William Gibson is a literary genius
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thewalrus.ca
"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
And now I know how book tours work.
Everything before was more a collection of weird stuff he learned or was linked to that day.
"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.)"
Thanks for the pointer.
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.
That's what an ending does.
The implication is that the interesting developments in that world never end, even if the book must.
Personally I find his endings enchanting.
And then vomiting like 700 pages of it.
And then not editing it.
And then releasing it in hardback.
And some people are not into the language stuff and the like. I can understand how it would miss a lot of people. I found it strangely engaging.
> unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author
Care to say more?
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)
Here’s an interesting thread with more books that share this conceit: https://ask.metafilter.com/190234/Help-me-find-novels-set-in...
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.
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".
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.
Like William Gibson he has a prophetic ability to see future technology, and put it to paper.
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.
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."
(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.)
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.
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.
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).
Just a great phrase describing a key development stage of the western novel, nothing special or anything :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(literature)
Maybe it gets better half way into the book?
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.
The opposite of Andy Weir's The Martian, which is the best technical manual I've ever read about potatoes.
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 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 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.
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.
"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."
Souls don't exist, but the metaphor of something slower catching up to you is nicely done IMO.
His more recent stuff is much less edgy and has better writing.
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.
But that's exactly the point, it's SUPPOSED to feel overwhelming.
"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."
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.
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)
Exhibit A for how that observation played out: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bed+sheets
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".
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100430011750/https://williamgi...
Or maybe we just go back to building our adtech stuff, and the system marches on and on.
Writing doesn't get any better than this. From this line onwards I was and always will be a Gibson fan.
His latter works are less impressive though, I think.
An homage to this line by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere...
I remember a discussion about that particular line with Gibson, in an interview, but can't find it at the moment.
> 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.
"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”."
[1] https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101146460
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.
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.
> 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'.
http://www.sensesfive.com/wp-content/uploads/tvstatic.jpg
Not that author intentions matter at all.
Looks green like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uz5hS5cJW0&t=49s
"I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful..."
So, not green.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't"
Man, I think it's time for a HHGTTG re-read.
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 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.
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/
Indeed. I wished the article had spent more energy on his masterpiece trilogy...
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.
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.
Also (different setting): Black Man/Thirteen and Thin Air.
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:
New Rose Hotel July 1984
The Winter Market April 1986
Dogfight July 1985
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Chrome_(short_story_...
complete boring slog of a book I had to put down halfway as it didn't get better and I Couldn't do it anymore.
The first time was a bit of a let-down, but the cast is brilliant, and I have come to appreciate the slow pacing very much.
There's the entire Bridge trilogi which acts as a kind of precursor to the Neuromancer universe.
I've lusted after this for over 30 years now. At this point, I am kinda glad that Hollywood never got it off the ground.
What I wanted was a good graphic novel version. They came out with a first edition, but no more. I sold it this year on an ebay spree...
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.
That’s so Gibson of you :)
The Neuromancer film was last meant to be directed by Tim Miller who directed Deadpool and was to be released in 2021.
So somehow the mess with the film rights may be resolved somehow.
The Neuromancer trilogy would make a great TV series. A few episodes for each book.
chiptunes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib8IYfcOnWU original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf8OmnRIBvA
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.
Yes, and I would add that mass surveillance is the checkmate...
Not sure many others saw that coming in the mid-90s.
- crypto - oculus - metaverse - vagina defense systems - sovereign sea states - burbclaves - kindle / tablets
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.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/08/18/1027159166/best-books-science...
Whenever I start a new book, I have the impression that it is written in subtle different language. It takes my brain a little while to catch on.
China Miéville has that as well in a different manner.
Gibson seems to me to be an author who thinks about every single word.
His texture is unique.
Some his later books have some slow passages.
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).
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.
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.
I echo this. I'm currently slogging my way through Blue Mars, the third weighty tome of Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars Trilogy...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Neal:
You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.”
See https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...
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.
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
Just amazing.
I like most other science fiction.. what am I feeling here?
Why do you find it narcissistic?