '90s but take place around 2007."

This was posted on the BBC News website two days after the publication of 'Spook Country':

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6938244.stm

there are book signings in london next week, apparently.

http://www.uksfbooknews.net/2007/08/08/william-gibson-signing-london-august-28th/
and the day after at forbidden planet:
http://www.forbiddenplanet.com/Signings.html

i never got past chap 2 of idoru

the last two, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, have been a lot friendlier for people without a technological bent. PR is especially good for people who live in london as it features quite a lot and he seems to know it quite well.

like the A-Z w.plug sockets in yr skull

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1075/1261169526_d61e8c9f06.jpg

Went to the William Gibson signing last night. Was
expecting there to be about 200 people there - was more like over
1,000. Gibson's an interesting guy, though the audience members who
were asking questions were idiots, as they always are at these things.
He was great when I got the book signed. I apologised because I was
the only person who I saw with a book that looked a bit dog-eared
because it had actually been read - everyone else had brand new copies
with the dust jackets on - and mine had coffee spilt on it. And when I
said that he replied "No, it's nice to see that it's been loved -
that's what it's there for."

I read it under the light of a Philips quad 18-watt bayonet-fit bulb, while drinking a Kia-Ora orange drink.

hahahaha

i love this guy's short stories but his novels just feel like old-fashioned thrillers with techno trappings. Spook Country feels particularly unfocused; how much freakin time was spent on "locative art" when it actually had nothing to do with the plot, etc?

Read Spook Country and then immediately re-read Pattern Recognition and I'm suspecting that the next book will somehow tie it and SC together into some sort of future history of recent past.

I didn't find Spook Country as unfocused as Tracer, but there's nothing really bringing it all together except for the triple entendre of the title. It would have been a terrific novella.

just started "pattern recognition". it gets better, i hope.

first three are the best, obvs

opening line of chapter 10 of pattern recognition must (unintentionally) be gibson's funniest line, ever

"She's down for a jack move."

reading this is reminding me that he's super good at dialogue, not as good at interior monologue.

how much freakin time was spent on "locative art" when it actually had nothing to do with the plot, etc?

very otm

also he repeats himself a lot lately. for example i just noticed that in "pattern recognition" he uses the phrase "semiotic neutrality" twice in 30 pages. when a dude writes this spare it sort of leaps out at you.

AINT NO TELLIN WHEN IM DOWN FOR A JACK MOVE

exactly

he has neat little moments of people interacting with an object (uh that sounds kind of lame). what stuck with me from PR is the bit where Cayse teaches the dutch weirdo how to put on a fedora

also the very next line after that "semiotic neutrality" bit.

"Her own place, in New York, is a whitewashed cave..."

which is how he described the mexican hotel at the beginning of "count zero". "The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected sound with too much clarity ..."

is this riffing on one's own themes or is he literally re-writing the matrix trilogy here?

yeah that was rather cool

maybe he's just not very good!

re: dutch weirdo. i have no idea what "tom cruise fed a diet of truffles and virgins blood" (or however he puts it) would look like, so i am imagining joseph beuys.

it would look just like tom cruise amirite

I just recently finished Pattern Recognition; I need to make sure I read every single fucking thing this man has written.

awesome awesome awesome book.

Is that one good? The last thing I read by him was Idoru and I swore that was the last time I got sucked into reading a Gibson book.

It was a very interesting take on Internet memes and marketing; the ideas flying around in it were really fascinating (suzy I'm not at all surprised you liked it; it seems like the stuff he was talking about would be right up your alley).

yup usually I find him really boysy so this was pretty good, ha ha girl allergic to branding!

I never finished Pattern Recognition! I couldn't get past the first 100 pages. I kinda feel obligated to try again though.

Pattern Recognition was one of my favorite Gibson novels, I really like his writing about the present. Idoru is one of my other favorites (along with Count Zero). I still haven't read the latest one. But Dan, yeah, you should probably read everything; the only ones that kind of dragged for me were Virtual Light and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which was probably better than I remembered).

oh and I think he very definitely references his own work as pointed out before, note that the character is named Casey and the main character of Neuromancer was Case. I dont' think it "means" anything, but it's done with purpose.

Pattern Recognition was awesome .... Spook Country (sort of a sequel?) I didn't like that much

have not read PR, just picked up Spook Country at a book exchange and am enjoying it, although it seems almost stereotypical for him as stet notes above.

HI DERE u should definitely read the first three as well. I didn't like Idoru much.

I found an audiobook of Gibson reading Neuromancer, and was addicted to it for the most part of last year. I couldn't stop listening to it. (His voice is so hypnotic!) But it made me realize that I probably wouldn't have made it through the book if I'd been left to my own devices. Now I want to gobble up everything he's written. Pattern Recognition is next on my list, I think. Neuromancer blew my mind though, I couldn't get over how...original...it was. I felt like I'd just discovered this 'new' thing, even though the story's, what, 24 years old? Crazy. What a guru..

Spook Country seems a little recycled after Pattern Recognition, but it still has its good points. I'd say PR is probably the stronger book. I'm looking forward to whatever comes next.

Did everyone catch the Chris Cunningham references in the director character in Pattern Recognition?

William Gibson-designed shoes
http://www.selfedge.com/shop/images/br_wg_low_cut/gibsonchucks1_main.jpg

I liked Pattern Recognition BUT the story just recycles the plot of his Count Zero, and then Spook Country recycles PR a bit.

damn, those gibson shoes look ugly.

one of my favorite parts of gibson's work is the part of virtual light that deals with the AIDS messiah, j.d. shapely. watching all the images of obama this past fall often made me think of "virtual light". i especially like the scenes set on the golden gate bridge. so lovely.

i think "virtual light" is pretty underrated, though i'm not as crazy about "idoru" and i can't remember a single thing about "all tomorrow's parties"

i think there was a hitman? and some hackers?

actually was it "ATP" that started with a scene in the tokyo subway involving an old man who's like a gundam otaku? who lives in a cardboard box? that scene was pretty great. don't remember anything else, though.

i bet that at some point gibson was like researching samurai and stuff for his cyberpunk novels and he read that one part of "the art of war" that goes "be subtle to the point of formlessness" and he decided to start applying that to his plots, i still have no idea what happened at the end of the last five novels.

every time i read a new one of his books i want to start a william gibson mad libs like "In the year [YEAR NO MORE THAN 15 NO FEWER THAN 3 YEARS IN THE FUTURE], a renegade [HACKER/BIKE MESSENGER/BOUNTY HUNTER WITH MADE-UP SCI-FI JOB NAME] comes into possession of [URBAN PLANNING DOCUMENTS/PASSWORD TO SOMETHING/ORPHAN CHILD WITH SPECIAL SKILL] and has to battle off [RUSSIAN GOONS/OTHER HACKERS/OTHER BOUNTY HUNTERS WITH MADE-UP SCI-FI JOB NAMES/SENTIENT COMPUTER] in a race to save [CITY/COUNTRY/WORLD].

Or you could just read Snow Crash.

Pattern Recognition seemed to lose a lot of steam in the last quarter or third, becoming more of a generic thriller than you would have expected.

i dunno man, neal stephenson gives me the fear. makes me think of fat bearded dudes dressed like morbius from the matrix sitting in cafes.

yeah i know hes got his fans on this board but to me william gibson represents the best of what wired magazine readers have to offer the world while neal stephenson represents the worst

makes me think of fat bearded dudes dressed like morbius from the matrix sitting in cafes.

If you want to scare these people, walk up casually to them and say, "So, it's been ten years since The Matrix came out," and noted their pained expressions.

http://sci-toys.com/scifoo/neal_stephenson__jaron_lanier.jpg

"So how was the Rush show?"

i just finished all tomorrow's parties, which i picked up without even realizing it was the the end of a trilogy. actually reads fine on its own. i thought the set-up was nice, the bridge community was a good touch, but the follow-through sort of predictably a let-down. i liked pattern recognition, but it already felt sort of dated i thought. all the riffs on marketing, viral video, web communities, smart enough but also sort of superseded. but cayce's a good character, and i think it's interesting how gibson had to rework the book to accommodate sept. 11 (speaking of being superseded).

http://blog.williamgibsonbooks.com/2010/05/31/book-expo-american-luncheon-talk/

Thanks!

WG is doing a reading/signing at Moes Books in Berkeley in September...I believe it is my duty to attend :D

Anybody reading Zero History?

I am!

It's very enjoyable so far. I don't know if this is planned as the final novel of a trilogy (as he seems to do a lot of trilogies) but I'd happily read as many Blue Ant books as he wants to write.

i also am.

realised last night that the little grey dashes on the first page of each chapter are stitching...

nice to see a reference to flying penguin as well.

(was actually disappointed on finding on this was another 'clothes as design objects' book as i'm not a fan of fashion (whereas the gadgets of earlier books are fine). but he makes it interesting.)

Anybody reading Zero History?

I am too!

finished.

wouldn't be a gibson book without a vaguely disappointing denouement. good run-up though. plus it takes place about 20 minutes north of where i'm sitting.

also wishing i'd taken the time to read the previous two again beforehand.

The reveal surprised me waaaaaay more than it should have, but I was delighted nonetheless.

He did a signing at Moe's Books in Berkeley this weekend and read a little from ZH. Cool stuff. Even super-tired from travel as he obviously was, I could listen to him read all day. (I told him how much I enjoyed the Neuromancer podcast and he said he did that reading over 3 solid days and it almost killed him.)

So now I have Zero History, and Spook Country, and my inlaws loaned me Pattern Recognition which I just started today. Excited to see this all the way through!

ugh "podcast" should be "audiobook". Brain fail.

missed that moes reading, bummed about it.

he'll be here in austin wednesday night!

http://www.lumus-optical.com/images/hires/P_8_2_big.jpg

http://www.lumus-optical.com/

I'm reading Count Zero right now

tried to read pattern recognition awhile ago but it was a little too bit stuck in the 'immediate now' for my taste

I love the fact that WG is about as polarly opposite from hard science sci fi as you can get, yet probably ends up being way more influential than most hard science types because scientist and engineer read his books and it's what they aspire to.

http://www.lumus-optical.com/

get back to me when it's retinal implants

get back to me when they can think of better things to do with it than spend the day checking stock quotes.

Liked Pattern Recognition quite a bit - should I read Spook Country before the new one?

Zero history is better than Spook Country, but I'd recommend you read Spook Country first to get the full pay-off.

There's a small bit where two pieces from the earlier two books intersect, so it's worth it.

of what I've read

Neuromancer: A-
Virtual Light: B-
Idoru: B+
All Tomorrow's Parties: C
Pattern Recognition - B+

Basically I consider the dude the epitomized version of visionary, but his plots border on wet dog and always get real exciting, more exciting, very exciting... and then end with disappointing conclusions. All said, he's a guy I don't want to stop reading. His theories, observations, visions of the future... just the coolest, most otm I've seen ever.

just, this weekend, finished neuromancer for the 4th time. lots i didn't remember. the johnny mnemonic references specifically.

yes, read them in order. but i think PR is the best of the three.

but his plots border on wet dog and always get real exciting, more exciting, very exciting... and then end with disappointing conclusions

And are often the same: person hunting arty macguffin (the art boxes in Count Zero, the videos in Pattern Recognition)

heh, gibson's use of the arty macguffin is a total Nerd View of How the Art World Works

also, 2 / 9 is barely 'often'

although i concur with the plots. the fight on wormwood scrubs being the most recent example.

i love the art boxes in count zero though. that's one of his best things. it's just weird. also that jewelled head thing in neuromancer.

i'm still kinda in shock Gibson managed to produce what is basically World of Warcraft/4chan/etc years before they occured. + widespread celebrity culture, like in the way that there are countless youtube celebs beyond your imagination (in Idoru)

and the couple sentences on the familiarity/homey-ness of a forum in Pattern Recognition... how weird that's never been written about before.

/praise

> i love the art boxes in count zero though. that's one of his best things.

those are real life things that he appropriated, Cornell boxes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cornell
http://www.google.com/images?q=cornell+boxes

liz daplyn told me this 8(

duchamp's large glass makes an appearance in Neuromancer too (towards the end, using its french name). he also lingers on other things, the door especially, which i figure is important. is there a reference for neuromancer like that one for watchmen?

also, 2 / 9 is barely 'often'

the jeans in Zero History are pretty much the same

or the augmented reality art pieces in Spook Country (those aren't as central to the plot though)

I would alllllmost recommend skipping Spook Country and just say go ahead and read Zero History. I didn't like SC that much.

Spook Country is definitely the weakest of the three and seems partially a rehash of the first (main character is female, has some of the same adventures, not as strongly characterized so it's hard to initially differentiate), but I feel like some of the characters are good to know since they reappear in the third.

I really need to reread Count Zero now, especially since the local art museum did a Joseph Cornell-themed event and exhibit a couple years back.

how funny; I certainly didn't know about Cornell boxes when I first read Count Zero and they are not at all what I'd pictured (I have, however, seen them since....and didn't make the connection). I should re-read all of these. I like the weird idea I'd constructed from the book more though.

> the jeans in Zero History are pretty much the same

and the curta calculators ( http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm ).

found study notes for neuromancer, often phrased as questions when i want answers! and some discussion on a forum somewhere which answered one of my questions (the neuromancer password, meh).

lol - went thru the whole book envisioning them as a bunch of casios

Started on Spook Country, appears to be a quick read, so nothing lost if it's terrible

Have you guys seen the Gibson-branded jackets/shoes/etc. done in collaboration with a Japanese company, in the vein of Pattern Recognition? (M1A jackets with no logos, etc.)

haven't seen those -- link?

I really enjoyed Spook Country. Thinking about getting Zero History as an e-book so I can start it tonight or tomorrow.

Buzz Rickson's. After he mentioned a nonexistent repro jacket in Pattern Recognition, they actually made it, and later made branded goods.

You can find their main Japanese page, but these guys stock some of their stuff, particularly the Gibson-affiliated wares: http://www.selfedge.com/shop/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=78

what's the neuromancer password?

qthose are real life things that he appropriated, Cornell boxes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cornell
http://www.google.com/images?q=cornell+boxes

liz daplyn told me this 8(

duchamp's large glass makes an appearance in Neuromancer too (towards the end, using its french name). he also lingers on other things, the door especially, which i figure is important. is there a reference for neuromancer like that one for watchmen?

― koogs, Wednesday, March 9, 2011 4:11 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

lol yeah, it's like, so the richest guy in the world bankrolls a hot art babe to find the people who made... this?

> what's the neuromancer password?

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive.asp

description in the book was pretty literal fwiw, it just sounded like he was avoiding the actual word

the cornell boxes, i'm pretty sure, get mentioned by name. so it's not Cornell Boxes as such that he's after but THIS NEW SOURCE of cornell boxes. (actually, the same is true of the jeans, he's after the person behind them.)

Marlys got busted for faking an actual Cornell, but the boxes Virek hires her to find the source of are not Cornells, merely Cornellesque.

I thought Spook Country and Zero History were a major drop in quality after Pattern Recognition, which for me is his best work. But clearly he is deeply into some stuff these days that just doesn't resonate with me at all.

reading Mona Lisa overdrive right now and the tone seems so different. also lol at his attempt to create a young urban minority male

finally finished zero history yesterday (took forever because i was not really enjoying it, for the most part) and it kinda crystalized what disappoints me about 21st-century gibson vs. '80s gibson. the whole arc of the sprawl trilogy, in addition to all the bolted-on bits of future projection and all the great texture-of-the-world stuff plus the caper plots which are hokey but i like, was leading up to (uh spoilers??) ideas about evolutionary leaps in human consciousness and vernadsky/de chardin paraphrasing and contact-with-alien-life through the matrix and so on. and the pattern recognition trilogy is about...what? the hunt for Really Swank Vintage Pants? crappy art made by nerds with gps systems? i've got no doubt gibson's got plenty of interesting stuff to tell us about the moment we're living in now technology/marketing wise, but in terms of NOVELS, especially pulp novels, the early stuff may have been a little silly in how seemingly serious it took its Big Concepts but underneath all the grotty disaffected punk stuff it had a delany/brunner/dick/moorcock/phil farmer craziness and overheateded insane ideas that a book about the Semiotics of the Perfect Logo is just never gonna have. (at least not populated by these characters and written by this writer.)

(i fully accept that gibson says he's no longer writing sf books but jeezus dude you were much better at that than being the steig larsson of the boing boing set.)

I don't think I got through more than 50 pages of pattern recognition. there was some passage about the girl explaining her preference for dark clothing without logos or patterns and that was just such a nerdy stand-in.

i've got no doubt gibson's got plenty of interesting stuff to tell us about the moment we're living in now technology/marketing wise, but in terms of NOVELS, especially pulp novels, the early stuff may have been a little silly in how seemingly serious it took its Big Concepts but underneath all the grotty disaffected punk stuff it had a delany/brunner/dick/moorcock/phil farmer craziness and overheateded insane ideas that a book about the Semiotics of the Perfect Logo is just never gonna have.

yeah, except i doubt that he has anything interesting to tell us abt the moment we're living in. he was good at darkly stylish near-future sci-fi speculation. he's bad at contemporary thrillers built around "cutting edge" tech & culture.

though my child's heart will always belong to the '80s stuff, i actually think virtual light might be his best all-around book, especially as the bridge (no pun intended) between these early and late phases of his work, something for everyone, etc. (too bad he more or less cocked it up then in idoru and all tomorrow's parties.) in that new paris review interview gibson says he kinda sees the bridge trilogy now as "alternate history" fiction rather than science fiction, and usually i'd take that as kind of hubristic "look how on top of my future projection game i was!" bullshit, but he's kinda right! it's still weirdly recognizable in a lot of ways as a 2007 that's kinda like ours but took some real hard cultural/political/technological left turns in the '90s. like vahid was saying way up-thread, it's studded with all these great bits of "history" (like j.d. shapely) that he doesn't fully explain. which i've always thought was kind of his real gift, the little pungent hint of cultural or political history that add to the overall texture and makes an invented world seem more real, because everyone takes it for granted, rather than having it all spelled out. (he once said he took the idea for never fully explaining the nuclear war in the sprawl trilogy from "escape from new york" lol.)

i reserve the right to retract that if i re-read it again soon. it's been a minute. i've read the first three so many times i can probably quote paragraphs verbatim.

yeah gibson is def great at showing and not telling

reread the sprawl trilogy (well reread neuromancer, read count zero/mona lisa overdrive for the first time) - mona lisa overdrive really felt mailed in

reread burning chrome too, it's kind of cute how eager to please he is in some of those stories

yeah mona lisa is definitely the weakest of the first three but the last few pages (especially the "punchline") always make me smile in an "oh come ON" kinda way.

hahaha yeah the mental image of them traipsing off on an intergalactic data stream, makes me think of the ghosts of anakin/yoda/obi wan chillin at the endor v-day campfire

next time i read it i'm gonna play the ewok song during the final stretch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np6vAuS0KNs

the sky above endor was the color of television, tuned to yub nub

yeah this latest trilogy wasn't really so hot. i dropped zero history TWICE before i decided to buck down and get it through with. i just found it so utterly boring at times, and i could never remember what had happened previously to where my bookmark was such that i'd reread chapters again and again = thus boredom ensued

but i justify the readings with the appreciative value i derive from gibson as to how much of the future we really are currently living in. i just find it so cool the way he can make the present so utterly slick and ambivalent, like our world is *only* logos and advertising and there really is no longer a human element to anything...blah blah blah blah. I guess I just have to say that I now look at my Roomba's pulsing charge-light with a quiet sense of giddiness now, more so than I ever have.

tho his fondness for stevejobs-ware gets me a little. maybe it's being such a vehement contrarian to most anything pro-mac, but it brings me to tears at times to think that the most prominent voice in ~the future~ readily heralds applecrap as the brightest embodiment of futureware we have today. he really loves talking about his macbook, or his characters possessing macbooks...mentioned at least 8923948723 per novel.

I can't get through Zero History. It's the first book of his I am going to give up on, and probably the last I'll ever bother trying to read. I suffered through Pattern Recognition and Spook Country (which I don't remember at all; probably part of the reason I don't really get ZH, but fuck re-reading those things).

His career trajectory is that of some bad-ass visionary post-punk musician who is playing adult contemporary jazz rock on Austin City Limits now or something. He has polished his style down to a nub. A boring nub. And, I can't help but to see him as this old guy who can't get over how awesome everything is now compared to when he was young; but to me it's not awesome at all. It's fuckin mundane. I just don't share his perspective at all. Like, I think the internet is far less interesting now than it was in the early 90s when not many people really knew about it and there were all kinds of dark corners to explore.

Sometimes I pick up Burning Chrome again just to re-read Hinterlands, which is my single favorite thing he's written. It's like every element that's good about Contact boiled down to a short story.

have you read Neuromancer?

oh duh. brain fart. i meant to say:

have you read Pohl's Gateway? I thought that was an obvious inspiration for "Hinterlands".

His career trajectory is that of some bad-ass visionary post-punk musician who is playing adult contemporary jazz rock on Austin City Limits now or something.

u_u i don't want this to be true but it's probably true.

i think my favorite burning chrome story is probably "the winter market," but for a guy who was apparently happily married at the time all those stories were written he wrote a LOT of variations on "beautiful cold woman with vague-to-no personality has left me and now i don't care about anything and i will become a.) a disaffected hacker law unto himself, or b.) a sad drunk depressed tool of the techno-corporate overlords." the style is so meticulous and beautiful and cold you can almost miss (or ignore once you get out of puberty) how juvenile most of the plots are in terms of male/female relations.

dickian in a way

I love how much mileage he gets out of two words: chrome and neon. in fact I wish there was a way to adapt drinking games to reading books.

Interview in the new Paris Review is pretty good

I wrote this on my blog in 2007, just after finishing Spook Country:

Here is the William Gibson Plot, as iterated in every book from Neuromancer through Pattern Recognition: Young-ish but jaded person with some preternatural but utterly mediaverse-related skill/talent/ability is roped into a quest for some mysterious objay dart or cyborg critter that's loping about the net causing disruption. Dark forces chase said young skilled/talented person, and ethically gray-area forces assist. By the end, multiple plotlines converge as young skilled/talented person comes face to face with the creator(s) of the objay dart, and everything winds down kinda ambiguously, but happily.

If he ever stops telling that story, I don't know what I'll do. I admit to being disappointed by ZH being, ultimately, about pants, but there were some good ideas in there and I'm gonna re-read it soonish.

Just picked up The Peripheral and I'm canceling the rest of the evening.

Buying it in two weeks, when he does his NYC reading. I have signed copies of the last trilogy and will be adding this one to the pile.

Reeves is awesome in this movie adaptation. haha.

Crap acting aside, I love the internet sequences in this.

(Johnny Mnemonic btw)

(On Movie Mix channel, uk, currently)

you know what is awesome? abel ferrara's adaptation of new rose hotel

is it?

I'm kind of relieved that an adaptation of Neuromancer never got made, actually.

it still might! last I heard vincenzo vitali was working on it...

Vincenzo natali, sorry

Peripheral is good but man did that feel like he hit some kind of word limit and needed to wrap things up.

"I'm kind of relieved that an adaptation of Neuromancer never got made, actually."

Tons of the ideas have already been knicked out of that trilogy, but it would have a been a smarter play than rebooting Total Recall. Maybe the technology is to the point it could be done by someone like AMC using the trilogy as a series cycle with perhaps starting with a reboot of Johnny Mnemonic story so you introduce Molly for Neuromancer.

Considering how high Hollywood is on the paint fumes from the superhero comics, eventually someone is going to get wise that there are boodles upon boodles of these science fiction series out there that perhaps are more movie/tv ready.

xpost

just finished this yesterday and yeah the plot/narrative progression isnt the point i guess. but i reveled in the shimmering complexity once the puzzle pieces fell together about 1/3 of the way in. almost like burroughs before that in terms of free-flowing paranoia and eerily familiar future shock

i have seen exactly one copy of this for sale (and despite being advertised as discounted it wasn't)

whsmiths are listing it at £12 but don't actually have any in the shop

foyles have it as £13 delivered or £17 "Click and Collect" and full price in actual shop!

amazon have it for £13

bookseller crow (local bookshop) said they were expecting more and would put one aside for me. unfortunately i was just visiting friends there and won't be back there this side of christmas.

i havent read the new one yet b/c the last few burned me but have we located the exact point when cyberpunk became thomas l friedmanpunk? the one about the cool hunter was so excruciating to read, felt like douglas coupland

struggling with the new book. the cyberspeak now just annoys me and time travel is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

(it went down to £9.xx on amazon in the end and i couldn't resist. i am going to hell.)

it didn't seem very cyberspeak-y to me but i still had no idea what was going on. cliffs notes please

first line:
"They didn't think Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him."

there wasn't a lot, but then every third chapter (and the chapters were tiny) there'd be a sentence like the one above were someone was fake-verbing neu-nouns.

the book got better and i enjoyed it in the end. i'd still easily put 5 of his other books ahead of it though.

btw this: http://www.doublerobotics.com/
and this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y

I thought "the Jackpot" was evocatively named, for what it represented. I preferred this one to the last two, which were a little dry. Agree that the beginning is a little rough, but I can buy that the future-jargon being confusing at the outset is an investment that pays off in the second half of the book.

i read this directly after reading ready player one so it was basically Tolstoy is how i break it down to an extent

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/william-gibson-on-fashion.html

Hahaha yeah like I'd ever spend any money on that

http://i.imgur.com/jQxrvVb.jpg

Just bought this cool jacket what do you guys think

at the coffee shop by my office i saw a barista wearing a self edge brand presumably selvedge apron. idk if everyone there has them or if he brought it from home and also idk which of those options is more sad

looks nice, can you spin around a little so I can see the back xp

Which came first, Pattern Recognition or Gibson's fashion line?

Pattern Recognition, he mentioned a black jacket from that line, which wasn't a real thing, and they made it later

If it's not rhetorical, PR came first.

all that buzz rickson shit is mad ugly and william gibson has always had all the style and grace of anthony michael hall playing bill gates in _pirates of silicon valley_ but apparently the wg x br line has been going strong for 10 years so wtf do i know

his characters wear it better than him for sure

I always figured William Gibson just walked into a Muji store and did a charcoal sketch of everything he saw for that part in pattern recognition

Just noticed my Amazon wishlist for "Agency" now has a 4/2/19 release date. I added that book to my wishlist 5/15/17. It's been a while coming. I wonder if there are reader copies of the original, pre-rewritten version floating out there?

I thought of Peripheral when the whole "ass in the jackpot" thing blew up over the summer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkJgN7N6WJo

Deadspin has an article about it that dug up all kinds of earlier uses of the phrase, missing out (unsurprisingly) on William Gibson's. Urban Dictionary actually has a nice succinct definition of the phrase which seems to suggest at least Gibson was familiar with the phrase:

"The state of being in trouble of one's own making"

I follow him on Twitter. He mostly retweets stuff, but occasionally says something. This is from last week:

Am starting Chapter 70 today. (As with The Peripheral, many are quite short.) Fingers crossed (when not typing) for April. https://t.co/nMqph6dCtk

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) September 29, 2018

The 'whot if Hillary won' angle sounds so bad.

It really does. I hope that gets shaved down to nothing in the final book - like, there's one sentence referring to the president as "she" and then the standard Gibson plot goes on.

*unreasonable expectations for the new book*

If it's still the "wut if Hillary won" plot he was talking about, I'd say any expectations are unreasonable.

"Agency" now showing Jan 21, 2020 as a "new William Gibson book" search result.

From this NPR review, I guess it's really, finally, truly released today.

I preordered an e-cooy and it showed up yesterday evening. Digging it.

Purchased and now anticipating! Rounded out the Amazon order for free shipping with the Sicario soundtrack. RIP, JJ.

i hope it's better than The Peripheral

completely forgot it was coming out this week and tackled something like three chapters before falling asleep last night

so far: if you didn't like The Peripheral, it does not bode well for you. it's a continuation

guh, if it's a sequel then I need to re-read the Peripheral I guess

"San Francisco, 2017"

what is this, historical fiction?

(i'm going to need to reread the peripheral too, given that i can't remember anything about it beyond the name)

((need to read the sprawl trilogy again, as it's my favourite))

> Rounded out the Amazon order for free shipping

in the uk the free postage threshold is £20 for non-book things but £10 of books qualifies the entire order for free delivery, which is odd, but useful. (and this was £12 ish)

Sprawl trilogy is my favorite trilogy of his too! Best individual book for me is Pattern Recognition (best response to 9/11 in fiction I've encountered, not that I am looking) followed closely by Neuromancer.

Started in on the Peripheral, wow I bet this one is off-putting if you aren't already in Gibson's corner.

I need to revisit the Bridge trilogy as I feel like those have probably aged the worst.

The trilogy before this one (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) was really good, even if it got a little thin, conceptually, toward the end - I remember thinking, Really? This is a book about pants?

About 2/3 of the way through Agency now; will probably need to read it twice.

hahaha, the Blue Ant trilogy it's called... and yeah, he seems to really be indulging his own interests in that one. Although he was always doing that, he just... now has different interests than I do (clothing design, watches, augmented reality). We used to be on the same page... apocalypse, cute bike messengers, corporate malfeasance. Who can't relate to those things.

iirc the blue ant trilogy ended in an anticlimactic fight about a mile north of here.

i missed the neuromancer trilogy completely, and the first thing i bought was a remaindered copy of Virtual Light.

Started on the new one last night, realized two pages in I needed to re-read the Peripheral. 15% of the way into that, still struggling to keep the names straight.

better go back to Burning Chrome and take it from there

pattern recognition was good but didn’t manage much of the peripheral.

I love the Bridge Trilogy, especially Virtual Light, but I revisit Pattern Recognition every few years, it's flawed but idk, so enjoyable.

where's a good place to start with classic gibson? just neuromancer?

def - i think it’s aged v well

If choosing classic, yes. It leads to Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Or go for the short stories of Burning Chrome, maybe, if you haven't read anything and are curious if you'd even like his writing.

From his Wikipedia entry, this is interesting.

After viewing the first 20 minutes of landmark cyberpunk film Blade Runner (1982) which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he "figured Neuromancer was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I'd copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film." He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader's attention and was convinced that he would be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist.

So Agency's delay isn't the first instance of delays due to rewriting.

neuromancer, virtual light, pattern recognition all good starts (all are starts of trilogies).

(as for ageing, iirc one of the books, i forget which, maybe the Johnny Mnemonic thing in burning chrome, talks about megabytes as if it's a lot...)

Thanks for the recs, folks

milo z is right, the beginning of the Peripheral is worse than an Agatha Christie novel, dude is throwing so many names at you it is v. confusing

The section of Virtual Light where Rydell describes his mom and how he grew up in Knoxville is maybe a bit too on the money for 2020.

There's no easy way into Gibson, you just have to take a dice so Neuromancer is as good a place as any really. Although if you are in the mood for something other than hard dystopian sci-fi then I would say Pattern Recognition also is a good place to begin.

every time i read a new one of his books i want to start a william gibson mad libs like "In the year [YEAR NO MORE THAN 15 NO FEWER THAN 3 YEARS IN THE FUTURE], a renegade [HACKER/BIKE MESSENGER/BOUNTY HUNTER WITH MADE-UP SCI-FI JOB NAME] comes into possession of [URBAN PLANNING DOCUMENTS/PASSWORD TO SOMETHING/ORPHAN CHILD WITH SPECIAL SKILL] and has to battle off [RUSSIAN GOONS/OTHER HACKERS/OTHER BOUNTY HUNTERS WITH MADE-UP SCI-FI JOB NAMES/SENTIENT COMPUTER] in a race to save [CITY/COUNTRY/WORLD].

― max, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 3:36 AM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^This, though is still pretty much on the money for much of his career.

I read Neuromancer for the first time last year and the treatment of the main (and p much only) female character has aged very badly, I would say.

razorgirl molly millions is not the most well-drawn character in the gibson canon, it’s true

Agency feels like he was rushing to wrap up the ending, the Clinton stuff is cringeworthy. Worst of the post-Pattern Recognition novels.

My copy arrived yesterday, and now slotted in reading pile after a few library borrows. I like the tactile cover's feel!

erm, but you know what they say...?

I liked it, but it's definitely a little light. The "present-day" characters are much more interesting than the "alternate-future" characters, something that wasn't true of The Peripheral. And the initial protagonist is a passenger in the plot — like, she literally spends a lot of the book being driven here and there and given things that will be necessary for the plot later. The book is called Agency, but she has very little. (Which may be ironic and deliberate.) I'll re-read it in a few months.

re-reading the peripheral ahead of the new one.

he talks about one of the peripherals being a "washing machine", which is an actual thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y

also, the wheely boy is also a thing (which i posted at the time). as seen on Community.

http://www.doublerobotics.com/

finished the new one. agree with unperson about Verity. not entirely sure a lot of the other characters did much either. ash? wilf? rainey? all pretty much only there because they were in the last book.

still, was a good excuse to reread the peripheral.

Should note that I read an interview with Gibson where he said that Verity's lack of agency was deliberate.

Smiled wryly on page 54, as Rainey and Wilf are discussing Verity's stub (timebranch):

"...Why aren't they happy there?"

"The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point." He took a seat at the table. "They're still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least."

Reading the Fractured Europe quadrilogy instead of re-reading the Blue Ant books. They make for an interesting comparison as a series that could be set in the same universe - more Le Carre, less Japanese denim.

Reading Burning Chrome, it's funny that his foreword has a bit about the big sci-fi guys of his adolescence (Asimov, Heinlein) reading the future incorrectly... then it's just "wot if Japan took over the world" in every other story.

The story about the guy dropping into visions of the perfect art deco sci-fi version of the '80s was great.

Was Neuromancer the last time anyone in a Gibson book had sex?

been working through the sprawl trilogy myself

Count Zero has a merc in rehab having sex in the first act. Gibson definitely shied away from writing sex for the most part as time’s gone on

Who needs sex when you can have selvage denim devoid of branding or decoration?

Gibson pioneered consumer affect pornography, the scene mh mentioned is in the fact the only thing he's written post-Neuromancer that ISN'T a sex scene

I kinda remember the security contractor/private eye guy from Knoxville in Virtual Light getting it on, but maybe that is just what you think Private dicks do in books.

(virtual light ebook is 99p on amazon.co.uk (and kobo.com) at the moment btw. last month it was idoru. i am waiting for ATP.)

I ordered the UK Penguin paperbacks of the Bridge trilogy from Blackstones last night. I like the matching covers and haven't read the books since they were new, so birthday present to myself (I turn 50 next month).

yeah, i re-bought the original trilogy (and the matching Burning Chrome) after i lost the first set to a flood.

virtual light was the first i bought, remaindered in a bookshop in leicester. everything since has been the hardback. and ATP is signed "merry xmas '99" (was a present, i didn't get to meet him).

There’s probably something Gibsonian to the fact that I own paperbacks of the sprawl trilogy but the idea of digging out a yellowed, dusty copy that’d make me sneeze and turn my reading light up made me just procure the ebook

The footage forum stuff in Pattern Recognition reads like early ILX. You lurk in’, William?

reminded me of newsgroup conspiracy theories tbh

Gibson's best joke is reducing all of Pattern Recognition to creating "Trope Slope, for instance, our viral pitchman platform" in Spook Country

First teaser trailer for The Peripheral tv series is out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSaWHbCSmRI

I did not imagine the pre-Jackpot humans with Appalachian accents

that trailer is actively making me not want to see it

production design-wise it looks not too far off what i had in my head when i read it but that's not MY flynne and burton ffs, casting seems way off

this reminds me i need to get back to slogging through the last quarter of AGENCY, which i am not enjoying at all

Revive made me think he'd Prokofieved it

I did not imagine the pre-Jackpot humans with Appalachian accents

Yeah, that's where the book takes place, out in the sticks.

It's pretty explicitly mentioned in the book!

I think this looks really good myself and very closely matches up with both how I envisioned the setting and the characters, so I'm excited for it.

this reminds me i need to get back to slogging through the last quarter of AGENCY, which i am not enjoying at all

I had the same experience. The first half was good and felt like it was building toward something; the end of the book is seriously underwhelming.

I don't have a lot of confidence that they'll pull off anything great, but I usually enjoy Chloë Grace Moretz's acting and Nolan/Joy have pulled off some decent television on occasion, so..

Agency was very whatever, but (I’m hoping) planted seeds that will sprout in the next book.

I watched the trailer. Dunno how I feel about it. Not gonna spring for Amazon Prime to watch it, but if DVD sets are available for rent at some point, might check it out.

Out in the sticks does not mean "up in the holler" - the contemporary setting seemed more decaying rust belt Ohio or Pennsylvania, empty Kansas town maybe, rather than east Kentucky. It doesn't matter but it just didn't sound right for the characters to me.

Looks pretty cool. I don't mind if they take some liberties with this book/series, because the source material isn't perfect.

A Blue Ant trilogy series by the guy who did Mr. Robot could be good - in terms of visual style at least.

i really should read those (I did Pattern Recognition which I loved but never got to the follow ups)

Spook Country is really good. Zero History is pretty good until it sinks in that the whole thing is just a love letter to Gibson's obsession with selvedge denim jeans.

haha I love the fabric history detours!

I like selvedge denim jeans so I'll probably enjoy it

I mean, it's a good book, I've read it a few times, but I distinctly remember on my first read thinking, "Wait...is this whole book...about pants?"

Unperson, did you read that long New Yorker profile about Gibson a couple years back?

Gibson got a couple of clothing collabs off of Pattern Recognition, that plotline in the third book was VMIC.

http://www.selfedge.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=647

Only $990