Perhaps my favorite piece of Gibson. It's echoed with me every time I travel for... 18 years now?
"Tuesday, February 04, 2003
OUT AND ABOUT, WITHOUT A LAPTOP
Day two, still not very far from home but starting to see that blogging on the fly and in internet cafes is probably not the best way to keep this updated. Though on the other hand I suspect I get to see more things because I don't travel with a camera. In the peculiar mobile fishbowl of a book tour, the only time I'd have to use a laptop would be the time I have to sit alone, staring blankly into space. I suspect that those moments serve some vital function."
Written on his blog [0] while he was touring for Pattern Recognition(?). His blog is still the most Gibson thing I've read, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Edit: Because I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't mention it. If you're a Gibson fan, read "New Rose Hotel" [1] and watch the film [2].
Heh. I bought Pattern Recognition and got Gibson to sign it on that tour. Not knowing how book tours worked I asked him if he'd seen $local_thing_our_town_is_known_for. "Are you kidding?" he said. "This is a book tour. I don't have time to take a piss."
The tour period entries (Jan to ?) read like someone who obviously hates traveling on book tours, but does it because it's part of the job, and is also kind of fascinated by dissecting his own discomfort.
Everything before was more a collection of weird stuff he learned or was linked to that day.
Thank you, I thought this blog was gone from the internet. His site at one point had a fairly active message board attached to it and I was sad when that went along with what I remember was some sort of author-bloggy appendage.
You're a legend. I've already lost an hour and a half reading these posts. There are 7 years of them!
"In Pattern Recognition, the only physical environments I can think of that evoke Cornell boxes are the basement arcade off Portobello Road, where Cayce sees the book’s first Michelin Man, and Boone’s ex-girlfriend’s rather too perfect apartment in Hongo, and, possibly, Baranov’s fetid caravan. None of these are felt as sympatico environments for Cayce.
But there may be another sort of Cornell box there, in the form of F:F:F, the website where Cayce and her friends have been discussing the footage, in the months before the book begins. I think that’s an improvement, though, as a website can become a Cornell box full of friends. Having seen that happen elsewhere, and been a part of it myself, my best hope for this site would be that, for some of you at least, that will happen for you here. (If it does, it won’t have much to do with me, and everything to do with you.)"
In his book "Pattern Recognition" he spends the first page and half describing jet-lag in such brilliant manner that you feel like you just experienced art.
Unfortunately I feel his plot/stories never seem to hold up.
I will always consider him an artist. Something to savor. I've always felt that it was superior to true 'literature' in that each word is a morsel that adds to the whole and not up to the interpretation of the reader.
"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."
It's an apt metaphor. Your internal clock is in a different time zone than you, and each day it comes a bit closer, until you and your internal clock are at last in sync.
Souls don't exist, but the metaphor of something slower catching up to you is nicely done IMO.
You also spend those days feeling utterly unlike yourself, in a new environment that is perhaps subtly, perhaps radically different than home. You feel distinctly unmoored and if there could be a collective unconscious psychically linking us to those around, then surely it must take a little while to get plugged into such a thing.
Most of my co-workers who have met me in person would describe me very differently to the few co-workers with whom I share the same continent. Jet lag changes my personality so significantly.
For me, it's the casual way in which he introduces new concepts and words, not breaking the flow of the sentence, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine their meaning as the story unfolds and paints a fairly convincing picture of the near future.
The friend who introduced me to Gibson was also lyrical about the jet lag passage, but I remember thinking that traveling North-South would be a counter example. Anyway, it is well written.
Ironically, this is something that I know has turned a ton of people off cyberpunk.
I suspect there's a deep bifurcation between people who are intrigued by mystery (e.g. new language) and people who are made uncomfortable by it.
When it's done right though, it strikes that good mystery novel tone for me: enough detail and context to be tantalizing and whet the intellectual appetite, but not so little or so much as to break disbelief or flow.
It is indeed an incredibly hard balance to strike, and I'm one of those people turned off from a lot of other science fiction where it's done ham-handedly. What Gibson nails so consistently is literary naturalism: his made-up words sound like things people would plausibly say without feeling ridiculous; he's a master forger of linguistic currency.
Someone once told me that early electronic music was good, because it was composed by non-electronic composers searching for a way to extend the art.
Science fiction feels very similar. If you read the earliest stuff (including subgenres like cyberpunk), you get authors who were looking to go beyond. Later, you get a mix of them and trend writers.
To me the thing that he does well is break down where understanding comes from: (1) pre-context, (2) "literary naturalism" (great phrase!), (3) context, & (4) post-context.
Sometimes, it's not critical that a reader understands 100% of a concept exactly where it's introduced, and by establishing less than that, tension can be created.
I guess it's treating your reader as another character in your writing, and understanding that just as your in-fiction characters have different levels of understanding at various times in the plot, so can your reader.
Personally, it feels very satisfying when a piece of understanding clicks into place later, and I hit 100% on (insert new concept here).
A lot of early cyberpunk also works because the authors were explicitly following noir/hardboiled styles, which are pretty straightforward and easy to "hang a story" on to. Some of the weaker sci-fi I've read fails to have any coherent structure and is instead just a jumble of random (but interesting) ideas.
It won't, sorry. A lot of 70s-80s sci has aged really badly - not because of technology turning out differently but because the stories were built around stock characters that were cliches at the time they were written.
I also found ringworld pretty unreadable. But I guess thats mostly because I find the world that is being built too hilarious and unbelievable. It lacks a sort of seriousness that cyberpunk usually doesn't.
This didn't start with cyberpunk, though. In fact it is a hallmark of your average pulp-era SF story to abuse neologisms mercilessly (often in combination with Deus Ex Machina and other cliches).
The New Wave in the 70s consciously broke with the past by (among other efforts) eschewing neologisms, but writers (and editors) in other periods/subgenres have, generally, gone for a balanced approach.
That "causal way" is one of my deep pleasures reading short stories. The format's constraints discourage authors from spelling everything out. Assumes reader is smart, leaves more to the imagination.
The opposite of Andy Weir's The Martian, which is the best technical manual I've ever read about potatoes.
The opening two sentences stick with me, with respect to apt jet-lag description:
"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
Stephenson occasionally fields questions about his endings in talks. Here's one of them, from his Google talk for the Anathem book tour [1]:
Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it.
A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently.
But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things.
...
So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.
For me, the endings meme really is that - I don't see what people are complaining about.
I don't mind Stephenson's endings. I feel like there are to many authors out there that write until they lose interest in the story then force themselves to bang out another 50-100 pages in order to give the story a 'proper' ending. Steven King comes to mind, I find most of his longer books just reach a point were the stories momentum just stops and feels like it is being dragged to the finish line.
I've read a fair bit of Stephenson, and have never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings. I enjoy reading his stories enough that I still read (and have re-read) them. Maybe it's that I want more from the characters, or an epilogue lunch at shawarma palace (or, more appropriately, Uncle Enzo's Pizza) where they show things returning to normal.
The closest thing I've encountered to that in film is the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. (SPOILERS) It's _very_ abrupt. And yet, when I think about it, it feels masterful -- there's nothing that could have been added between the climax and the ending that would have made it better. Objectively it seems really good, but it's _shocking_ in how abrupt it is, and as a viewer it took me some time to reconcile between "I hate that" and "that's probably brilliant".
> I've ... never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings
It seems to me that that sort of satisfaction isn't what Stephenson is going for, but rather if his works can be said to have any consistent theme it is that narrative threads (plot, history, etc.) overlap but aren't aligned, so no matter when you start or stop at least some of those threads are going to be in the middle.
Crypto's ending is still better than Snow Crash's (though I prefer SC overall). Someone sent me a great meme yesterday showing the back half of the horse fully drawn and the front half barely a stick figure of a horse and the back half said "Stephenson starting a book" and the front was "Stephenson finishing a book." I dunno if I've ever seen a truer meme in my life.
I love the first chapter of Snow Crash, it brilliantly establishes the world, the tone and (the) Protagonist. There’s a breathless pacing that makes it incredibly fun to read aloud. The rest I can do without.
It is also a possibly a (sort-of) sequel to Snow Crash.
There are hints all over the Diamond Age that refer to Snow Crash;
> "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
> "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
> "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
I would not have people start with that book. It's easy to get confused. It is very tough to get through some parts (unless you've read it multiple times and are a super-fan).
I find the message very interesting: culture is technology. He has such strong libertarian characters in every novel, he also shows that: "being strong but along makes you weak" (Mel being captured and trussed up). His cultural superiority explanation falls apart slightly in two ways: Victorian culture is lacking (the point of the Mel experiment) and the three girls have completely different outcomes from their "Primer education". (or maybe Victorian culture just needs to evolve).
I'm not sure how I feel about the Victorians battling the (barbarian) Chinese and the very feudal class structure.
Anathem has easily his most complete ending, where there's even something of an epilogue after the plot threads are wrapped up, but sadly a lot of the stuff after it was a bit of a regression either in quality of ideas or of ending or both.
(Anathem hides the central plot elements of the book until at least halfway through, though, which could be offputting on its own if you don't click with the world-building before that. But personally I greatly prefer that to the pedestrianness of a Reamde or Fall or even the front end of Seveneves.)
At least that one ended in a burst of new threads for my imagination to chew on; the second half of Fall slowly dwindles into the petty, boring squabbles of gods, leaving a ton of more interesting questions unasked and unanswered.
Yikes! I'd decided to take a pass on anything he's written unless it received unanimous critical acclaim after slogging through Seveneves and not even finishing Reamde, so it's kind of sad to hear that things aren't getting better.
The beginning of Seveneves is pretty bad, but the rest of the book makes up for it. It's as if the first part of the book exists soley to set up the plot and characters for the second part of the story which is where the interesting bits are.
I’m convinced the ending (and other parts) of Cryptonomicon were inspired by A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, but I have no evidence to support this claim.
Huh—I'd have said Cryptonomicon's the only one of his I've read that didn't turn into a directionless mess halfway through, and/or have a bad ending. Also read The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Anathem.
I just finished _Reamde_ and was, overall, fairly satisfied with the way the story built towards the conclusion. It moves in unexpected directions, but I enjoyed the entire ride.
I keep hearing & reading enough good things about that one that I'll likely check it out eventually. I kinda swore him off after The Diamond Age gave me the novel but unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author, but if/when I backslide on that Reamde will probably be what does it.
Reamde is basically gun porn (in the same way Seveneves was orbital dynamics porn) with a protracted hostage situation for plot tension and some videogaming/spy craft stuff thrown in for flavor. Not really sci-fi IMO.
I was angry at him for taking such an excellent start to a novel, and then spending... what, 300, 400 more pages, just wasting it.
I think the part where the anger really took over, as my main feeling toward and about the novel, was a scene he wrote that exists only to have one character explain another character's motivation "to them"—but actually to us, because we'd spent the last 1/3 or so of the novel with a character whose motivations and behavior didn't seem consistent, like Stephenson had recycled the early-in-the-book character straight into another role that was actually a whole different character, without explanation, without transition, without foreshadowing, without the character themselves seeming to reflect on their own change (which might have justified this scene), without doing the work to make it fit. Moreover, and as a sign of just how "whoops better patch that up without actually putting in any effort" that was, the explanation is entirely lame and unconvincing.
It felt like a chapter that got inserted because test readers or his editor went "WTF?" about all that, and it was just so, so lazy and bad, and retroactively made the treading-water-and-pointless-but-not-offensive middle section of the book worse, to know that, no, it wasn't going somewhere good, Stephenson just wrote it poorly and now, at the end, he's lazily writing his way out of his own mess, rather than fixing it.
(this is the scene between—and I'm a little fuzzy on the characters, as this was years ago—the Chinese emperor-dude and the father who tried to get an off-books Primer for his daughter, from the beginning of the book, with the scene in question occurring, IIRC, near the beginning of what you might call the last act)
I've read all, and Anathem and the Diamond Age remain favorites. They had clearer direction than Cryptonomicon to my mind, which meanders a tad more. I recall a chapter with characters reading a memo/email from a guy explaining his stockings fetishism.
I’ve found Stephenson a mixed bag, I enjoyed his early work, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and Reamde was fine. However Ive struggled to enjoy his more recent work, I’m usually excited to see a book coming, but recent works seem to lack something for me.
I gave up on Stephenson at Quicksilver. I didn't like Cryptonomicon, but liked his previous work so I gave Quicksilver a try. It's very rare that I don't finish a book, but I didn't finish that one.
Funny, because I love the baroque cycle. The enormity of it, and how it feels you can just go to this world and look around as the story meanders in the background.
Now that you say it, I think his later books spend too much time on "putting you into the world" and not enough time of actually interesting things happening in the world for my tastes.
I lived that series. I think his books depend on how much time you can devote to them. If you can read for hours on end the. They are great, you can really immerse yourself in them. They are not books you can read a few pages of every now and then.
The same with Seven Eves. Absolutely amazing book, but you better enjoy it while you're reading, the end feels like your book has missed the last pages.
Makes me think of the common saying when comparing two writers: 'X tells a better story, but Y tells a story better.'
Gibson is pretty deep in the 'tells a story better' category.
I found Neuromancer to be quite a frustrating read, as if the author is trying so hard to be cool. I understand that he invented a whole sub genre which is cool but for me the engagement with the characters was zero and the introduction of new ideas without context made me feel as lost as one of his characters.
Interesting, Neuromancer is by far my favorite Gibson book. I feel like I'm generally very sensitive to authors trying to hard, and I dont get that vibe, although I think I can see how it can be construed that way.
Neuromancer was (i think) a ground up creation of that world Sprawl/BAMA etc. Personally I always find characters / places the best when you experience them as they are and don't get the explanation, which when attempted is inevitably less interesting than what you might imagine. The later books in the sprawl series (Count Zero I believe and another one whose name I can't remember) felt much more one dimensional to me.
I agree on the later books of the first trilogy (last one's Mona Lisa Overdrive) - they didn't leave as much an impression on me as Neuromancer did. Following trilogies were probably much more pre-organized than the first.
Hmmm. It'd be a neat litmus test for you to read The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon. Those are books from a very different time/aesthetic compared to Neuromancer but, in their own way, also defined their genre by being so tryhard they became sublime. It'd be interesting to see if you have a similar reaction to either of them--have you read those?
I wish Gibson would exclusively write short stories or even aphorisms. His brilliance is in how he builds a world in offhand comments. The overall narratives tend to be boilerplate sci-fi, unfortunately. I've read the first ±50 pages of Neuromancer a few dozen times, but quickly lose interest in the story after the narrative really gets going.
I think it would be hard to do what he does and also have tidy plots. I love thinking about his relationship to the Matrix; I believe his take was correctly something in the realm of -- "I mean, this is obviously me but also perhaps better in most ways" (especially as it followed Johnny Mnemonic)
I've read most of his stuff and I'm not sure if I love or hate his writing. For one, I can't read any of his books just once. He seems to love having the reader confused for the first half of the book and lift the fog in the second half. If I really want to make sense of the story, I have to do a second reading and only then does the first half make any sense.
I just got Agency and this time I think I'm going to read as many plot summaries as I can find before I dive in. Maybe I can make sense of the book in one pass that way.
I was disappointed with Agency, it had almost a Dan Brown feel of a character grabbed and going and doing one thing after another to advance a narrative that doesnt pause long enough to let you question if it makes any sense. It does still have a Gibson-created world with lots of allusions that you have to piece together (this is one reason I like Gibson). When I read it, I didn't realize it was a sequel / second book in that world, so I don't know what more is obvious if you've already read the first book
I enjoyed Agency, having said that, there's a significant plot thread that is just resolved in a very offhand and uninteresting manner. There was a lot of similarity with The Peripheral as well, and there's what feels like forever in the middle where nothing happens except characters shuttle repeatedly between different locations without really knowing anything or doing anything actually significant. None of the viewpoint characters do all that much or have much 'agency'. All of the actually interesting stuff is happening offscreen.
I suppose it's strange to say I enjoyed it given those criticisms, but I do like his writing, and there are some fun ideas hidden in there too.
That's a recurring aspect of every single Gibson novel, arguably; the protagonists are mostly passive observers while other characters do things, usually behind the scenes.
Gibson's plot always follows this template. Some big shot with limitless financial resources hires the protagonist to do/find/learn something. The protagonist mostly just travels and chats with various people. Meanwhile, some kind of intrigue happens on the sidelines, but the main character actually ends up not doing anything that affected the plot. One of the few exceptions is Case who, while being a passive travel companion for most of the book, actually helps execute a hack.
In The Peripheral, this is taken to an extreme. Flynne doesn't do anything. The book starts her witnessing a crime. After that, she simply passively observes everything else. Flynne doesn't even control her own movements; at several points she's transported to a new location for her protection. And most of the action happens behind the scenes, and characters report back with progress on what's happened. It's such a weird novel.
As an aside, I read Agency when it came out, and today I couldn't remember a single thing about it. I can vaguely remember the plots of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. From there it gets fuzzy. Looking back at his output (which I've read everything of), I find his books simply got increasingly less interesting and less memorable over time. His prose still shines, though.
There is a quote about Gene Wolfe’s writing that you can never read one of his books, you can only re-read it. Some people really like that type of writing, and some don’t.
I personally can’t imagine reading a plot summary before reading a Gibson, part of what makes his books interesting is looking back and realising which little incidental detail was the true pivotal thing in the book.
I find Gibson entertaining, but I often get the feeling, reading his novels, that I’m in a product showroom. He mentions brand names strangely often, and a commercial style of speech is constantly leaking into his prose. I remember a description (I don’t remember which novel) mentioning the “high thread count” of the sheets on someone’s bed. I never expected to see that phrase outside of a product description. I doubt that there’s actual product placement in his books, but it feels like it.
EDIT after reading replies: I agree with all the replies. I understood the brand-obsessed nature of the world he’s invoking. I may, however, have underestimated him, and not appreciated how he deliberately allows aspects of this universe to infect the authorial voice. Next time I read one of his books I’ll keep this in mind.
I also sometimes enjoy the immersion into particular products, when Gibson goes into details about something I’d never heard of, such as Maybach automobiles.
> Q Why do you seem obsessed with brand name apparel et al in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country?
> A You ain't seen nothing, yet! Actually the new one may explain that, a bit. Or just further convince some people that I'm obsessed. It's one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren't really that many of those. It's not about clothes, though, or branding; it's about code, subtext. I was really delighted, for instance, to learn who made George Bush's raincoats. A company in Little Rock (now extinct, alas) but they were made of Ventile, a British cotton so tightly woven that you can make fire hoses (and RAF ocean survival suits) out of it. Which exists because Churchill demanded it, because the Germans had all the flax production sewn up. No flax, no fire hoses for the Blitz. The cultural complexities that put that particular material on Bush's back delight me deeply; it's a kind of secret history (and not least because most people would find it fantastically boring, I imagine).
If that's from the Blue Ant trilogy, it's intended to have that effect.
The underlying themes have a lot to do with individuality in a sea of hyperconsumerism. It's been a minute, but I think the Bridge trilogy also started nudging in that direction. Gibson likes to crib off emerging trends.
Which is probably why he'd already abandoned writing hacker heroes by the 90s. (Bridge Laney having a somewhat different gift)
> I think the Bridge trilogy also started nudging in that direction.
Yes, but in a slightly different way. For example there is a scene in Virtual Light where one character is listening to another complain about how "you can't tell the difference anymore between the 'programs' and the 'commercials,' whatever that meant".
Well one or two of his books specifically have characters who care a lot about those things and its a defining characteristic of them and its also a commentary on society and the obsessiveness of brands. Very similar to American Psycho but with a little more nuance.
Did you think you were being subtly compelled to purchase the products mentioned? There's a big difference between Jack Links beef jerky getting 5 second of screen time in World War Z and defining a character by their obsession with brands.
Oh boy is that ever a rabbit hole. There are probably dozens of extremely high-end, obsessively detailed labels that produce replica and Americana-inspired garments. Good resource if you are interested further: https://www.styleforum.net/threads/the-japanese-repro-clothi...
It's almost like that style of commercialized prose forces you to recognize it as such and reflect on how crass it really is. And then you realize that that kind of dialogue is pretty much the one you are having with yourself 24/7, involuntarily, due to how mediated our experience is by commercial interests.
Or maybe we just go back to building our adtech stuff, and the system marches on and on.
There is a criticism about Gibson that generally runs: his prose is nicely developed, but there’s little future in his writing as he spends so much effort mining extant niche products/ideas. He might live on the front edge of now - but it’s still now.
IIRC in an interview Gibson tells how one of his early artistic experiences was in a high-school draft class where they had to make meticulous drawings of everyday objects like pencils, including as much detail as possible.
For me, this remains one of the most interesting studies in literary imagery, and one that only gets more interesting with time. By the 1990s, of course, TVs tended to show an RGB#0000FF blue when given an unusable signal – something which itself has largely died out over the past two decades with modern TVs reverting to black instead of blue.
And yet... there's no mistaking the visual evoked by these opening lines. Even if you didn't grow up with over-the-air broadcast TV on a cathode-ray tube, the words "dead channel" are equally of their era and ground the book in its analog-and-early-digital milieu. The real timelessness comes in the juxtaposition of old, malfunctioning electronics and the natural environment: a pitch-perfect image to introduce the world of the Sprawl.
I don't live in the US and I never saw a dead channel on TV in the 90s. As I read your comment I suddenly wasn't sure which was meant anymore, so I found this on Reddit:
> Gibson imagined an ancient TV ... that grey/green haze as the tube warmed to a channel that was 'active', but sending no programming. A 'dead' channel.
> Most kids in the 90's imagined the static of a TV of THEIR childhood, when not tuned to any channel, just projecting a grey/white static. Gibson has often corrected people that this was NOT the 'Dead Channel' he was referring to.
> Now, of course, a new generation is imagining a sickly bright blue ... probably the last generation to really know what a 'TV' is, when it connected to something called a 'channel'.
If you like this kind of richly visual writing you should really read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It is a deeply unsettling book but it's an absolute literary masterpiece.
It took me three attempts to make it to the end, because the violence is so... much. But once you manage to ... let's say "transcend" that, it is a very rewarding experience. I absolutely adore how McCarthy manages to evoke such graphic imagery with such sparse prose (both the violent parts and the landscapes), plus the Judge just has got to be the best antagonist in the history of literature.
And the ending has a certain magic I have not found words for. Strangely serene. I suspect there is some symbolism or reference I am missing.
Gibson discusses the opening in the foreword to the latest edition of Neuromancer [1]:
"It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism, right at the very start of my career in the imaginary future.
But an invisible one, interestingly; one that reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel”."
This comment makes me feel old. I immediately knew he was talking about static, but I suppose if you didn't grow up with pre-digital terrestrial TV, you wouldn't be familiar with that.
as remarked on in homage by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere:
> The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
I think this first sentence is my favorite part of all of Neuromancer and my favorite opening sentence of any novel.
Neuromancer didn't seem so earth-shattering to me when I read it. Cool but not overly engaging, I guess. I was quite young when I read Neuromancer and I want to read it again though, to see if I can get more out of it.
I’m in my 30’s, and read it for the first time this year. I thought it was amazing. More amazing than the book itself was all the influences on pop culture I encountered as I read it. I think as great as the book is it’s influence has been far greater.
Funny coincidence as I am reading a novel that I have been putting off for decades, Neuromancer. Which I discovered after playing the game with the same name on C=64 as a kid.
I loved the rendering of the cyberspace, the combat logic, the story and all.
There are complete walkthrough now on youtube if you don’t want to go through all of it. The Amiga version was very nice graphically.
I would love to see a GOOD Neuromancer movie. That would bring me back in the theatre.
Don't forget there's a trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The other books are just as good, if not better.
Although be prepared that if you like it too much, there's no more. Gibson typically tires of writing in one style for more than three books.
PS: There's an excellent New Rose Hotel movie that no one has ever seen. Highly recommend reading the short story and watching it. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/
> Although be prepared that if you like it too much, there's no more.
Well, there's (most of) the short stories in Burning Chrome, and I don't think the break is that huge for the bridge trilogy. It's a different future from Neuromancer, though.
Then again I've yet to read anything by Gibson I didn't like, including the most recent books. So I might not be the best guide...
I recommend looking into Bruce Sterling, if you enjoy Gibson - particularly Islands in the Net (if you can find it! I ended up buying an expensive used copy online) and Holy Fire.
AFAIK, most of the Burning Chrome short stories were originally published before the Sprawl novels, then later collected in the anthology? (Side note: you can buy original 80s copies of Omni magazine with the first publication for pretty cheap off eBay)
Other authors I've enjoyed, coming off Neuromancer-type Gibson:
Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies). Closest in tone. For god's sake don't watch the Amazon series for plot.
Effinger comes up on a lot of lists, although I haven't read it myself yet.
Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, The Children of the Sky). Space opera instead of cyberpunk, but shares early Gibson's "incremental exposition," where you figure things out gradually vs all at once.
Tbh, I think the best cyberpunk was always in short story form, and mostly before 1990.
> AFAIK, most of the Burning Chrome short stories were originally published before the Sprawl novels
I didn't actually realize any of the short stories came out after Neuromancer (1984)(or indeed that the omnibus(1986) did) - but a few were later works:
I actually like the blue ant trilogy better. It was the first novels I read after 9/11 that factored it into the story in a realistic and reasonable way.
The magic of Neuromancer is not just the story, it's in how its written.
An average sentence carries as much information and visuals as a whole paragraph in a more ordinary book. The data per character rate is absolutely insane, there's nothing quite like it. It's like reading a zip file. So fucking cool.
This aspect of the book will be next to impossible to capture in a movie... least you'd be expected to pause every few seconds to decipher what you see and what's going on.
So the chances for a movie adaptation that really groks the book are zero. But perhaps it's for the best.
When I finally got around to picking up a copy of Neuromancer, the book was so small that I was concerned that there was an abridged version that I had somehow wound up with and looked up the page count online. Nope, just turns out that that's how Gibson writes. Love his style though, it's amazing how much he's able to accomplish with so little.
At least you have the Johnny Mnemonic movie which I have watched and enjoyed several times since I had it on a VHS tape I bought. BTW, 30 seconds ago, I re-purchased it in digital form from the Google Play Store.
Nice article, but I would have liked it to include a catalog of all of Gibson's prescient details in his masterpiece trilogy. Beyond Cyberspace, the one that seems to resonate the most as we look into our future with today's lens is the coming Methuselah uber-wealth elites that Yuval Noah Harari details in his books.
Although Stephenson has his moments, I don't think we have seen any writer that has come close to either Phillip K. Dick or Gibson - and that includes post-trilogy Gibson.
I really like Gibson's prose and also, in my imagination, his almost-no-government, corporate enclave centered world is (probably unfortunately) the pattern for future life. Corporations and elites have won class warfare (control of media and political parties - game over), nothing is going to change that, so accepting life as is, I am very curious what our transition into the future will look like.
I find it interesting that write realistic near-future sci-fi with social commentary — the kind we had so much of during the 1960s and 1970s, with John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Disch, and so on — is so rare these days. Off the top of my head, I can't think of many: Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Omar El Akkad, any others?
I recently read an NPR article [1] about the best sci-fi and fantasy of the past decade. With one exception (El Akkad's American War), it's pretty much all space opera or similar. I guess Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven isn't, but I haven't read it.
I’ve thought about that as well. The only addition I can think of to your short list is Ada Palmer, I highly recommend her Terra Ignota series for social commentary and some refreshing optimism - and flying cars.
All these name drops makes me think we should have another "Best Sci-Fi" post/thread. I recall a past HN discussion based on top sci-fi according to reddit, which led me to Greg Egan's Permutation City - one of the best recommendations I've gotten in a while.
That one haunts me. I wish someone with the required talent would make it into a movie. It would be really creepy and depressing but I could not get enough of it.
I love Miéville (well, his good stuff; his B roll not so much). But he's always going to be below Gibson on my ranking because Miéville's worlds and characters, while rich and innovative and unique and fascinating and and ... all seem so deeply _hopeless_ to me.
It's ironic. Gibson writes about hypercapitalist dystopias (present or future), often starring burnouts and addicts, but manages, through all the grit and suffering, to often hint that things still tend towards hope--even if only in small, human ways--despite the overly cynical tone of the world: the AI ascendant, heroes tropily settled down. Miéville, on the other hand, writes of worlds packed with magic and intrigue and hypertrophic growth, but often ends his plots (deliberately, I think) on a hopeless, stagnant note.
There are exceptions to both trends in each author's bibliography, to be sure, but it's a really pronounced juxtaposition (at least for me).
I found his prose kind of boring actually. Like trying to listen to a physics lecture, but it's delivered as an ASMR track. Way too caught up in its own awesomeness to actually efficiently communicate anything.
That's not to say I don't like dense prose. Borges is fantastic and I have to read his stories carefully, one sentence at a time, but there is a ton of information packed in to very few words.
I really like the way Gibson invents language and does so expertly enough that he can just use it without explanation and I feel clever for being able to follow it, which is almost certainly part of the trick. I think it gives extra weight to whatever his point happens to be. I can't think of anyone else who does it just now. Any suggestions? Doesn't have to be sf.
It's not new, but I just read Neverness by David Zindell. I had a similar feeling with his invented language. He actually does it so realistically that sometimes I couldn't tell when the words were invented and when they were just archaic.
The only other author I know of would be William Shakespear. Many find him harder to follow of course, but the words he invented aren't any harder than the rest.
That's a fair point but the effect is wildly different for the reader or audience in the modern world. Where Gibson's invented language invokes a mood with a very different language you can still follow, Shakespeare's language became common usage to the point of sounding cliched. He's even named his loverboy character "Romeo!" - a real quote from highschool. Kind of different to reading how someone interfaced, jacked, punched deck, couldn't proj etc. It's been decades so my examples are probably in need of some work but I guess they stayed with me that long.
Can someone be a literary genius and suck at writing? I guess so. Prescient? Inventive? Sure. But good lord his prose is turgid. A while back, I tried to read his 'best' books and all I could reason about their popularity is that here was an author for adult adolescents. The excerpts from this article seem almost chosen on purpose to illustrate how bad it is.
SF is a tough genre to swallow. If that's the question I can't offer you much without qualification. Gibson is a particularly egregious desecrator of English but only one. The genre gravitates to pulp. These are fantasy novels not just in their imaginary worlds, but in their imaginary psychology. Pulp fetishizes thin, simplified inner lives and relationships. That's as much part of the escapism as the tech. Enjoy it if you can but if you don't know what good prose is already, you won't learn it from Gibson.
If you love Gibson's prose I'm not sure what to recommend. Maybe you'd enjoy James Joyce, or Kerouac or Burroughs maybe. If you love fiction generally there are all the great novels to read.
For me-- I loved Neuromancer(which I've read multiple times), but thought his other books were very meh, very forgettable.
That said, his writing style is great. Most sci-fi (and fantasy) seem to love a lot of padding-- 300+ page books of which 200 is fluff. Gibson wrote comparatively short and sharp books- no unnecessary exposition, no character spending 3 pages describing the city, or admiring themselves in the mirror so we can learn about the strange alien races.
I wish more scifi books were short and quick/easy to read.
Well certainly Phillip K. Dick wrote a lot of short stuff.
It's from an earlier era but a lot of his great stuff was very short stories.
And yet a Scanner Darkly really dragged for me...
Overall though I agree, a shocking amount of modern sci-fi seems to be full of needless details where the author tries to prove to you that they're really smart and so on. Project Hail Mary was REAL bad about that, despite having an overall great story.
Peter F Hamilton has entered the chat. He has great plots, but they’re buried under so much unnecessary detail, reading his books is like an archaeological dig. Unless you really want to know in excruciating detail what every character, no matter how minor, had for breakfast.
Many books should be edited down. Neal Stephenson is a prime example of getting away with leaving in so much mediocre stuff that it drags down the quality of his books, even though he can be brilliant too.
My favorite Murakami book so far is "South of the Border" - and I'm not sure "Norwegian Wood" could not have been made even better with a few (only a few !) cuts.
> (the “normcore” aesthetic of the 2010s can convincingly be traced to the habits of a Gibson character who’s “allergic” to brands)
Normcore as I understand it is not averse to brands, and its spirit seems inconsistent with the character's unique look and obsessive attention to detail in her own outfits and accessories, but setting that aside, I'm struck by the implicit claim that Pattern Recognition could have had greater reach than No Logo by Naomi Klein, which came out a few years earlier and plugged into contemporary determination to personally resist the power of multinational corporations that was being amplified through globalization. No Logo was certainly a more famous book, but it's possible that an order of magnitude more people actually read Pattern Recognition and that it directly influenced the personal fashion of more people. If so, that would be a remarkable testament to the power of a fun read from a bestselling author. I any case I'd be interested in reading about how someone traced William Gibson's influence on fashion trends.
I was positively obsessed with (and still hold dear) Gibson's early works, especially the short stories, but the Idoru trilogy somehow bored me. Not sure whether his storytelling changed or my tastes did.
I love how (as Gibson himself has remarked) Neuromancer has become nearly impossible to read straightforwardly by younger readers because he failed to predict the ubiquity of cell phones and has the characters depend on landlines and pay phones for communication - to someone who's grown up with omnipresent cell phones their absence is baffling and seems like an intentional plot point building up to some twist that never comes.
I'm a superfan as well and I think the Blue Ant ones hold up the best. With a few years of context we can see now that he was really well ahead of the curve on a ton of stuff that is now our reality. When Cayce explains why she quit coolhunting she says that the world has begun to suffer a contagion wherein almost everybody is a coolhunter of some kind, and of course that did happen, but the publication of the book where she says this predates instagram by two or three years. Gibson was one of the first to point out how ubiquitous internet essentially killed the geographical subculture with its signature language of fashion and so on. They still exist, but on a smorgasboard of options presented by the twining together of internet and culture. The Bigends of our world will send global anything that looks promising, shorn of its physical context.
e: Molly Millions is the most iconic and famous Gibson character but I think Bigend, with his charm, machinations, drive to commodify art, etc, is the one really representing an archetype for our times.
>their absense is baffling
Well if they lack an imagination then that's not Gibson's problem. It would be like saying that they can't read fantasy because messages have to be delivered on horseback "why wouldn't they just have cell phones?" I hear them cry.
It could just be because the real world changed a lot between publishing Neuromancer and Virtual Light, but the Bridge trilogy in my view is way better than Neuromancer.
Gibson and Stephenson have different styles of writing. The comments throughout this thread are evidence enough. I could see many liking one over the other so I have a hard time taking your recommendation even though I'd like to.
I've wondered why more Gibson books aren't movies, or why when they're adapted, they're done so quite poorly. Some of his books would adapt quite nicely to hyperlink cinema. I'd also love to see the Safdie brothers try their hands at a Neuromancer adaptation. Their brand of over-adrenalized haphazard cinema would work well with Case's character.
> the “normcore” aesthetic of the 2010s can convincingly be traced to the habits of a Gibson character who’s “allergic” to brands
The Blue Ant books are some of my favorites, but I think that's quite a stretch. Cayce's character wasn't nearly widely enough read to be that influential.
It’s probably just me, but I found Neuromancer extremely hard to read. I forced myself to do it because the world building was so great, but I didn’t enjoy it a lot.
I tried to do the same for The peripheral, but just couldn’t.
Not for me I guess.
you can read today his books and forget they somehow were wroten full 20-30-40 years ago.
His books have almost every technology we have today, or we have some similar stuff, sometimes we still don't have some technology he mentions, but there are prototypes.
But the sociological aspect of the books are even more interesting.
There's a book from 1993, "Virtual Light", where a character mentions he remembers going to school and having to use mask and all sorts of cleaning stuff, there was a virus "in the air", the teacher then explained the kids the word "pandemy". The historical moment mentioned for that pandemy would aproximately be this and/or the 2030s
It gets a small (peripheral?) mention but The Jackpot books - The Peripheral and Agency are really good. They're going to be a series on Amazon Prime too.
I loved both the Jackpot books - the way the first one throws you in with no context whatsoever and slowly reveals itself. And I thought it interesting with Agency (possible spoilers) that the only characters with any actual agency were vastly intelligent military AIs or whatever post-human monsters Lowbeer and the rest of the Klept are. Mere humans never got a look in.
I think you're right there and I think it suffers from the political context in which it was written. The near future America of Peripheral was far stronger and more convincing, even politically, than the near future America of Agency.
Also, Peripheral described a dark, dilapidated countryside / suburbia which was a new landscape for Gibson. While Agency's stub differs significantly from ours but because it is closer chronologically maybe it felt uncanny?
Yeah I wasn't being precise sorry. The agency stub's similarities to our world felt too "on the nose" or similar, in a way that detracted from it being an accurate/enthralling depiction of our world (in the way that all sf is no matter when/where it's set). It's hard to phrase what I mean here but I think the countryside/suburbia might have something to do with it. "2060s USA: The Department of Homeland Security is an oppressive militia and also one of very few sources of stable employment" felt much more real and powerful than "Kinda 201X USA: Trump didn't win, but now there's a nuclear standoff" but I can't say why exactly. There is still a lot of classic Gibson prose in Agency though--the good stuff. High hopes for the new book.
Good job on nailing down one of the things I didn't like about Agency. I felt the world-building in The Peripheral was top-notch, and it felt Agency kind of threw that away and it made everything feel very muddy.
I don't know where to put this but I can't get through even a page of his writing.. like the first and overwhelming impression is of a narcissistic haze/stink. Like reading a fart.
I like most other science fiction.. what am I feeling here?
"Tuesday, February 04, 2003
OUT AND ABOUT, WITHOUT A LAPTOP
Day two, still not very far from home but starting to see that blogging on the fly and in internet cafes is probably not the best way to keep this updated. Though on the other hand I suspect I get to see more things because I don't travel with a camera. In the peculiar mobile fishbowl of a book tour, the only time I'd have to use a laptop would be the time I have to sit alone, staring blankly into space. I suspect that those moments serve some vital function."
Written on his blog [0] while he was touring for Pattern Recognition(?). His blog is still the most Gibson thing I've read, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Edit: Because I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't mention it. If you're a Gibson fan, read "New Rose Hotel" [1] and watch the film [2].
[0] http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2003/02/?m=1
[1] http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/hotel.txt
[2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/