William Gibson

version

Well-known member
I think it was droid who mentioned he'd got a new one out. I've still only read Neuromancer and some of the short stories. Has anyone been keeping abreast of his output over the years? droid?

This is the new one:
Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events.

Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t.

Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
I disagree with Luka's assessment. He's still got something.

The "righteous dub mon" line is in his first novel, he has a kind of rastas in space thing going on. I always thought it was a bit cheesy but it's an American (or Canadian, even more distant) understanding of reggae. They're much further away from it, so turn the exoticism up to 11. If you've grown up in London, it seems a bit ridiculous.

Case (IIRC) is the "cool hunter". That trait, an overt sensitivity to branding, is Gibson trying to interface the human with the sheer overwhelm of modern world. He's creating characters that have human responses to the totality of information we're exposed to. In the earlier trilogies, there are similar characters - Gentry, in one of the Neuromancer books is trying to see the shape of cyberspace. It's the same idea. And then there's a guy (can't recall his name off top of my head) in the next trilogy who does a similar thing - he sees emergent patterns in the flows of information. So it might seem like a daft character initially but it's him trying to chase down this idea - how might the human nervous system response to the dataflows we've created?

The inverse of this are the pattern makers - the one in Count Zero (I think) who makes Cornell boxes, and the paralysed artist who makes "the footage" in one of Blue Ant books. These are examples of the dataflow itself speaking, making gnomic utterances that somehow speak and suggest things to humans. The line the AI who makes the boxes use in Count Zero I think is something like "my songs are of space and distance. The longing is in you".
 

version

Well-known member
My dad borrowed my copy of Neuromancer, read about half of it then handed it back because he said the whole thing seemed to be taking place on a white background. It was all just names and vague descriptions so he couldn't situate the characters and get drawn into it.
 

version

Well-known member
One of my enduring memories of Neuromancer is having no clue what was going on with Riviera, the bloke who could project holograms. I don't think it even explained that that was what he was doing at first.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The best bits in Gibson are often the little bits of future shock. There's a in the second trilogy that has semi-sentient tags chased around a wall by cleaning programs. I remember him describing an interview to work in retail where it was suggested the character "might just need a bit of tribal blackwork" to get a job in a surf shop. So perfect. He has a knack for spotting the trends and textures of the present day and just tweaking them slightly so there's a familarity but enough to make the everyday seem strange.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
He said about Neuromancer he was just trying really hard not to bore the reader so he overloaded it with every device possible. Which is true. It's very entertaining but confusing as fuck. The later books are much more elegant.
 

version

Well-known member
Huemans...in the 14th Century the monks ornamented and illustrated the manuscripts of letters. In the 21st and 22nd century the letters of the alphabet through competition are now armamented for letter racing and galactic battles. This was made possible by a secret equation known as THE RAMM:ELL:ZEE.
 

version

Well-known member
I like that. It's one of the things I like about Pynchon. That you get stuff happening off to the side or in passing with no explanation. It's just there for you to chew on if you feel like it.
 
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