William Gibson C/D

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.