William Gibson's Neuromancer was first published 25 years ago. Dr_Ken writes with an excerpt from an article at MacWorld that delves into the current state of some of the technology that drives the book: "'Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power. Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails. The book eventually sold more than 160 million copies, but bringing the book to popular attention took a long time and a lot of word-of-mouth. The sci-fi community, however, was acutely aware of the novel's importance when it came out: Neuromancer ran the table on sci-fi's big three awards in 1984, winning the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award.'"
It's been a few months since I read it but I remember the humans staying human all the way to the end.
And I seem to remember quite a few characters going insane, some quietly, some in a more bugfuck manner. Not always 'integration' to blame, but there was futsie (future shock, fellow thrill lovers) all over that book.
Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails
It's been a few months since I read it but I remember the humans staying human all the way to the end.
They weren't human to begin with. Not a one of them, except, perhaps, the Finn and Maelcum.
Case, Molly, Armitage, Riviera, 3jane, Dixie Flatline - not a human in the bunch, all of them creatures - monsters - of the Information Age dystopia Gibson envisioned.
I have a quite contrary view on that. They were all human, and to some degree even the AIs (to an increasing degree over the series of books). They weren't monsters, merely products of their culture. On the matter of distopia, let see what Gibson has to say on that himself [io9.com]:
None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl. [...]
I think, you can safely say this over the characters, too. Their behaviour and personality simply reflect the situation they live in. Being a drug dealer and -(ab)users, asocial and delusional is hardly desirable but far from seldom among human, as can be observed in the slums of the large cities around the world.
No, I mean they really weren't human. They are fully realized and empathetic characters, but they really, really weren't like you or I. Their existence was so intertwined with technology, they did not have the same perspective or motivations that ordinary humans do. (Which is a major theme in the book - humans transformed into something else by their circumstances.)
And yes, they were monsters - murderous and dangerous - and made that way by their integration with technology even more than their economic cir
BBC tells me [wikipedia.org] Da Vinci code sold 30 million (back in 2006). Wikipedia refers me to this article [reviewcanada.ca] from 2006 which says Neuromancer sold around 6.5 million copies - which seems a bit more believable.
Yeh, I wasn't sure about that, but compared to Da Vinci code (woops, I linked the wrong page in my first post, meant to link this BBC article [bbc.co.uk] it didn't sound that unreasonable that 6.5 million was the world total, given 30 million was Da Vinci code, and I would have said that would have massssiiiveeellyyy outsold Neuromancer, even given the massively different amount of time they've been made available. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
Note that any sales figure a major English language publishing house discloses will be inflated by between 50% and 300%. This is standard practice -- everybody does it, so if you don't do it, everybody will assume that you're exaggerating your sales anyway and discount the figure accordingly. Stupid, but that's the way the business works.
Even if you assume the 6.5 million worldwide sales figures is exaggerated by a factor of three, that's hugely impressive -- an SF novel that sells 10,000 hardcover and 50,000 paperback in the US is doing really well (and you can triple that figure to get an estimate of the worldwide sales).
Terry Pratchett's total career sales track is around 66 million books.
Steven King sold somewhere upwards of 100 million, total.
J. K. Rowling is around the 70-120 million mark, worldwide.
I call bullshit, by at least one (and probably two) orders of magnitude.
Yeah, to be honest, a lot of this article is basically bullshit.
What Gibson introduced was the idea of a global network of millions of computers, which he described in astonishing detail--though the World Wide Web, as we know it today, was still more than a decade away
Such global networks featured in the fiction of Heinlein, Asimov and plenty of others before Neuromancer was published. Plenty of authors predicted the growth and utility of world wide computer networks, although none (including Gibson) grasped the full implications of this. And basically, everyone here was copying the ideas of Vannevar Bush, anyway.
But Gibson took the World Wide Web much further. By introducing the concept of cyberspace, he made the Web a habitable place, with all the world's data stores represented as visual, even palpable, structures arranged in an endless matrix.
Gibson didn't "introduce the concept of cyberspace". He may have invented the name that eventually became associated with it, but the idea of a visual 3D interface to computer networks was old by the time Neuromancer was published. Hell, the film Tron was highly popular 6 years beforehand, and basically involved almost exactly the same concepts: a three dimensional world in which a person can interact on a physical level with the virtual components of a software system. Sure, the way the world is presented is different, but the idea is basically the same. And Bruce Sterling was writing stuff _extremely_ similar to Gibson's work a few years ahead of him.
This article is basically placing Neuromancer in a historical context that it does not warrant: it did not innovate these ideas.
You're absolutely right, a particular 1946 short story worth mentioning (and reading!) is Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe [wikipedia.org]
And don't forget Philp K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where people communed with animal spirits in a virtual world, and the lines between religion, mind, and reality became increasingly blurred. I highly recommend it to people who only ever say "Blade Runner" and have no idea of the very different story that it was connected with.
Neuromancer was wonderful, and compelling, and intriguing. But it was nearly "Megabytes and sorcery" in the kind of magical spellcasting by mystical, incomprehe
And don't forget Philp K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where people communed with animal spirits in a virtual world
Uhh... I must've missed that part. Last time I read it, it was about a real, entirely non-virtual, post-apocalyptic world in which humans where confined to dreary cities and took care of the few remaining animals, the possession of which was an outward expression of both social status and inherent humanity (people believe that compassion and empathy are uniquely human traits,
Such global networks featured in the fiction of Heinlein, Asimov and plenty of others before Neuromancer was published. Plenty of authors predicted the growth and utility of world wide computer networks, although none (including Gibson) grasped the full implications of this.
I think you're incorrect about Heinlein.
If you look at his books [wikipedia.org], the closest I think he comes is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966. A big central computer on the moon becomes self-aware, and he can project a synthesized voice and image over a video phone network. He's also networked to a lot of stuff, and can, e.g., make toilets run backwards. However, it's really not depicted as anything at all resembling the internet. All he really did was take existing time-sharing systems (the Dartmouth time-sharing system started in 1964) and extrapolate to the case where the central computer was self-aware, and the network spread across the whole moon. The way humans use the network in the story is always as nothing more than a video phone network. There is only one computer, and nobody ever transfers any digital data other than video telephony. It's true that the network is described as global (meaning global on the moon), but it's really only depicted as a telephone network, and a global telephone network already existed in 1966. A global network of computers would have been an innovation, but Heinlein doesn't depict the existence of any other computers on the network.
Probably "A Logic Named Joe," by Murray Leinster, is the most relevant example that predates the actual internet.
Don't forget Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (1967), or Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" (1956). It's a much older concept than Neuromancer.
Meh. Friday is from 1982. How about 'The Shockwave Rider' by John Brunner? Written in 1975, with a global communications network as a central plot point, and the first literary description of the concept of a computer worm.
Really, here on Slashdot I'd expect people to know their classics.
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
Perhaps I should read this again. On the first reading it was incredibly hard to make much sense of the story. It does though drip with atmosphere, but some parts of the story are just so damn bizarre.
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
I just read it for the first time about a month ago, and thought the same thing. There are parts of the story where you just need to accept what is being said and delve into it later, otherwise you keep going back thinking you missed some explanation of a word/thing/scene. Thankfully I've played Shadowrun which is basically based on Gibson's stories that I can see (although he's not a fan of it apparently). I'm about half-way through Count Zero and so far its ok, but is starting to refer back to Neuroman
It's a trilogy so yes you should read them all. And I would suggest
reading Johnny Mnemonic as well. I really cannot say which one
is the best as I've always thought about it as one work.
The later two are pretty tightly intervowen, but Neuromancer really is more of a stand-alone work that the later books only vaguely reference. All three are definitely not a single work.
More importantly, the story of Neuromancer is entirely self-contained. You don't need to read the later books to appreciate it. Therefore it is a separate work.
Gibson is no easy read because he doesn't explain things. He writes as if he wrote a story for someone who lives in that time and needs no explanation of terms and technology. It makes it hard to read, but it also adds a lot to the atmosphere once you got into the mindset.
I don't like stories that explain everything in detail to make it easier for you to read. They take away from the experience IMO.
That's called "immersion". A good writer will make it easy by slowly introducing the words and concepts to you so that you have a good idea of the environment by the time the story really starts moving. Anathem was excellent in this way. Even though it had a lot of made-up words and a totally different society, the concepts were introduced so that you could easily follow them. Now if only the story had been a bit better...
Of course, some authors prefer to just dunk you into the midst of everything.
Exactly. The parts of the novel which make little sense on first reading quite literally read like a series of fleeting impressions, experienced by the main character (Case, in this book). It's a great way of putting the reader in the action.
You know ONLY what the main character knows and no more - you don't get to cheat with help from the Explaining Narrator.
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
As an open implementation of.NET Lisa Overdrive, I thought it was a pretty good attempt, although, as usual, it's a slavish imitation of a paradigm invented by others and released in closed-source format long ago. What's especially weird in this case, though, is that the Lisa, which stole shamelessly from XEROX PARC, had to be overclocked in order to be able to run the bloated.NET Framework, which itself, erm, "borrowed" many toolkit widgets that came out of over nearly decades of Macintosh development, which itself obsoleted the original Lisa project --- only to be being re-implemented in the opensource Mono project so that it could be run on a non-Windows OS stack. Talk about chasing your own tail. Especially since OS X has been out for about a decade, and XCode makes everything else pale by comparison.
Sorry, I enjoyed Neuromancer as much as anyone. However, you can't talk about what Gibson got right without talking about what he missed... most interestingly he missed the invention of mobile phones and so pay phones make an appearance in the book.
Yeah, there are definitely parts of Neuromancer that are hilariously dated. The one that always sticks out for me is the part where Case has 3MB of stolen RAM that he's trying to move. It sounded impressively futuristic in 1985. Today, not so much.
most interestingly he missed the invention of mobile phones and so pay phones make an appearance in the book.
It's true that he doesn't have any mobile phones and seems to prefer implants, but he had a lot of those that do similar functions to a phone. E.g., Molly has some sort of implant that gives the time, and radio functions and then Case monitors her position through his cyberspace rig (more than just her position, her whole sensory apparatus), of which a video conferencing phone might be considered a clumsy version. Also, throughout the book, one sees people who insert some sort of chip called a "microsoft" into a jack behind their ear that give them some extra knowledge, or some enhancement. When those Bluetooth headsets became popular and people just started wearing them around like they were an item of clothing, it reminded me precisely of those "microsofts" in Neuromancer, or whatever they were called.
Everybody likes to focus on the technology when discussing William Gibson, but the real focus of his stories have always been about the psychology/sociology/culture of the people in his books.
Take the Bridge Trilogy. The virtual glasses which (in part) drive the stories are simply plot macguffins. The real focus of the stories is the San Francisco-Oakland bridge and the people on it, which is decidedly low-tech - an interstitial, lawless zone, where, due to the class divide, the city's poor and homeless have taken residency, living in makeshift cabins strapped to the suspension cables. A metalsmith on the bridge forges knife blades, hammered out of motorcycle chains, giving them a damascus-like blade, while a vendor sells soup from a pot that is never emptied, rather continuously adding new ingredients... the 'wild folk' living on the bridge are feared by those living on land, but on the bridge itself, there is a sense of cooperation and fellowship.
Compare to the real-life (and now demolished) city of Kowloon.
Anyway, if you focus too much on the tech, you're missing the point.
First line, oft quoted: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"
When Billy wrote that that would have been grey, but today it's bright blue.
Great sci-fi is rarely about the technology. Neuromancer was first and foremost a great cyberpunk story. The technology that the main character Case used was secondary to who Case was - a guy from the underbelly of society who lived by his own brand of ethics and was being manipulated by evil-doers. The technoworld in which he lived is simply an interesting setting - like Sam Spade's San Francisco.
This is the man who coined the term "cyberspace"--first in "Johnny Mnemonic" in his 1982 Burning Chrome collection and popularized in Neuromancer--and imagined the representation of information as virtual/geographic landscapes. All of it pounded out using a manual typewriter. This 15-year-old interview [wordyard.com] may give you some sense of why Gibson's novel will probably matter more than any cultural artifact you or I will ever create.
I read just about all of Gibson's novels the week they came out, and they were super cool... but they have had about zero predictive power.
The word "cyberspace" almost always means that the person using it has no idea what they're talking about. Oh, there are exceptions, but the people who are most taken by Gibson's vision are sorely lacking in insight.
The representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.
Not believing in the predictive power of Gibson's novels doesn't mean I don't consider them important, it just means I'm aware that they're fiction.
Lord of the Rings is a great cultural artifact without having people yammering on about Ringwraiths being real.
Regarding "the representation of information as landscapes" as "a repeated dead end," I agree it has been done to death and the idea may not have any meaning as such. However, considered as a metaphor, the idea that networked information and the traversal of these domains would/could serve as a replacement for physical/real/actual landscapes is, to my mind, prescient.
Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee, Marshall McLuhan, Jaron Lanier, Sherry Turkle, and many other theorists and creators of human-machine interfaces have helped produce what we recognize as contemporary information systems and, in my opinion, Gibson's fictional vision to some degree shaped what has been created (e.g. Second Life) and what we imagine possible (e.g. real-time augmented reality). I think you too quickly dismiss Gibson's influence when you claim Gibson's work has no predictive power.
Gibson may not have predicted anything, but his vision indisputably reflects and affects some of the very real technologies that have since come to pass.
[[NOTICE: THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT--at least it isn't meant to be]]
Actually, about all I remember about this novel other than the space station is that it was incredibly boring all the way to the even more boring space station sequence at the end: Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides. Yes, it may have been prescient. But could it not have been readable too? Sorry, but I grew up reading Asimov, and enjoyed it, though he wasn't half as pr
Try reading it in poor translation. I just finished reading it in Spanish, and at some points I had to translate the Spanish to English, word for word, to work out what it meant.
But then, has there been anything in science lately that warrants any kind of gee-whiz fiction based on it?
I might suggest you have a look at pretty much anything written by Greg Bear (Blood Music, Darwin's Radio, Eon et.al - see Wikipedia on Greg Bear [wikipedia.org]). I'm not sure if 10 or so year old stuff fits your criteria for "new", but there is no question that this is real science fiction, based on extrapolations of scientific discoveries - not D&D with ray guns (not that there's anything wrong with that). From your post I think you might like him.
I read Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition on similar advice. I disliked both, but probably for very different reasons. (I also read his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and though I won't say I disliked it, I also wasn't impressed by it; I simply didn't feel strongly about it either way.)
My problem with William Gibson is an impression I get from him: That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows
> That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little. > You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work [...]
Not so much. While they work with similar themes, I think their writing style is quite different.
William Gibson is much more terse and relies on cultural references ('name-dropping') for setting the scene. The story evolves more around such scene descriptions, than a particular sequence of actions. As you seem to find those scene descriptions rather pretentious, it is hardly surprising, that you dislike his works. But quite frankly, I like sentences with such references like:
Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she's had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solaris here, using the expressway as found Future City. Now it's been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. (from Pattern Recognition)
In my opinion, Neal Stephenson writes more approachable. I feel more involved. His writing seems to me less constructed and more flowing. But to me it also seems his down-side: The plot seems a bit unplanned, getting out of hand, the ending somewhat hurried.
In my opinion, Neal Stephenson writes more approachable. I feel more involved. His writing seems to me less constructed and more flowing. But to me it also seems his down-side: The plot seems a bit unplanned, getting out of hand, the ending somewhat hurried.
Some slashdotter, in some previous thread about Stephenson uttered the excellent words "Neal Stephenson doesn't do endings. At some point, he just declares victory and stops writing." (admittedly, I'm not sure I got the quote entirely right - it's been s
Everybody keeps neglecting his use of derms to deliver drugs. Yet, the first "patch" I saw widely in use was the anti-smoking patches in the mid-90's.
Interestingly, I did recently come across it as a delivery mechanism for illegal psychedelic drugs also - definitely the first time I've seen that. The "sales pitch" for it was that it'd give you a longer trip, since it absorbs more slowly in to the system. Basically it's (purported to be) about 4 trips worth of LSD, but given at a rate of approximately 1 per 4 hours, so you'd come up at a pretty slow rate, but eventually reach the intensity of about one and a half trips, and then remain at that state for
The Theme (Score:2, Interesting)
Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails
It's been a few months since I read it but I remember the humans staying human all the way to the end.
Re: (Score:3)
And I seem to remember quite a few characters going insane, some quietly, some in a more bugfuck manner. Not always 'integration' to blame, but there was futsie (future shock, fellow thrill lovers) all over that book.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails
It's been a few months since I read it but I remember the humans staying human all the way to the end.
They weren't human to begin with. Not a one of them, except, perhaps, the Finn and Maelcum.
Case, Molly, Armitage, Riviera, 3jane, Dixie Flatline - not a human in the bunch, all of them creatures - monsters - of the Information Age dystopia Gibson envisioned.
It was kind of the point of the book.
Re:The Theme (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a quite contrary view on that. They were all human, and to some degree even the AIs (to an increasing degree over the series of books). They weren't monsters, merely products of their culture.
On the matter of distopia, let see what Gibson has to say on that himself [io9.com]:
I think, you can safely say this over the characters, too. Their behaviour and personality simply reflect the situation they live in. Being a drug dealer and -(ab)users, asocial and delusional is hardly desirable but far from seldom among human, as can be observed in the slums of the large cities around the world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I mean they really weren't human. They are fully realized and empathetic characters, but they really, really weren't like you or I. Their existence was so intertwined with technology, they did not have the same perspective or motivations that ordinary humans do. (Which is a major theme in the book - humans transformed into something else by their circumstances.)
And yes, they were monsters - murderous and dangerous - and made that way by their integration with technology even more than their economic cir
160 million copies!? (Score:5, Informative)
160 million sounds like.... a lot.
BBC tells me [wikipedia.org] Da Vinci code sold 30 million (back in 2006). Wikipedia refers me to this article [reviewcanada.ca] from 2006 which says Neuromancer sold around 6.5 million copies - which seems a bit more believable.
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You do realize that is 6.5 million copies... in Canada, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeh, I wasn't sure about that, but compared to Da Vinci code (woops, I linked the wrong page in my first post, meant to link this BBC article [bbc.co.uk] it didn't sound that unreasonable that 6.5 million was the world total, given 30 million was Da Vinci code, and I would have said that would have massssiiiveeellyyy outsold Neuromancer, even given the massively different amount of time they've been made available. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your Rowling figure is off by a considerable amount. Last estimate was 400+ million copies.
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, to be honest, a lot of this article is basically bullshit.
Such global networks featured in the fiction of Heinlein, Asimov and plenty of others before Neuromancer was published. Plenty of authors predicted the growth and utility of world wide computer networks, although none (including Gibson) grasped the full implications of this. And basically, everyone here was copying the ideas of Vannevar Bush, anyway.
Gibson didn't "introduce the concept of cyberspace". He may have invented the name that eventually became associated with it, but the idea of a visual 3D interface to computer networks was old by the time Neuromancer was published. Hell, the film Tron was highly popular 6 years beforehand, and basically involved almost exactly the same concepts: a three dimensional world in which a person can interact on a physical level with the virtual components of a software system. Sure, the way the world is presented is different, but the idea is basically the same. And Bruce Sterling was writing stuff _extremely_ similar to Gibson's work a few years ahead of him.
This article is basically placing Neuromancer in a historical context that it does not warrant: it did not innovate these ideas.
Parent
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And don't forget Philp K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where people communed with animal spirits in a virtual world
Uhh... I must've missed that part. Last time I read it, it was about a real, entirely non-virtual, post-apocalyptic world in which humans where confined to dreary cities and took care of the few remaining animals, the possession of which was an outward expression of both social status and inherent humanity (people believe that compassion and empathy are uniquely human traits,
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're incorrect about Heinlein. If you look at his books [wikipedia.org], the closest I think he comes is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966. A big central computer on the moon becomes self-aware, and he can project a synthesized voice and image over a video phone network. He's also networked to a lot of stuff, and can, e.g., make toilets run backwards. However, it's really not depicted as anything at all resembling the internet. All he really did was take existing time-sharing systems (the Dartmouth time-sharing system started in 1964) and extrapolate to the case where the central computer was self-aware, and the network spread across the whole moon. The way humans use the network in the story is always as nothing more than a video phone network. There is only one computer, and nobody ever transfers any digital data other than video telephony. It's true that the network is described as global (meaning global on the moon), but it's really only depicted as a telephone network, and a global telephone network already existed in 1966. A global network of computers would have been an innovation, but Heinlein doesn't depict the existence of any other computers on the network.
Probably "A Logic Named Joe," by Murray Leinster, is the most relevant example that predates the actual internet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:160 million copies!? (Score:4, Informative)
Meh. Friday is from 1982. How about 'The Shockwave Rider' by John Brunner? Written in 1975, with a global communications network as a central plot point, and the first literary description of the concept of a computer worm.
Really, here on Slashdot I'd expect people to know their classics.
Mart
Parent
Never forget the lesson of Neuromancer (Score:5, Insightful)
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
Re:Never forget the lesson of Neuromancer (Score:5, Funny)
What, you're telling me I can't get rich from fencing 4MB of memory on the street? Way to shatter my dreams of being a hot interface cowboy!
Parent
Might read this again (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The later two are pretty tightly intervowen, but Neuromancer really is more of a stand-alone work that the later books only vaguely reference. All three are definitely not a single work.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly, the story of Neuromancer is entirely self-contained. You don't need to read the later books to appreciate it. Therefore it is a separate work.
Re:Might read this again (Score:5, Insightful)
Gibson is no easy read because he doesn't explain things. He writes as if he wrote a story for someone who lives in that time and needs no explanation of terms and technology. It makes it hard to read, but it also adds a lot to the atmosphere once you got into the mindset.
I don't like stories that explain everything in detail to make it easier for you to read. They take away from the experience IMO.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, some authors prefer to just dunk you into the midst of everything.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. The parts of the novel which make little sense on first reading quite literally read like a series of fleeting impressions, experienced by the main character (Case, in this book). It's a great way of putting the reader in the action.
You know ONLY what the main character knows and no more - you don't get to cheat with help from the Explaining Narrator.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
He said he hates the American version of writing where the author has to explain everything 3 times so the audience can understand it.
Re:Might read this again (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
As an open implementation of .NET Lisa Overdrive, I thought it was a pretty good attempt, although, as usual, it's a slavish imitation of a paradigm invented by others and released in closed-source format long ago. What's especially weird in this case, though, is that the Lisa, which stole shamelessly from XEROX PARC, had to be overclocked in order to be able to run the bloated .NET Framework, which itself, erm, "borrowed" many toolkit widgets that came out of over nearly decades of Macintosh development, which itself obsoleted the original Lisa project --- only to be being re-implemented in the opensource Mono project so that it could be run on a non-Windows OS stack. Talk about chasing your own tail. Especially since OS X has been out for about a decade, and XCode makes everything else pale by comparison.
Parent
Pay Phones (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I enjoyed Neuromancer as much as anyone. However, you can't talk about what Gibson got right without talking about what he missed... most interestingly he missed the invention of mobile phones and so pay phones make an appearance in the book.
Re:Pay Phones (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
bluetooth headsets (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true that he doesn't have any mobile phones and seems to prefer implants, but he had a lot of those that do similar functions to a phone. E.g., Molly has some sort of implant that gives the time, and radio functions and then Case monitors her position through his cyberspace rig (more than just her position, her whole sensory apparatus), of which a video conferencing phone might be considered a clumsy version. Also, throughout the book, one sees people who insert some sort of chip called a "microsoft" into a jack behind their ear that give them some extra knowledge, or some enhancement. When those Bluetooth headsets became popular and people just started wearing them around like they were an item of clothing, it reminded me precisely of those "microsofts" in Neuromancer, or whatever they were called.
Parent
Re:Pay Phones (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody likes to focus on the technology when discussing William Gibson, but the real focus of his stories have always been about the psychology/sociology/culture of the people in his books.
Take the Bridge Trilogy. The virtual glasses which (in part) drive the stories are simply plot macguffins. The real focus of the stories is the San Francisco-Oakland bridge and the people on it, which is decidedly low-tech - an interstitial, lawless zone, where, due to the class divide, the city's poor and homeless have taken residency, living in makeshift cabins strapped to the suspension cables. A metalsmith on the bridge forges knife blades, hammered out of motorcycle chains, giving them a damascus-like blade, while a vendor sells soup from a pot that is never emptied, rather continuously adding new ingredients... the 'wild folk' living on the bridge are feared by those living on land, but on the bridge itself, there is a sense of cooperation and fellowship.
Compare to the real-life (and now demolished) city of Kowloon.
Anyway, if you focus too much on the tech, you're missing the point.
Parent
Re:Pay Phones (Score:4, Funny)
And which is why I find his work so incredibly boring. If I wanted to read about a shanty town, I'd go buy a book called "poor people".
Parent
Well he sure predicted the color of the sky (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
'The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel' - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (yes, of course it's deliberate).
You have missed the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Can the attitude and pay your respect, boy. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the man who coined the term "cyberspace"--first in "Johnny Mnemonic" in his 1982 Burning Chrome collection and popularized in Neuromancer--and imagined the representation of information as virtual/geographic landscapes. All of it pounded out using a manual typewriter. This 15-year-old interview [wordyard.com] may give you some sense of why Gibson's novel will probably matter more than any cultural artifact you or I will ever create.
Parent
Who are you calling "boy", kid? (Score:5, Insightful)
I read just about all of Gibson's novels the week they came out, and they were super cool... but they have had about zero predictive power.
The word "cyberspace" almost always means that the person using it has no idea what they're talking about. Oh, there are exceptions, but the people who are most taken by Gibson's vision are sorely lacking in insight.
The representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.
Not believing in the predictive power of Gibson's novels doesn't mean I don't consider them important, it just means I'm aware that they're fiction.
Lord of the Rings is a great cultural artifact without having people yammering on about Ringwraiths being real.
Parent
Re:Who are you calling "boy", kid? (Score:4, Insightful)
Excellent points taken.
Regarding "the representation of information as landscapes" as "a repeated dead end," I agree it has been done to death and the idea may not have any meaning as such. However, considered as a metaphor, the idea that networked information and the traversal of these domains would/could serve as a replacement for physical/real/actual landscapes is, to my mind, prescient.
Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee, Marshall McLuhan, Jaron Lanier, Sherry Turkle, and many other theorists and creators of human-machine interfaces have helped produce what we recognize as contemporary information systems and, in my opinion, Gibson's fictional vision to some degree shaped what has been created (e.g. Second Life) and what we imagine possible (e.g. real-time augmented reality). I think you too quickly dismiss Gibson's influence when you claim Gibson's work has no predictive power.
Gibson may not have predicted anything, but his vision indisputably reflects and affects some of the very real technologies that have since come to pass.
Parent
Re:Amazon, here I come! (Score:5, Funny)
This looks like something I ought to buy.
If you want to follow the spirit of the book, find a copy of the text illegally on-line and download it to your phone!
Also, this is my first first post ever!
Welcome!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
[[NOTICE: THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT--at least it isn't meant to be]]
Actually, about all I remember about this novel other than the space station is that it was incredibly boring all the way to the even more boring space station sequence at the end: Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides. Yes, it may have been prescient. But could it not have been readable too? Sorry, but I grew up reading Asimov, and enjoyed it, though he wasn't half as pr
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Try reading it in poor translation. I just finished reading it in Spanish, and at some points I had to translate the Spanish to English, word for word, to work out what it meant.
Re: Amazon, here I come! (Score:4, Informative)
But then, has there been anything in science lately that warrants any kind of gee-whiz fiction based on it?
I might suggest you have a look at pretty much anything written by Greg Bear (Blood Music, Darwin's Radio, Eon et.al - see Wikipedia on Greg Bear [wikipedia.org]). I'm not sure if 10 or so year old stuff fits your criteria for "new", but there is no question that this is real science fiction, based on extrapolations of scientific discoveries - not D&D with ray guns (not that there's anything wrong with that). From your post I think you might like him.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I read Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition on similar advice. I disliked both, but probably for very different reasons. (I also read his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and though I won't say I disliked it, I also wasn't impressed by it; I simply didn't feel strongly about it either way.)
My problem with William Gibson is an impression I get from him: That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows
Re:I didn't think it was that good (Score:5, Interesting)
> That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little.
> You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work [...]
Not so much. While they work with similar themes, I think their writing style is quite different.
William Gibson is much more terse and relies on cultural references ('name-dropping') for setting the scene. The story evolves more around such scene descriptions, than a particular sequence of actions.
As you seem to find those scene descriptions rather pretentious, it is hardly surprising, that you dislike his works. But quite frankly, I like sentences with such references like:
In my opinion, Neal Stephenson writes more approachable. I feel more involved. His writing seems to me less constructed and more flowing. But to me it also seems his down-side: The plot seems a bit unplanned, getting out of hand, the ending somewhat hurried.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Some slashdotter, in some previous thread about Stephenson uttered the excellent words "Neal Stephenson doesn't do endings. At some point, he just declares victory and stops writing." (admittedly, I'm not sure I got the quote entirely right - it's been s
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Everybody keeps neglecting his use of derms to deliver drugs. Yet, the first "patch" I saw widely in use was the anti-smoking patches in the mid-90's.
Interestingly, I did recently come across it as a delivery mechanism for illegal psychedelic drugs also - definitely the first time I've seen that. The "sales pitch" for it was that it'd give you a longer trip, since it absorbs more slowly in to the system. Basically it's (purported to be) about 4 trips worth of LSD, but given at a rate of approximately 1 per 4 hours, so you'd come up at a pretty slow rate, but eventually reach the intensity of about one and a half trips, and then remain at that state for