William Gibson C/D

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.