third book in the Neuromancer trilogy.
Showing posts with label william gibson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label william gibson. Show all posts
Monday, 15 September 2025
Wednesday, 20 August 2025
Sunday, 10 August 2025
Thursday, 1 September 2016
8tracks - William Gibson
http://8tracks.com/screamingtemple/ths-ace-j
- iamx - "My Secret Friend"
catchy - LOLO - "Hit and run"
one of those songs, slightly Marina and the Diamonds, that returns regularly in the playlists I find. It's not too bad. But I can never remember who or what.
Sunday, 28 February 2016
William Gibson - "Distrust That Particular Flavor"
Compilation of essays. Not amazing, but a nice enough read.
If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.
We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.
In [H.G. Well's] preface to the 1941 edition, he could only add: 'Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year, twenty years ago. Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: "I told you so. You damned fools." (The italics are mine.)'
The italics are indeed his: the terminally exasperated visionary, the technologically fluent Victorian who has watched the twentieth century arrive, with all of its astonishing baggage of change, and who has come to trust in the minds of the sort of men who ran British Rail. They are the italics of the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever, the less evolved. And they are with us today, those italics, though I've long since learned to run shy of science fiction that employs them.
And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today [1996], in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that post geographical meta-country we increasingly call home. it will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun - we seem to have a knack for that - but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working.
If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.
We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.
In [H.G. Well's] preface to the 1941 edition, he could only add: 'Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year, twenty years ago. Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: "I told you so. You damned fools." (The italics are mine.)'
The italics are indeed his: the terminally exasperated visionary, the technologically fluent Victorian who has watched the twentieth century arrive, with all of its astonishing baggage of change, and who has come to trust in the minds of the sort of men who ran British Rail. They are the italics of the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever, the less evolved. And they are with us today, those italics, though I've long since learned to run shy of science fiction that employs them.
And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today [1996], in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that post geographical meta-country we increasingly call home. it will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun - we seem to have a knack for that - but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working.
Friday, 4 May 2012
William Gibson - "Spook Country"
Looking forward to a new W. Gibson, but kind of disappointed.
It's set in today's time; I love his cyberpunk stories and the strangeness of them, the familiarity with which he throws around the weirdest stuff, everything so familiar to him yet as a reader you grapple to understand it all.
And that's what bothered me most here; he mentions a dozen times she "grabbed her Powerbook". Ok, we got it, a laptop, fine. And a big boss, someone who presumably can create a darknet at will, "hasn't set his WEP". First of all, that guy should know to set his WPA2, not WEP, second, and more importantly, it's a password. Doesn't matter what or how!
The repeating of (fake) brandnames or styles in cyberpunk works well, nay, is necessary because the reader is utterly unfamiliar with them. You need the repetition to slowly form a full image of something in your mind. With day-to-day objects like laptops and the such.. we don't need that.
Also, the characters, the story; it all gets only mildly interesting. The clou, I couldn't really care much about it.
The style, short chapters of 3 - 6 pages, cycling through the three storylines gives a nice impression of everything happening at once, without getting lost.
Yet, at most a 6.
It's set in today's time; I love his cyberpunk stories and the strangeness of them, the familiarity with which he throws around the weirdest stuff, everything so familiar to him yet as a reader you grapple to understand it all.
And that's what bothered me most here; he mentions a dozen times she "grabbed her Powerbook". Ok, we got it, a laptop, fine. And a big boss, someone who presumably can create a darknet at will, "hasn't set his WEP". First of all, that guy should know to set his WPA2, not WEP, second, and more importantly, it's a password. Doesn't matter what or how!
The repeating of (fake) brandnames or styles in cyberpunk works well, nay, is necessary because the reader is utterly unfamiliar with them. You need the repetition to slowly form a full image of something in your mind. With day-to-day objects like laptops and the such.. we don't need that.
Also, the characters, the story; it all gets only mildly interesting. The clou, I couldn't really care much about it.
The style, short chapters of 3 - 6 pages, cycling through the three storylines gives a nice impression of everything happening at once, without getting lost.
Yet, at most a 6.
Saturday, 18 September 2010
William Gibson - "Burning Chrome"
Collection of shorts, ending with "Burning Chrome".
I'd have to reread it to properly write about it here, but it is absolutely amazing. Every single story.
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