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William Gibson on his Tech Life and Latest Novel 269

Posted by CowboyNeal from the far-away-and-personal dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a brief article on William Gibson. In it he discusses his tech life, the ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, 'Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer. I don't find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good.'"
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William Gibson on his Tech Life and Latest Novel More

William Gibson on his Tech Life and Latest Novel

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  • Turns out... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:13PM (#8334169)
    He's running a 286, and that copy of MS Word 2.0 is suiting him just fine.
    • I could've sworn I saw a picture of his home office with an old mac on the table.

    • Virtual Writing (Score:3, Interesting)

      by t0ny ( 590331 )
      Does he delve into how Neal Stephen's book "Snow Crash" inspired him to write "Virtaul Light"?

      After reading VL, the entire thing gave me a super feeling of deja vu. I havent read another Gibson novel since then. Its a shame how somebody who had once been such a good writer could stoop so low.

  • Better than Gibson, IMO (Score:3, Funny)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:15PM (#8334198) Homepage Journal
    Although he's not really well known nor as critically acclaimed, I really like Kilgore Trout. I don't think his books are in print anymore, he died a few years back.

    So it goes.

  • He used to blog.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aurum42 ( 712010 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:17PM (#8334209)
    Gibson used to maintain a fairly interesting blog [williamgibsonbooks.com], but he quit to work on his "day job", which is really too bad - I like looking in on the lives of the writers I read, although it feels a little voyeuristic at times (and that's when I stop). It's fascinating seeing the creative process in action.

    • Re:He used to blog.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by metlin ( 258108 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:25PM (#8334304) Journal
      He gave a talk at Georgia Tech last week, and it was quite cool.

      He actually explained why he had stopped blogging. He felt that when he had the "urge" to write or do something, the net is an easy outlet but not the best. Writing, on the other hand is a more organized and better outlet, and ofcourse has better benefits :)

      I had also asked him about why he had ended Neuromancer in a way that almost killed all the characters (in terms of a future) -- and his response was something along the lines of, even if down the line I'm so broke that I want to write a sequel, I should not be able to, because it won't be the work of the moment. He said that he would ideally like to re-write Neuromancer, and felt bad about how he had not thought about cellphones and other common technologies being common in the real future :)

      A really cool guy, and he really gave very proper answers for everything. And yes, he said his favourite book was Idoru.

      And I strongly recommend reading Pattern Recognition to those of who who have not -- that book rocks!

    • Re:He used to blog.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Mad_Rain ( 674268 )
      He also did a movie [imdb.com] called "No Maps For These Territories" that lends a good deal of insight into his personality. I just watched it, and thought it was pretty cool.

  • Why won't my memory stick fit in my ear? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:17PM (#8334214)
    "I remember seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc".

    Just goes to show what using an Apple can do for you. :) Rumor has it he has another book on the way... and one with a movie deal in the works. Maybe they'll pass on Keanu this time and get a real actor and his next book-based movie won't suck so bad.

    Still working on how to get my new 512Mb USB 2.0 memory stick to interface with my brain.

    The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers [nccomp.com]

  • Best quote of the article (Score:5, Funny)

    by glen604 ( 750214 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:18PM (#8334224)
    " I realized no one had tried to write a science-fiction novel as if Lou Reed and David Bowie were writing it."

    I suppose you could say that about a lot of things-
    we need more software that was written as if Lou Reed and David Bowie had written it

  • I agree (Score:3, Informative)

    by gustgr ( 695173 ) <(gustgr) (at) (gmail.com)> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:18PM (#8334225)
    "I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good."

    Indeed.

    I am at the 6th semester of Computer Science and I see a lot of guys who got low grades and don't know even how to code really basic programs looking for top computers. I belive all they want is to play games.

    Personally I don't need a top-ultra-fast box to get my programs working or improve my programming skills, and even get some fun (ie. MUD).

    Of course if you work with production servers, high definition graphics or movies you need power machines, but regular and ordinary users who only surf on the net, compile some code, edit some texts don't need that all IMHO.

    • Re:I agree (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kertong ( 179136 )
      I agree as well. Offtopic, but here's my 2 cents.

      If you have a good computer "know-how", you know how to squeeze the maximum performance out of what you have already.

      Back when I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, I had a job as a Residential Computing Consultant. You know, tech support. You wouldn't believe how many people had top of the line (at the time) Pentium 3s that felt much, much slower than my AMD K6-2, because their windows installation was stuffed full of stupid utilities, realone, popups, popup
    • "I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good."

      He might complies with the "Muq's law", I explain:

      I don't like to upgrade my computer, for obvious reason$ and often I realize that I didn't need that much I upgraded.

      So I made some analysis and realized, to a regular user, who just "types/browses/compiles once and while", that:

      An upgrade just worths if your current processor's frequency is lower than the frequency of memory on the machine you're willing to upgrade

    • Re:I agree (Score:2, Insightful)

      by LearningHard ( 612455 )
      I used to make a big deal out of having an awesome computer. I think I grew up. The only problem is now I am 24 years old and having to go back into college. I wish so much that back when I started college I had paid more attention to attending class. I always did very well in CSCI courses but unfortunately did rather poorly in the math side of things. Oh well, in a couple of years when my fianc ee finishes her graduate work I will go back and do things the right way.
    • I've always found people complaining they need to compile their code all again (wait a lot) when they make a small change on the code.

      The advice here is to split your code in several files and use make. It'll just compile the (small) file you've changed, which takes much less time. Using gcc option -O0 also helps (when you don't care about the generated software performance).

      It looks a no brainer advice but people still complain about that ;-)

  • Blasphemy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by el-spectre ( 668104 )
    Just out of curiosity... am I the only one for whom Neuromancer fell flat? The first 50 or 100 pages were impressive, and... then... it... went... nowhere...

    I really admired how I had a feel for the world in just a coupla pages, but the book seemed to end up in a how-weird-can-you-go mode.

    disclaimer: I just read this 6 months ago... maybe having read/seen other/better stories had jaded me.

    • Re:Blasphemy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:22PM (#8334274) Homepage
      Actually, my largest problem with Neuromancer was that it took many many readings, starting as a grade school student, before I finally really started to understand everything.

      I still re-read the book to pick up new things. I finally realized exactly what Case was talking about when he told Molly to "take advantage of my natural state." lately.

      • ... my largest problem with Neuromancer was that it took many many readings [...] before I finally really started to understand everything.

        Why is that a problem? A book that forces you to think and then go back a re-read it and think again and maybe have an aha-experience at some stage and then think some more and re-read, etc etc, is usually one of the more interesting -- it might irritate the hell out of you, but it would still be interesting, wouldn't it, rather than boring or dull -- reading experi

    • Same effect for me.. I read it about ten years ago, before I read other books of the genre, and I was not that fond of it.

      I liked "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson much better.

      "Permutation City" by Greg Egan went in a different direction, but it was excellent.

    • Re:Blasphemy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Squidbait ( 716932 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:40PM (#8334446)
      You have to look at it from the point of view of when it was written. Many of what are now cyberpunk cliches exist because of Neuromancer and its sequels. William Gibson created a whole new world, that was fresh at the time, and he did it with style. For me, the Neuromancer trilogy is to cyberpunkian sci-fi what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy.

      BTW, I've just started Snow Crash, and from what I can see, this is just Gibson's style pushed over the top, done with less class, and deserving of far less credit given that he has obviously read Gibson's books and is essentially imitating them with a moderate amount of success.

      • Re:Blasphemy (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mister_tim ( 653773 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @08:19PM (#8334830)

        I think that's a bit harsh. It's probably fair to assume that Neal Stephenson had read Neuromancer before he wrote Snow Crash, but they are quite different. Snow Crash should belong in a different sub-genre of sci-fi than Neuromancer - it's only marginally cyberpunk in the way Gibson is, and it's a lot funnier and plays on that side of things more. Also, Snow Crash deliberately tries to be 'cool', and succeeds, while Neuromancer is much more serious and sedate.

        Compared to Stephenson's later work (especially The Diamond Age, which could almost count as a sequel), Snow Crash also feels very much like an early novel - and it was. Anyway, I found it much more accessible and enjoyable than Neuromancer when I read them both back in the early-ish 90s - and I've re-read it more often since.

      • I agree. Snow Crash just doesn't deserve the hype. I was massively disappointed.

        Not often mentioned are Gibson's other books in the Neuromancer series: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. If I remember correctly, the linking character is the enigmatic Molly.

      • Re:Blasphemy (Score:2, Informative)

        by TXG1112 ( 456055 )
        I have to agree. I read Nuromancer in the late '80s back when my Apple //c was state of the art. It blew me away. Up until that point there had been nothing like it. I thought it interesting about Gibson's comment about the lack of cell phones. I'm not sure if after rereading it I would have noticed their absence in the book, but that may be because when I first read it, cell phones weren't very common. I guess it's a matter of perspective. On a side note, I have always wanted to name a server Wintermute,

    • Re:Blasphemy (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Neop2Lemus ( 683727 )
      Yes, for all I heard about it, its' not anywhere near the standards of Clarke and Asimov.

      A very, very hip book, but not a good one. Its' just not clever enough or plotted well enough. Plenty of cyberpunk counter-culture (which is neat) but that's all I'd have to say for it.

    • Re:Blasphemy (Score:3, Informative)

      by dgmartin98 ( 576409 )
      I thought Neuromancer was an amazingly great book! I've only read it once, and that was shortly after it came out (10-15 years ago ?). However, since then I've read Idoru, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and The Difference Engine - all of which were a chore to read. I had to force myself to finish those.

      Dave
    • I liked Neuromancer, mostly for its rather surreal and atmospheric writing. For a deeper insight into the genesis of the "cyberpunk" genre, I suggest all of you go read "True Names", a brilliant novella by Vernor Vinge written ~4 years (1980?) before Neuromancer. Even today, it's an astonishing leap of the imagination, but you can expect no less from the author of Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (but I still think "True Names" was his best). Oh, you should also read Jack Vance :-)
    • Weird! I guess it must be a time thing. I read Neuromancer when it first came out (BBS days!) and was floored. The only thing that had prepared me for it was The Adolesence of P1 [amazon.com] and Brunner's Shockwave Rider. The breadth and detail of Gibson's world was amazing, as well as the brevity of his writing. I love how he's able to paint Case in Japan, almost like a painting by Manet, with soundtrack by Berlin. Neuromancer is rather baroque and the style of it reminds me of Jules Verne.

      Neuromancer's still on m

    • Re:Blasphemy (Score:3, Interesting)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Just out of curiosity... am I the only one for whom Neuromancer fell flat? The first 50 or 100 pages were impressive, and... then... it... went... nowhere...

      Back in the day, somebody came to me and said, "You gotta read this amazing new cyberpunk stuff, it's this new word, it means all these cool new authors, like try this William Gibson guy."

      I said, "Cyberpunk? What is that, you mean sorta like Blade Runner?"

      And you know what, turns out I was pretty much right. The ideas and stories of the big "cyb

  • What gibson really is interested (Score:5, Interesting)

    by peripatetic_bum ( 211859 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:19PM (#8334240) Homepage Journal
    And what I wish Pattern Recognition was going to be about was the take over of the corporation. I think Gibson's real contribution in his neuromancer trilogy was the complete and utterly believeable and scary description of the "Corporation as the World".

    When I re-read his stuff I am most impressed and awed by how clearly he was able to create a world in which the corporations ran everything and were god-like beings. I know this isnt new now but back in the 80's when Governments were the big powerhouses, saying that someone like Nike was more powerful than the US (say someone like Halliburton) was a bit of shock since we were seeing the US and Russia go at it from Gov't run models of economies.

    Anyway, just pick up his early books and you can taste the corporations presence everywhere and how so soaked into the culture that no one is his books ever saw it.

    Anyway, getting back to his more recent books, I miss the fact that he no longer seems to be fascinated by the corporations (his fascination with AI's was most explicit [ie the AI, as a real being, representing/being the corporation])
    and he now is more of a Tipping Point type writer (much like Crichton, ie spot a trend and write about it )

    Anyway, just my thought, would like to hear your replies
    • It's reality.

      Start at the Federal Reserve. Examine why fractional reserve banking is a scam and follow from there.

      You'd be surprised what reality really is.

      "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin. Enjoy.
      • My bank has never said to me that I can come in and demand gold (or anything else) for my cash. If your bank has, I suggest you find a less scammy one.
        • Any bank that practices fractional banking is scamming you.

          But you'd have to actually learn something to understand it. I suggest you do that. Do you think inflation is some mysterious force? Inflation is a tax like any other. The lost buying power of your dollar year after year is not magic.
    • I bet to disagree.

      Crichton writes books that're *just* right for a Hollywood movie. Gibson is not like that -- in fact, he almost sounded against making movies out of his books. He said it would be right if they don't screw it up (which is quite unlikely), but I don't care as there isn't much that I'm gonna get in terms of financial benefits.

      Gibson likes to think of how the future would be - he thinks and extrapolates, rather than weave out Hollywood style crap like most writers out there. His books are g
  • "I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc". Just think... if he'd seen an ad for the G4 Notebook with a Linux logo instead, then second two Matrixes (no he didn't write them, but they take from his ideas) might not have sucked so bad. Or maybe Keanu's brain could've been unloaded to an iPod and all the data shared on the internet. :)

  • Virtually... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by EverDense ( 575518 )
    It's not the type of glitch you expect from the Orwell of the Internet, the Vasco da Gama of cyberspace, the man who virtually predicted virtual reality.

    Nice pun... but not true. He may have HELPED the term gain some popularity,
    but History [vrs.org.uk] says he was far behind a lot of others.

  • Tech Nation Interview (Score:5, Informative)

    by zedge ( 133214 ) * on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:23PM (#8334282)
    There's also a pretty good interview with
    Gibson on Tech Nation here
    http://www.technation.com:8080/ramgen/021004 _2.rm

  • Gibson is a Luddite, thought everyone knew this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary&yahoo,com> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:24PM (#8334293) Journal
    He just doesn't like technology. Like you can't figure that out from reading his books. Sheesh. His stories often portray the darker, grimmer aspects of technology. His writing is great, but he is more poet than scientist. He also didn't invent cyberpunk. Try 'Ooblik' by Phillip K. Dick for a VERY early cyberspace concept. Or read 'True Names' by Vernor Vinge. Much better story by someone who actually likes and understands technology, written way before Gibson.

    Don't get me wrong, I love Gibson, but he is more of an anti-science fiction writer.

  • Cyberspace (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DeadVulcan ( 182139 ) <dead@vulcan.pobox@com> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:25PM (#8334310)

    Gibson anticipated many concepts, such as cyberspace, that are now commonplace

    That's saying a bit too much... The term "cyberspace" was coined because of Gibson's popular book, and at the time, anyone who knew anything about the internet laughed at the media people who bandied the word around as though Gibson's vision had anything in common with SMTP, NNTP, or HTTP.

    Then we all watched, horrified, as the word set up shop, settled down, and refused to go away... Leading to all manner of cyber-this and cyber-that.

    Sigh.

    • Re:Cyberspace (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dirtside ( 91468 )
      That's saying a bit too much... The term "cyberspace" was coined because of Gibson's popular book,
      More accurately, Gibson himself coined the word "cyberspace" in Neuromancer. (I think. I know he coined the word, but I'm not positive that Neuromancer marked its first appearance.)

      • Re:Cyberspace (Score:2, Informative)

        by wheresdrew ( 735202 )
        Yes, he coined the term. He even had a cameo in David Lynch's "Wild Palms" as himself. Somebody introduces him to one of the characters and says, "this is William Gibson. He invented the term 'cyberspace.'" Gibson responds, "yes, and they'll never let me forget it."

  • Writing and technology (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Metropolitan ( 107536 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:27PM (#8334328) Journal
    Writing isn't often done best while immersed in that which is being written about. Contemplation, the space to imagine and build worlds in one's mind, is the key.

    Sometimes playing with toys can get in the way of that.

    It's easy to get drawn into the whole cycle of newer-better-faster-cooler, with musical instruments, computers, whatever. Can be very distracting to actually creating with those things!

  • So true (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rkane ( 465411 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:27PM (#8334329) Homepage Journal
    At the present time, there is still a large part of society that knows nothing about computers. They may be able to turn them on, click the icon that says "double click here for aol x.x" or even check email. However, most of them don't know the inner workings of the technology, nor do most care.

    That is why I think people can relate to William Gibson's writing - not just geeks. People can actually read it from someone who sees things in a way that they can see them as well.
    • click the icon that says "double click here for aol x.x"

      See, there's the exact problem right there. If they would just do what they're told! ;)

  • Gibson on Unscrewed Wednesday night (Score:3, Informative)

    by bearl ( 589272 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:29PM (#8334342)
    He was also interviewed on Unscrewed last night. Unscrewed Wednesday Episode [techtv.com] Not much at that link, but check the schedule to see when it'll be replayed.

  • The Man in the High Castle (Score:5, Informative)

    by joepa ( 199570 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:35PM (#8334403)
    The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff.

    To speak of visionaries, this is actually an important theme in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. Of course, even PKD had a tendency to (unknowingly?) refashion ideas that were first put into writing by Plato and Aristotle. I guess it is true, in some sense, that there is nothing new under the sun.

  • Declining Quality (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sh0t ( 607838 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:35PM (#8334405) Journal
    Maybe I'm an insensitive clod but "Pattern Recognition" and "All of Tomorrowies Parties" didn't do much for me. I'm still in love with his ground breaking early work but I don't think he's kept up as a truly continuous quality-giving writer.

  • Whoa: That's UI development (Score:4, Funny)

    by DeadVulcan ( 182139 ) <dead@vulcan.pobox@com> on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:38PM (#8334426)

    The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." [snip] "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder.

    That sounds amazingly like my process as user interface designer and developer. Except that, in the first stage, I'm grumpy just because I have to mediate so many heated design meetings.

  • Gibson owes his remarkable career to a bus-stop epiphany. "I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc," he says. "Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. Apple at the forefront again, another item you can add to the list of Apple firsts!

  • Cayce and Case? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by diesel66 ( 254283 )
    Is the the fact that the protagonists from Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition are phonetically identical just a coincidence?

    Don't miss the adventures of Kaice in his next novel! Or is it Quess?

  • non techs are better techs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plams ( 744927 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:45PM (#8334496) Homepage
    IMHO, one of the great things about Gibson is that he really isn't into a lot of the technology he describes. I guess it allows him not to get too distracted by knowledge. I mean, for a hacker, it would probably be tough to write something interesting involving computers, without putting them in a boring context (too techy for ordinary people, and too ordinary for techy people). But if you have the ability to look upon technology as something unknown and new, you can let your imagination fill that black hole of ignorance and come up with something truly creative. So that's Gibson for me. A n00b script kiddie with a beautiful imagination:)

    • Stephenson (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BitwizeGHC ( 145393 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @08:11PM (#8334742) Homepage
      Read some of Neal Stephenson's work. Start with In the Beginning was the Command Line (which is available free online) and go on to Snow Crash. I'm worming my way through Cryptonomicon right now.

      Stephenson describes technology -- real and fictional -- in a very detailed, precise, knowledgeable, and methodical manner. But he does it in a way that is in a literary sense engaging and fascinating. He can put into words the kind of beauty that hackers and engineers see in technological systems all the time, which is generally seen as dull and boring by the non-technical crowd, in such a way as to make it understandable to non-techs, and let them see the beauty too.

      Gibson? Feh. He's for candy ravers.

      • Re:Stephenson (Score:3, Insightful)

        by johnwroach ( 624103 )
        Stephenson describes technology -- real and fictional -- in a very detailed, precise, knowledgeable, and methodical manner.
        Too bad he can't write an ending the same way. That man needs an editor.

        Spoiler

        1000 pages of stuff (300 of them about eating cereal) and a two-sentence climax.

        IMO, of course, Stephenson's books are great while you're reading them, but when you're done, you gotta wonder why you struggled through it.

      • Re:Stephenson (Score:5, Insightful)

        by plams ( 744927 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @09:15PM (#8335390) Homepage

        Funny you should mention it. I thought of Stephenson right after having posted it.

        Well, they're very different kinds of authors. I'll try some metaphores.. I'll probably get it wrong: You give a bunch of nuts and bolts to two people and ask them to make "whatever" out of it. The first one comes up with an invention.. a machine of some kind; he's the inventor. The other makes a metallic man-like statue; he's the artist. Both creations are work of creativity, and though the base is the same, the results are very different. The inventor may point out that nuts and bolts can be used as they were intented, but to create something new, while the artist may try to point out some relationship between humanity and technology, using the nuts and bolts as symbols rather than their intended use.

        Using these metaphores, I guess I'd say Stephenson is more of an inventor while Gibson is more of an artist. (And well, they both have a bit of both). Oh, and Stephenson is an excellent lecturer.

        Anyway, I've read Neuromancer, Pattern Recogtion, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon - and I very much enjoyed all of them.

      • Re:Stephenson (Score:3, Insightful)

        by BenBenBen ( 249969 )
        Stephenson provides a clean, narratative [?] tale with very little room for personal interpretation, IMO. The beauty of Gibson's work is that every year more of it comes true, and the very fact that it is written without the benefit of understanding nmap or assembly registers gives it a realism a strained Stephenson book will never have.

        I read Cryptonomicon once, and won't read it again (unless I decide that maybe it can't be as bad as I remember). The ending was abrupt and comical, the story disjointed an
    • >I guess it allows him not to get too distracted by knowledge.

      I can't stand his work exactly because of that.

      It becomes painfully insulting and weak.

      Its like me writing up on how the human body functions. Or a microprocessor programmer designing a graphical UI.

      Give me a writer who allows me to have a chance to believe it could be based in reality. Such as Asimov.

  • pattern rec *SPOILER* (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crabpeople ( 720852 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:50PM (#8334532) Journal
    i dont know.. when i read that book, being a big gibson fan, i thought it was mostly a let down. they kept building the subplot of her father up so much that you knew he had to come back at the end. But it didnt come back to him. It just sort of became some story about some russian girls who werent even involved in sex. I thought at least the end should have some meaning. Unless he meant for it to have a sequel (possible i guess), the book itself made me feel like i just wasted my time.


    nothing was really acomplished and there weren't any real insights at all gained on anything. maybe because he was writing about the present day instead of the future, or maybe because he was traumatized by sept 11th, who knows. I didnt really see the point in basing so much of the book on sept 11th anyways. it seemed tacked on.

    The main character, was like a last refugee from the dot com bubble. i remember her just walking in, saying yes or no to things and then getting a huge check and going home to her studio apartment. it seems like he wrote half of it before sept 11th and then added a bunch more to it after.

    of course i have no idea imho and all that.

  • Gibson should stick to what he doesn't know. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:50PM (#8334534)
    I don't think I am alone among Gibson's fans in being of the opinion that the more hip the author became with tech, the less hip his writing became.

    Although they are based on similar themes,
    "Neuromancer" was a psechedelic ride through things unimagined before, "Pattern Recognition" is a familiar drab story about internet fanboys.

    For Gibson, I say, write what you don't know, please!

  • I don't find the latest tech helpful either (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @07:58PM (#8334594) Homepage Journal
    Maybe it's just me, but I am quite convinced that possessing a faster development machine would not make me a more productive programmer. Not in the slightest.

    My 667 Mhz Pentium III is considerably faster than what I require for all the development work I've done since I bought it in 2000.

    There was a time when it mattered to programmers to have high-end equipment, because computers of that day were so constrained for resources. There was a time I was overjoyed to have bought a used 135 MB (you read that right) hard drive off the Usenet News, because it meant I could develop code on my Mac Plus without being limited to two floppy drives and no hard drive.

    Sure, a faster machine would mean faster compiles - but how much of your time is spent waiting for a compile, as opposed to the time you spend thinking about your code?

    The great nightmare that all the hardware vendors have is that the day will come when everybody realizes their machines are fast enough, so they don't need to upgrade anymore. The result of this is that both Apple and Microsoft are putting more and more CPU-intensive eyecandy into their products, to burn up those cycles.

  • Ah, but there is another . . . (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Mad Duke ( 222354 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @08:01PM (#8334621)
    The Fact Checkers at the Philly Inq missed something: there is another movie based on a Gibson short story - "The New Rose Hotel". Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and the delectable (OMFG where does that tattoo end) Asia Argento. The film was a commercial failure - it's rather slow and amateurish, but it's much better than that awful Keanu/Ice-T mess. I have the DVD right here in my sweaty little hand. Excuse me, gotta go watch Asia in the swimming pool again. Oh, and many thanks to my old buddy Marrow who gave me his copy.

  • Like Gibson? Read Vernor Vinge (Score:5, Interesting)

    by puzzled ( 12525 ) on Thursday February 19, 2004 @08:47PM (#8335125) Journal


    Gibson is great, so is Stephenson, but if you like either one of them you should branch out and read Vernor Vinge.

    Vinge wrote True Names way back when - *the* seminal work for hacker culture.

    That work alone would make the man's efforts worthwhile, but Across Realtime, A Fire On The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky just completely blow that one out of the water.

    If Gibson is working with his personal binoculars focused on the future, Vinge is doing the same thing using his own personal mental Hubble Telescope.

    Stop clicking that mouse, get up, and get yourself to a bookstore RIGHT NOW!!!

  • have you done iti (Score:5, Funny)

    by onShore_Jake ( 80260 ) on Friday February 20, 2004 @12:08AM (#8336666) Journal
    you are not truly a Nerd until you have hacked the Garbage file of a Gibson. You never know what you'll find. Rumor has it that that is where the leaked Windows code is from.

  • the father of cyberpunk (Score:4, Insightful)

    by daddy norcal ( 734037 ) on Friday February 20, 2004 @12:28AM (#8336768) Homepage

    Gibson is one of the all time great sci-fi storytellers.

    To this day neuromancer remains one of the best sci-fi tales of the modern age. Reading it for the first time when I was 13, I didn't understand it all. In fact I didn't understand most of it until I had re-read it a few times. Perhaps this is why it was not a critical success immediately. Either way, they eventually came around, and within two years the book had won the [worldcon.org] big [philipkdickaward.org] three [sfwa.org].

    The real reason I loved the book as a kid was because of Case! He was one of the guys who made me want to grow up to be a code cowboy (even if I didn't come close). Gibson gave the nerd a sexy and dangerous side that put the cyberpunk genre on the map, soon after every would be 'hacker' was longing for 'cyberspace' just like Case was:

    A year [in Japan] and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.... He'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hot el, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.'

    A master at the top of his game.

  • 10 years ago I chatted briefly with him... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DerProfi ( 318055 ) on Friday February 20, 2004 @01:00AM (#8336995)
    at some lackluster book signing (can't even remember which book) he was attending at a store in Washington DC. I asked him to sign my copy with "Dear Stranger, Sorry I had this book printed in such a terrible typeface. It won't happen again, Thanks, WG" He got mock-defensive and I apologized profusely at which point he grinned and talked with me for several minutes about why he had selected what he called the "East Berlin Street Sign Font", most of which I proceeded to forget although I do remember that he mentioned something about having traveled there shortly after the wall came down. I doubt I'll ever come face-to-face with another well-known writer who's cool enough to talk to some random schmoe the way he did, so mad love to you, Bill! And there ends the one and only semi-namedropping post I could ever hope to make on Slashdot...

    Oh, and he chose to sign my book with a simple "BAD TYPE! William Gibson".

    Smart-ass...

    PS, anyone checking out his oevre should definitely not miss his short stories

  • From Neuromancer to Pattern Recognition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Friday February 20, 2004 @06:39AM (#8338133) Journal
    I am amongst the many people who were quite dissapointed with pattern recognition. One could, however, have seen it coming for quite a while now as his second trilogy, the Bridge series, was quite a step down in terms of interest (who really cared about the bridge), innovation (wow, vr glasses and vrml websites!! how cool) and tension (the pro assassin is sort of like a gap model with a knife).

    The things that really made Neuromacer and Count Zero for me (MLO was starting to get boring, somehow) were the grimy, gritty texture of the settings (this got translated marvelously into the matrix), the interesting characters (Case, Molly, the Finn, The Count etc) who were all from a criminal strata, the plot that is extremely well thought out and paced, the AI's (Neuromancer and Wintermute make excellent characters) and his ability to describe minute details in a setting that could conjure up a visible image of the room or place in one's mind.

    So what if there weren't any cell-phones. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973 and used musical tech from that era, and I still love it.

    Even in the bridge trilogy there were parts which were true Gibson where he was describing the hard luck times of the male hero working for the store as a security man.

    I think that what started Gibson off on his journey of boredom is when he had made enough money to no longer have to write at his very best level, in order to survive. He started then writing about rich boring people.

    Perhaops about the time he became one too.

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