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Comment by nimithryn | Hacker News Reader

To each his own, but I don’t think the length of the book has anything to do with the clarity of the narrative. And I’m definitely not arguing that Stephenson writes novels that are less confusing than Gibson in general (I liked Anathem! But cmon) I’m just arguing that the style in Snow Crash spells out what’s going on more literally than in Neuromancer.

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I'm not using this reply to agree or disagree, I just want to share this piece of internet archeology with you. If you're interested in comparing and contrasting great cyberpunk authors, the esteemed Rudy Rucker himself did this in an interview with punk-cyber legend R U Sirius (of R U A Cyberpunk? meme fame) on his blog back in the day https://www.acceler8or.com/2012/02/cyberpunk-sfmathematics-l...

The comparison with the Beats is interesting (I know next to nothing about the Beats). Thanks for sharing!

Yes, Gibson came out of 60’s counter culture and was his style is a kind of like a pop version of William Burroughs - a writer who, in the late 70s and early 80s had an enormous and overreaching influence on younger writers.

As an interesting aside, There’s an old Canadian documentary film about Rochdale and the hippie scene in Toronto, shot around 1970, that, by pure chance, features a very young William Gibson well before he had published anything - I stumbled across this by chance in the York University film archives about 30 years ago - no idea if it’s available anywhere online and may no longer exist anymore.

I remember having just read Neuromancer and in the same month happened to watch that exact documentary with Gibson a nobody wandering around in Toronto

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