How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real | Hacker News Reader

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real

newyorker.com

148 pointsfortran77132 comments

I've been waiting for his upcoming novel "Agency" to come out for a long time! https://www.amazon.com/Agency-William-Gibson/dp/110198693X

Excited to hear about this:

> “Agency” is a sequel to Gibson’s previous novel, “The Peripheral,” from 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, executive-produced by the creators of “Westworld.”

Well, I hope Westworld’s creators have learned meanwhile how to make it clear what and when it happens.

They really went and mucked it up after a fantastic season 1.

I thought The Peripheral was a really frustrating novel to read.

Many — perhaps most — of Gibson's novels have the main plot occur behind the scenes, with the principal character being a minor player a passive observer of events instigated by others, in particular by wealthy oligarchic figures with unlimited resources (think Armitage in Neuromancer, Bigend in the Blue Ant books, etc.). Think about what Case actually does in Neuromancer. He steals the ROM containing Dixie Flatline, and then... not much else. I loved Neuromancer when I first read it in the 1990s, but today a re-read makes it painfully obvious how much of the plot is on rails, with the main group of characters transported from location to location, ticking boxes on the heist checklist.

The Peripheral is an extreme example of this. Without spoiling anything serious, Flynne makes a pivotal conscious choice in the first chapter, and then for the rest of the book she does absolutely nothing other than being shipped around while other characters do stuff. She's even kidnapped at one point. The last two thirds of the book is spent mobilizing for a huge event that, at least to me, barely registers when it happens, and Flynne doesn't even seem necessary in order to resolve the central conflict, except that Gibson wanted her to be present. Flynne is not a badly drawn character, but she has very little agency.

I love Gibson's prose and his attention to world building and futuristic detail, which I think end up elevating his books above what the shoddy plots deserve, but even that seemed diminished in The Peripheral. The dialogue is particularly atrocious, with every present-day character speaking in the same annoying shorthand style. A lot of The Peripheral consists of people talking on the phone with each other and repeating known plot points to each other. There's a lot of lazy writing here for someone famous for their cool-sounding prose.

It has been my observation that some people are really bothered by structural or technical problems in storytelling—and, conversely, highly value structurally and technically sound stories—and others don't seem to notice at all.

This doesn't seem to be a trade-off thing either—I find that few things actually are, just as "the truth lies somewhere in the middle" is more fairy tale than dependable guide—that is, those who appreciate technically-sound storytelling aren't somehow deficient in appreciation of humor or good characterization or well-written dialog or whatever. They are just very bothered by sloppy or poor plotting, while other people don't even notice. (presumably there are also some who notice but do not care, though I believe they're a rare species)

> ...some people are really bothered by structural or technical problems in storytelling...and others don't seem to notice at all.

Good point. I was just thinking this while reading reviews from people who loved/hated Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. Some people focus on language/affect and others on plot/information.

Good distinctions. For fiction I usually read without noticing the scaffolding too much. It's my way to go to sleep. Then I started reading the blog by Steven Erikson after a few Malazan books and noticed how much time he purports to spend on getting sentences, paragraphs and sequences just right. I think that is the beauty in art. There are many layers to investigate. And then some focus on techniques, some on material, some on historical perspective. I think being able to easily get the views of others on arts is one of the big plusses of today.

For me, this is the one of the things that makes Gibson’s books fascinating. Feature, not a bug.

Often his stories are told from the points of view of three different characters, each of whom doesn’t fully understand what’s going on, and as events are generally instigated by vastly powerful AIs, corporations or ogliarchs, they have little power to do anything but hold on and try not to die.

The fun for the reader is to piece together the clues and work out the implications of what the characters are experiencing.

Sure; I'm not against the idea. But if you follow Gibson's entire oevre as a reader, it quickly becomes a very obvious, tiring pattern.

Gibson has a template, which goes: A wealthy, shadowy figure with nebulous intentions hires the main character, a professional of some sort, to investigate/seek out/collect something which isn't what it seems, and meanwhile machinations are happening behind the scenes, and at the end it appears the main character's purpose was peripheral and/or the intent was to lure some sought-after person to reveal themselves. The template becomes incredibly obvious once you recognize it.

Interestingly, for some reason Gibson makes the mechanics of his plots painfully transparent. Another favourite author of mine, Iain M. Banks, has a few books that, if you think about them, follow a similar pattern: The Player of Games, Against a Dark Background, The Hydrogen Sonata, and Consider Phlebas all have the main character trapped in a trajectory where they're effectively secondary to large-scale background machinations and all-powerful AIs. (Against a Dark Background is maybe the most Gibsonesque here, and is less satisfying as a result, while still being very enjoyable.)

One of Gibson's better books, I think, is Cont Zero — not a popular opinion, as far as I can tell — precisely because he eschews some of his normal narrative tics. But that novel also clearly justifies the lack of agency by following characters who are, from the outset, on the run from forces beyond their control.

And if the main character is called Case or Cayce then so much the better...

[quote]But if you follow Gibson's entire oevre as a reader, it quickly becomes a very obvious, tiring pattern.[/quote]

I don't know, it's refreshing. Too many books where the hero saves the world.

I've never read Gibson for the action, but for the world that slips through the cracks in the action. Not even the technological, the social.

Guess that's why I liked Pattern Recognition and its sequel as much as Neuromancer.

> The Peripheral is an extreme example of this.

Well, the title is "the peripheral". Maybe agency will be more important in, you know, "agency"? :)

I'm looking forward to it, at any rate.. Then again I really enjoyed peripheral.

This is not super-relevant to the article, but I thought I would mention:

It often strikes me that the opening line of Neuromancer, which is something like "The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel" must be losing its meaning to newer readers.

A recently penned introduction to Neuromancer (by Gibson, I think, though it might be by Neil Gaiman) points this out, as well as Gibson's failure to predict cell phones (which he is chagrined by).

Just the other day I was reading some early Neal Stephenson, and it made reference to 32-bit personal computers as being on the cutting edge. I guess you could read it as a period piece. Similarly, a novel about a computer that was written in the 1950s describes a machine a city block on a side, cooled by Niagra falls, with 1000 bits of storage, that somehow still forms the pillar of a surveillance society.

Novel writers are not the best predictors of technology, it would appear. That's okay.

>with 1000 bits of storage

Did anybody really write that? The first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby (1948), had 1024 bits of storage. Even assuming no miniaturization, just scaling up contemporary computers would have gotten you more than 1000 bits.

I forget the name of the book, but yes, they really did write that. It wasn't a mainstream author, if that matters.

(It might have been a megabit, but it sure wasn't much compared to what you need in order to run a computerized dystopia...).

> A recently penned introduction to Neuromancer (by Gibson, I think, though it might be by Neil Gaiman) points this out

It was Gaiman in his series introduction to the Penguin Galaxy [1] reprint in hardcover of Neuromancer, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Once and Future King, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Stranger in a Strange Land.

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGX/penguin-galaxy...

For reference: https://archive.org/details/AnalogStaticroyaltyFreeLoopingBa...

I think that line has survived quite well. In the 1980s, this implied flickering static noise. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the colour of missing input on TVs was often blue, which is perhaps less fitting the scene. But these days, a "dead channel" would presumably be interpreted as the TV not having any source input, and is often just black.

I wonder if modern readers would envision something like this: https://allhomosapienswelcome.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/when-...

I've been replaying Mass Effect 3 recently and there's a little story someone tells, which starts with "Sky was color of vid-cam turned to a dead vorcha." That gave me a great chuckle.

Ed: whoops, not Pratchett, Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

Xxxx xxxx

Terry Pratchett realized this... I can't find the quote now, but one of his books (Good Omens?) starts "The sky was the perfect blue of a television tuned to a dead channel..." (can't recall if "over the port" is in there).

You are thinking of 'Neverwhere', by Neil Gaiman!

Quite.

I've actually never been certain which thing it meant. I own some very old TVs that glow a sort of metallic gray color. Most TVs from the 70s and 80s have a sharp white-on-black snow pattern. In the 90s you got those weird solid blue screens. All seem like semi-reasonable skies, to me.

And similarly, I wonder how long HBO will stick to their logo animation, with the static - it's a strange anachronism now, and looks terrible in streamed format, since random noise is essentially incompressible.

Edit: I'm sure this is discussed back and forth ad nauseam at HBO...

I really enjoyed his most recent novel "Peripheral" and can't wait for his next one due out in January.

> An orange notebook, filled with intricate time lines for “The Peripheral,” was decorated with a sticker bearing the logo of the niche techwear brand Outlier—a black swan.

Outlier makes amazing clothing: https://outlier.nyc

Go figure his fashion sense was ahead of the time. He is wearing Acronym in the article's photo, which if you ask me, is the most compelling fashion brand on the entire planet.

Remember all that stuff about the Cayce Pollard Units :P

I always liked Acronym from a design perspective, but $2,000 for a basic jacket? Seems to me like minimalist street wear should be affordable by design.

i wouldn't call it basic - the materials and fixings are very very very expensive, and the actual patterns of the clothes are ungodly complex. cobrax buttons are ~$5 each for example.

Having watched a bunch of videos about their clothes out of curiosity, I have to say they do seem to make use of decent-quality materials, with the caveat that Gore-Tex never lasts as long as it's supposed to, and it's completely impossible to repair once it starts delaminating.

As for the cut and features, yeah they have a few cute tricks and features, but nothing to justify the hype and pricing.

You have to understand that our perception of fashion pricing is completely skewed by fast fashion. It is payed by slave labour and extremely poluting processes.

The 2000$ jacket is not wierd. The 50$ is.

I am not saying Acronym is super ecological or ethical (i dont know them). But with that pricetag there is atleast a chance. There is so much suffering behind new cheap clothes it is scary.

They are both weird IMO. Well-made, ethically-sourced jackets with high quality materials can be bought for like $200-$500. I understand the branding, exclusivity etc. that $2000 will buy, but saying that jackets need to cost that much isn't accurate.

You are right. Especialy if you are buying classic styles where there is no need for research/development than you can find quality + ethics + reasonable price (100s usd range).

Classic Australian-style oilskin jackets and dusters can be had for under $300 for a really nice model, or under $150 for an ordinary one, made in Australia from high-quality 10-12oz oilskin fabric. The fabric and design with a rain-shedding cape have proven themselves over generations of people making their living outdoors.

It will be heavier than a modern Gore-Tex design, and perhaps not quite as breathable. On the other hand it won't delaminate after a couple of years and become useless for bad weather, which happens to all Gore-Tex jackets I've owned, even nice rainjackets from Helly-Hansen and similar brands. You can repair and re-impregnate oilskin/oilcloth/waxed cotton with new wax yourself, and keep it for decades.

If I was going on a serious trekking/hiking/mountaineering trip, yes I would buy the modern lightweight technical clothing. But for use in ordinary rain and snow and everyday life, I'll stick with the oilskin coat and hat.

> The 2000$ jacket is not wierd.

It is weird. There has never been a time in the history of man where paying the equivalent of 2000 in 2019 dollars for a single jacket is normal, outside of the most elite members of society. Yes, "fast fashion" is at the other extreme, but there is a huge gulf between the cheap, low quality $50 jackets and the absurdly priced $2000 jackets.

From what iknow it was true forever before mid 19th century when mass industralization started.

Before that time every garment required fitting and people had very few of them because they were very expensive. They were used often times for decades thanks to care and repairs.

Jesus. You can get a bespoke suit made by OECD-state labor and with decent materials for less than it'd cost to put together a jacket + trousers combo from Acronym. Granted, yes, you could also spend way more than that if you want a particular, famous tailor shop to make it, but still.

You can, but Acronym don't sell bespoke suits. Those are relatively well understood in terms of design, while a lot of the Acronym stuff looks like it would have required quite a bit of RnD. Factor in a very niche target market, plus that the price is probably more of a selling point than a downside in that segment, and I guess you get that kind of pricing.

I'm certainly not buying myself, but I also don't think they're just selling regular clothes at a spectacular markup. Whether their garments are any good, I have no idea.

Well, it's sort of a truism that you pay more for less when it comes to fashion (and minimalism of other kinds, too...) But I'm glad Gibson can afford Acronym (and/or his connections are enough to swing him a free coat as an 'influencer'). Probably no single author has had such an impact on me, in hindsight.

It is a bit of a dystopian wet dream styling. No wonder the guy behind it helped doing fashion for Death Stranding.

I personaly think high tech fashion looks already a bit outdated but i would surely love to have some Acronym stuff. Unfortunately its way off my price range.

At $198 for a button-up short, I sure hope it's amazing.

actually quite affordable considering it's merino. not comparable to regular cotton shirts.

Maybe it's affordable for merino, but I disagree that it's not comparable to regular cotton shirts. A shirt is a shirt.

I posted it elswhere. Cheap clothes are travesty payed by unhuman labour and environment. Most stuff should cost 10x more. Probably 30x if you want to make it last long and be ethical. (we you should)

How do you arrive at those numbers? If clothes cost 10x what they do today but fabric costs didn't change, I'd most certainly be sewing nearly all my own clothes. Give that I'm a software engineer in the bay area, this strongly suggests to me that 10x is too high.

Fabric is also way too cheap.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/dyeing-text...

I closely know people working for some high end brands. It is common knowledge. A dirty secret. The worst part is most of them dont give a fuck. Its just money grabbing.

Unfortunately you also have no chance of knowing if your 1500usd hoodie was made well or by kid payed 12usd week.

Its hard to expect other outcome since many brands are regular startups with investors. There are few monopoly megacorps like LVMH and Kering that act much like Facebooks and Googles and just squeeze anything for their investors and demolish/buy competition.

You completely failed to answer my question.

Sorry but i said i just know this from people in the industry. Obviously you will want some concrete math so you believe stranger. Well I cant give it to you.

Do you consider Everlane [1] to be ethical? They're based on the premise that the workers — in countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka [2] — should be fairly compensated, and they're completely transparent about how much of the retail price goes to the factories. And yet their clothes, which in my experience are of high quality, are not expensive; they're certainly not 10 times the cost of similar clothing from, say, Uniqlo, Zara or H&M.

[1] https://everlane.com/

[2] https://www.everlane.com/factories/

Never heard abou Everlane. Looks nice. The question is how do we know what they claim is true? There are some certificate authorities for example but i am not sure we have this stuff figured out as society.

I used to work there, I can confirm that they are legit about their standards. They visit their factories constantly.

I'm old enough to remember when American t-shirts and jeans were largely made in the USA. I still have some of the t-shirts. They were more expensive but no where near 10x, much less 30x.

For that matter, I still buy boots made in the USA and they're less than 2x over boots made in Vietnam.

> For that matter, I still buy boots made in the USA and they're less than 2x over boots made in Vietnam.

Same, if someone can point me to ultra-cheap leather shoes from the developing world that're anywhere near as good as the ones made in the US and Europe I'm absolutely mercenary enough to be all over that (aren't lower prices supposed to be the main way normal non-capitalists benefit from globalization, after all?). Savings seem to be at best ~40% vs. comparable products made by much more expensive OECD labor.

I said it in different comment yes i inflated it a bit but..

Made in USA is just part of it and it doesnt strictly mean it was ecological process.

For example where was the cloth made? Coloring is where lot of the worst stuff happens.

I don't really like sensationalist documentaries because it's never accurate but try "True Cost" or "River Blue".

I believe that you are correct about the environmental damage done by producers in poorly-regulated countries. I believe that you are incorrect about how expensive it would be to do it cleanly instead.

Dumping untreated wastewater back into the river will always be cheaper than treating it, but dye residues in particular are fairly easy to treat so that the waste water is again safe to drink. Dyeing enough denim for a pair of jeans with proper post-treatment for wastewater is only slightly more expensive than doing it by dumping the untreated wastewater. But if there are no laws or weak enforcement, a lot of companies (individuals for that matter) will behave destructively to save less than a dollar per unit.

I thought denim is particuraly bad. Especialy if its not raw denim it uses immense amount of water for washing to make it less stiff.

Also while it might relatively be cheap to treat water like this in US.. in under developed countries it would be more expensive. So pick your poison i guess.

It's really expensive to make clothes if you're making a niche product.

I've got no problem at all with expensive clothes, I'm just saying that if you're going to charge a lot, the product better live up to the price.

The newer stuff these days with Merino wool is pretty amazing. It's thinner and softer than normal wool. And has all the same benefits. Wicks away moisture and sweat so you have to wash it less.

i have some t-shirts from Taylor & Stitch that are merino. I can wear em multiple days without any smell. Totally worth the price.

https://www.taylorstitch.com/collections/mens-the-civic-coll...

Those photos look like a promising direction for GAN researchers to explore. No need to hire any models or photogs. Just order your parameterized virtual hipsters from the Cloud, like angels on demand.

$395 for a hoodie?? I quite like my made-in-America hoodie from American Giant, which retails for $108. What extra value would I get if I shelled out an additional $287 for the Outlier hoodie?

Art.

If you get into the whole don't use resources, paying money for products that have a lot of artistic thought put into them makes sense. Artistic thought uses nothing from the planet, the person has to eat anyway.

I personally have no issue with using resources, but if someone else wants to spend it on art, cool, I still get to view it.

If it's made with proper merino wool then that would explain the price. I've bought merino jumpers in that price range before, and they're well worth it since they're warm but also light-weight.

Check out the prices on Arc’teryx Veilance, also mentioned in the article. $2299 for a hoodie.

Insanity, sheer insanity.

It's techwear. Outlandish prices are practically part of the aesthetic.

While they are a nice read, I had the impression his stories didn't age well in terms of technology.

A fax machine in a car?

While I agree that's somewhat ridiculous, just look at tesla and their integrated tablets. He had the right idea with integrating more technology into cars.

wait till eink is the thickness of a sheet of paper, and cellular modems and antennas fit as well. holding a piece of "paper" that can always reflect a current source of truth, or be etched and locked to never changed.

Orwell is spinning in his grave at the phrase "a current source of truth"

there are plenty of temporal truths relative to their frame. "hours worked this week" or "percent complete."

you might also be tracking a moving object, and as that object relocates geographically, different types of sensors pick it up, and the device saying "ive found it" changes. each sensor is the source of truth.

if those things were printed on standard paper, they can be false moments after they are printed.

There was some science fiction movie I once saw that initially seemed to happen in contemporary times. Only when the protagonist opened the trunk of their car and opened the paper map it was revealed that the paper is actually a screen.

Edit: it was Babylon A.D. I'd really like to have such map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67d50vpqqC8.

The payphones ringing in the airport as the AI tries to call Case in Neuromancer.

Gave me the chills when I read it, but it was also kind of quaint even back then, I mean yuppies had cell phones.

It didn't disturb me though then or now, I like the feel of the novel.

Eh. Previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509788

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9683013

The technology very rapidly aged, but that's not what you read Gibson for; his writing much more evocative and stylish than your typical SF.

awesome article. i really need to read his newer stuff( for me newer anyway)

Avid sci-fi reader here. Gibson had maybe 3 good books in him. 30 years ago. Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Him and a few others (Rudy Rucker, etc) made some contributions.

There's far better out there and I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.

Neuromancer by itself is enough to make him worth studying.

I knew someone would bring up Neuromancer and honestly I'm with the GP here. I find Gibson highly overrated. I find Neuromncer in particular extremely overrated. It's not bad. It's just nothing exceptional as a piece of writing.

Now I read it many years after it came out so I suspect a lot of the fawning comes from nostalgia and those who happened to be the right age when it came out to be blown away by his ideas.

There GP had it right though. Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan and a lot less interesting once you realize it was a thinly veiled expression of xenophobia about the Japanese.

Some works are exceptional because their exceptional. Others are viewed as such because they're pioneering and while credit is due for Novell ideas often the only thing holding that up later is nostalgia over what's really a pedestrian work of fiction.

Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan

I disagree. Cyberpunk is now one of the principal, default sci-fi tropes.

Those who live in the visionary's future do not appreciate how extraordinary that vision was at the time.

So much of what you consider "normal tech" today seemed mind-blowing fantasy when predicted. In a world of 16,384-byte 4MHz computers communicating at 110 bits per second, high-res VR via multi-core multi-GHz computers networked at gigabit/s [0] was magic we didn't know how to comprehend. So much linguistic/cognitive representation was lacking that "futuristic" then sounds primitive/confused today. Once you grasp the context it was written it, you may see how insightful & innovative the works were.

[0] ...used to watch cat videos and argue with strangers.

So those is wrong on two fronts: we don't live in Neuromancer's future and many of the ideas you attribute to him predate him quite significantly.

Technologically augmented humans? Nope.

Pervasive VR? Hardly.

Dystopian future? Not realty.

Corporations supplanting governments? That's a stretch.

There was a book from the 1950s or 1960s (the names escapes me) that looe decline in sending bits, the natural conclusion of which was that in the coming decades you would be able to share your experience in real time to anyone else the planet. Off that's not VR I don't know what is.

Gibson may have popularized it in sci-fi (although I'm not entirely convinced of that) but nostalgia really seems to be trying to cast there present in Gibsob's future more than I think is justices.

>thinly veiled expression of xenophobia about the Japanese.

while that is an unfortunate and awful aspect of one its central aesthetic tenants, i do not think that it is the core.

Kind of an understandable xenophobia, given rhetoric in the US in the early 80's. It's a work that fits the cultural context of the time it was written, in that respect.

There was certainly an anti-Japanese streak to cyberpunk, which hasn't held up well. But what was more important was that cyberpunk predicted was a future in which the real power was held by giant international tech companies rather than governments. That is basically the world that we live in.

This reads like someone who did not read Neuromancer when it was released in 1984, so they fail to understand how groundbreaking it was for the time. And someone who doesn't know it was the first novel to win all three major awards of the science fiction genre. And how influential the novel (and the Sprawl trilogy) were to a broader cultural movement.

This comment reads like one from sometimes who stopped at the first sentence when it became clear I don't fawn over Neuromsncer because I _literally_ said I read it years later.

I also makes the point that it may well have been groundbreaking butt groundbreaking doesn't necessarily mean good fiction.

Interestingly Goodreads had it are 3.9/5 and a quick scan of the 5 star reviews all seem to mention how groundbreaking it was.

I can give credit for that but if you take that offer of the picture you're left with a completely forgettable work of fiction.

As for those who say how her predicted the future... Did he? Did he really? We don't live in a dystopia, VR is a gimmick, corporations haven't replaced governments and enhanced humans are still a fantasy.

As for the cell phone as a portable computer, the Pl prediction for that goes back to at least 1974 with The Mote in God's Eye.

This thread has done nothing but affirm my view that many people get completely enraptured with and are unable to separate themselves from nostalgia.

Maybe some new readers expect something... More? I personally am a great fan - and I do think William Gibson And Bruce Sterling did a lot to cement cyberpunk as a strong genere (not alone, Vernor Vinge, Philip K Dick certainly played a big part).

But the line continues back - William Gibson wrote a new foreword to Tiger, Tiger / The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. And Richard Morgan's series Altered Carbon continue forward in this vein of combining punk/pulp, dystopia and technology.

Personally I grown more and more fond of Gibson's vision of escaped AIs being worshipped as Vodou legbas.

Who is far better? I mean I would put like Gene Wolfe and PKD ahead of him among a few others, but he’s definitely a top tier sci fi author in my book.

Great examples! I think Gibson's work is built on roads mostly laid by Ellison & Zelazny. I think he has about 3 absolutely great books but the rest of his output is pretty unremarkable.

That's a far cry from the output and impact of PKD specifically (favorite author, btw).

Samuel Delaney was a big influence; Gibson wrote the foreword to newer editions of Dhalgren.

Gibson has also said John Brunner was also a big influence, and praised The Sheep Look Up (which is great).

I wonder if Gibson read Alfred Bester, whose The Stars My Destination certainly has something cyberpunk in it. His lesser-known novel The Computer Connection (also known as Extro) is also terrific.

"...when his output is so little."

Unless you're his publisher, the measure of a good writer is not how many books he's churned out. Look at Donna Tartt; she does one a decade.

Ugh Donna Tartt's books are such horrible juxtapositions of beautiful writing and terrible plots. If she crafted worse sentences I could just skip her awful books but the way she writes leaves me in the position of feeling compelled to read them and then hating how dumb the plots are.

Sounds like my reaction to Neal Stephenson. His phrasing is godly. His plotting is godawful.

My "favorite" part of The Diamond Age was when he had a whole scene solely so one character could explain to the reader what another's (lame) motivation had been for the last half the book or so, as it had been in no other way established or explained up 'till then and the book was about to wrap up.

For all of my problems with Neal, The Big U is an amusing read.

I think it's because he hadn't learned a whole lot of bad pacing habits at that point, but had already developed a strong descriptive style. Snow Crash is an evolution of that. The pacing is a mess, but entertainingly so, and the first-class descriptive writing and dialogue makes up for it.

He desperately needs an iron-fisted editor in his life. It's a tragedy that he doesn't.

In what ways is the “pacing” of Snow Crash a “mess”? Not really familiar with the concept of pacing. Thanks

Every time I read a Stephenson novel I have to break through that first quarter to a third before I'm fully taken in. It's like a dog or cat finding a comfortable position to sleep in. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, all require me to push through that first part before I can get comfortable.

I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.

The world he created was all around you by the time you were born so you probably wouldn't understand.

Perhaps similarly to how someone today watching Pulp Fiction for the first time will see something cliched and derivative.

I watched a Peckinpah movie with a youth and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when they went there, but then I realized he was being generationally ironical.

That is such a great point.

From all other stuff I was reading and watching, I had that idea about a story. Not quite like "The Matrix" but something about people trapped in virtual world. I was also getting myself to finally read William Gibson, this year I got to read "Neuromancer". That was eye opening thing, I had to check twice when that book was released.

Neuromancer itself was written on a typewriter. That's how different the world was.

Exactly.

"At the time you coined “cyberspace,” you’d supposedly barely spent any time on a computer. That’s hard to believe.

Oh no, I had scarcely seen one. Personal computers were not common objects at all, and I had been writing short fiction on the kind of manual portable that hipsters are starting to pay really good money for now. And then a friend of mine called from Texas and said, “My dad just gave me this machine called an Apple IIc, and, like, it automates the writing of fiction — you’ve gotta get one.” So I went down to a department store, which was the only Apple dealership in town. I bought the IIc and the printer and the bits you needed to make it work and took it all home in a box, and never looked back. It was a godsend for me because I can’t type, and having this endlessly correctable, effortlessly correctable way to write was fantastic."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cyberspace...

Great point.

Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones. I even grew up before cell phones, but they are such a part of our lives now it is hard to look past when they are missing.

>Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones.

One of the funniest moments in the Buffy spin-off Angel was when the title character was trapped somewhere, and after managing to escape he's asked by his friends why he just didn't use his cellphone to call for help - at which point he's at a genuine loss for words, because he did have one with him at the time.

Modern cell phones are a hellish technology for people trying to plot stories. Every single person's carrying a superior version of a 1960s spy's kit, and can magically send anything recorded on it to anyone else in seconds. It takes serious effort to make any event or information plausibly known only to a limited circle, should any of them wish it to be otherwise.

It's become almost an in-joke how horror movies so often have to find a way to dispose of or disable cell phones early in the plot.

I was born the year he wrote Neuromancer and I had already been familiar with his work before I was 10 (and playing Shadowrun since like '91). It's not an age thing.

Serial Experiments Lain is another SF work that makes little to no sense today, though the time between its release and obsolescence was much shorter (10 years later it already seemed quaint).

Lain, like Neuromancer, is best viewed in my mind as a sort of dark, surreal fantasy story.

> Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan.

Which is why The Matrix and its sequels were a huge box-office flop, why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title), and why there haven't been half a dozen extremely successful adaptations of (mostly recent) cyberpunk works over the last few years. /sarcasm

Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.

>Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.

Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.

>Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.

Is it? I'd say that's the view from the nice top floors. And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? I'd say cyberpunk hit the nail in the head:

https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2f...

https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-dea...

https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...

>And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"?

They don't actually intermingle much with the future as cyberpunk might have made us think though. Usually the nightmare cyberpunk scenario was that you find yourself in debt peonage to some corporate overlord. But that's a dramatic overestimation of our value to corporate overlords.

I feel so much like in debt serfdom.

Yes. Gibson shows us the dirtiest most dagerous parts of the sprawl, but his world is not the distopya most people think (not that it is necessarily a great place either). On Gibson own words even the poorest inhabitants of the sprawl still have a better quality of life than many third world countries today.

I'm not saying that it didn't have a huge cultural impact.

As a distinct genre, Cyberpunk lived for maybe 8 years. It's influences are huge, but all I'm saying is that his literary contributions are few. Also in that genre, Harlan Ellison probably deserves as much if not more credit.

He gets way too much smoke for not enough fire.

[quote]why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title),[/quote]

I strongly doubt even 10% of the anticipation about Cyberpunk 2077 is due to the title and subject matter. The creators redefined the first person rpg and then the open world rpg successfully with the fantasy Witcher series and there would be the exact same hype no matter what kind of world their next game would be set in.

I just finished "Rewired: the Post Cyberpunk Anthology" which has some commentary mixed in about this issue. The editors' view seems to be in part that Gibson's work was influential precisely because of the reaction it got.

Do we WANT to live in a post government mega corporate future where everyone has mirror shades? The folks who got to thinking about that when Gibson was telling us about that future came up with some great ideas.

Gibson's modern work still feels good to me but it feels more like fiction than science fiction because we've crept into his future.

Taste is intensely personal, and everyone gets their own.

Impact on the genre and on culture in general, however, is an more objective thing, and by that measure, Gibson is a giant.

> I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.

As a huge science fiction nerd, I get impatient for new mind candy, too. But I far prefer a few stellar novels to a stream of forgettable pap, and by that measure, Gibson also over-performs.

Cyberpunk doesn’t feel so novel anymore because we’re quite literally living in a Cyberpunk dystopia. We don’t just notice it in the same way that fish don’t notice it’s wet.

As for Gibson’s Neuromancer aesthetic, it’s been strip-mined and recycled so thoroughly that it no longer has the shock of the new.

As a similar example, the bullet-time effects used in the Matrix (which itself owes a huge debt to Gibson) were so different, they went from jaw-dropping to cliche almost immediately through overuse.

>Cyberpunk doesn’t feel so novel anymore because we’re quite literally living in a Cyberpunk dystopia.

Not really. Our AI is speciously intelligent, our computers are woodenly interactive, our governments are unimaginatively democratic, and our corporations are predictably mercantile. There is a general feeling of living in a pre-cyberpunk present but little of that world has materialized and I feel, like notions of a coming atomic age, it will continue to languish unfulfilled until replaced by another fashionable future.

I’m not sure what you mean by “his output is so little”.

Just because he hasn’t become the overly verbose waster of words that so many others have (ahem...) doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a solid body of work. I count 15 books on my shelf that bear his name. “So little”?

Wait, 15 books?

Burning Chrome

Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Difference Engine (w/Bruce Sterling)

Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties

Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History

The Peripheral

That's 12?

With the graphic novel Archangel and his non-fiction collection Distrust That Particular Flavor you get 14, at least. The sequel to The Peripheral comes out in January.

I enjoy his early work as well. I read his newer ones but mostly out of an appreciation for the old stuff.

I find the new books to be about things that are very low stakes, like an ad agency, or rich people from the future messing with people as a hobby. Because of that I'm less engaged.

But even with the low stakes the language is very high minded. I spend a lot of time with the lookup feature, which makes me glad I use an e-reader.

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