I grew up reading Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy. I can honestly say that it largely influenced me into my current career (programmer).
I really wish that Gibson wasn't so bored with capital F Future. I would love to see what kind of hard-scifi novel he could produce today.
Everything he wrote seemed so terrible and magnificent at the same time and I strongly believed that it helped shape the direction of technological progress for a generation. You can't capture the hearts and minds of an entire generation of teen geeks and it not leave its mark.
I side-hopped to Neal Stephenson. Only, he seems to be writing one book each about large areas of possible future, rather than a series. Or a hyper-series, like C. J. Cherryh where sets of stories are told from different parts of the same over-arcing time-line.
Neal Asher has the same thrill of technical what-if, but is not yet of wide enough breadth. And hopefully, Daniel Suarez will keep going.
I was interested to find out that he's not a singularity type (he's at pains to say this in a way that only singularity types will notice, though).
Many sci-fi authors today do subscribe to the idea of the singularity, and feel that it is impossible to do the sort of 'life in 50 years' Sci-Fi prognosticating that Gibson did in Neuromancer.
My favorite of the prognosticators is Vernor Vinge; I loved Rainbow's End for its balls-out attempt to paint a picture of (and make sense of) a near-ish future. Even that doesn't get 50 years out, though.
Taking a totally different spin (and one he takes in his essay): Neuromancer is a product of its time just like, say Echo and the Bunnymen, David Bowie, or the Cure. Seen in this light, you can complain about the lack of new quality music today, or just get with the program and learn to appreciate Lady Gaga.
Put that way, this first decade of the millenium is one which holds huge promise, huge unknown dangers, and a pervasive sense of lack-of-shock by we-the-people living in it. We should expect our Sci Fi literature to be variously engaging in this or responding to it.
This is what I've liked so much about his last two novels; the real (or realistic, or at least possible in today's society) brought out and examined as the bizarre. I'm really looking forward to the close of this trilogy in the fall.
As far as my memory serves me, i seem to remember an interview with Gibson about writing about the future. It isn't so much that he lost interest but more that he doesn't feel like he can imagine the future anymore. I seem to remember him saying younger writers would be better.
Again not 100% sure it was him, but if it was that could explain his diminishing interest and the fact that his books seemed to move further towards now than the future.
This is fairly standard 'death of the author' literary theory, except, Gibson has a nice way with words. I guess I'd call it style. A really nice book about modernism meeting post-modernism in literary theory (written for nerds) is Richard S. Powers' book Galatea 2.0. You might like it.
I agree the future isn't what it used to be. I think it's that technology fundamentally changed our social structure, and while it was assimilating the technology, it created a gap, an unknown, that we could escape to, and which might answer perennial questions about being a human, for better or worse. But now we've assimilated it, so that gap is no more.
Perhaps we'll get science fiction again, when next we develop a technology that fundamentally changes the structure of society. Continuously improving communication wouldn't do it; that's one of the things we've assimilated.
Don't know what it would be, but perhaps a way of looking for it would be to examine our social structures, and ask what changes it copes well with, and what it wouldn't. ie. hack society.
I loved Gibson at the time, but it seems he doesn't really have the passion of a futurist, like my personal fave Greg Egan. I've always thought that writers who use SF merely as a trope to talk about the present sort of miss the whole point. Yes, the present is the launchpad; but what is interesting is to speculate about the possible futures any particular now might imply.
I have to assume PKD would find something to write about, were he alive today.
Yes, probably. PKD wrote paranoid fiction (his own words, I believe)--his stories are not really tied to an particular technology, but more to a state of mind.
Thing is, while Spook Country and Pattern Recognition are not groundbreaking the way Sprawl Trilogy was, Gibson still remains a truly gifted writer who has a way with words.
Too much of sci-fiction has been written by people with great ideas, but inferior way of writing them down.
I like his thought about the capital-F future only really being present in the minds of people of a certain age/cultural background, and the alternative being a kind of endless digital Now, but I don't know that I completely buy it.
The digital Now, as a concept seems as if it needs some kind of thinking comprehension as a state. An inward recognition that as he puts it "the future is always someone else's past". But I don't see that when I look around me. I don't see a society filled with people conscious of what's around them, I see one filled largely with sleepwalkers. Where ground-breaking technological marvels are not accepted as part of a capital-N Now, but simply ignored, or never apprehended. I don't know, but I fear that the end of the Futurist is more to do with the end of the Presentist - you can't consider the future without the springboard of the present, and current culture seems to be too numbing for most people to have the will, or need, to do so.
Well, that came out much more grumpy than I'd thought.
"I called it Zero History because one of the characters has had a missing decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he hasn’t been up to much good, the past ten years. But that quotidian now finds him. Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a credit rating, and the need to pay taxes."
16 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadcloses mouth and walks away
I really wish that Gibson wasn't so bored with capital F Future. I would love to see what kind of hard-scifi novel he could produce today.
Everything he wrote seemed so terrible and magnificent at the same time and I strongly believed that it helped shape the direction of technological progress for a generation. You can't capture the hearts and minds of an entire generation of teen geeks and it not leave its mark.
Neal Asher has the same thrill of technical what-if, but is not yet of wide enough breadth. And hopefully, Daniel Suarez will keep going.
Many sci-fi authors today do subscribe to the idea of the singularity, and feel that it is impossible to do the sort of 'life in 50 years' Sci-Fi prognosticating that Gibson did in Neuromancer.
My favorite of the prognosticators is Vernor Vinge; I loved Rainbow's End for its balls-out attempt to paint a picture of (and make sense of) a near-ish future. Even that doesn't get 50 years out, though.
Taking a totally different spin (and one he takes in his essay): Neuromancer is a product of its time just like, say Echo and the Bunnymen, David Bowie, or the Cure. Seen in this light, you can complain about the lack of new quality music today, or just get with the program and learn to appreciate Lady Gaga.
Put that way, this first decade of the millenium is one which holds huge promise, huge unknown dangers, and a pervasive sense of lack-of-shock by we-the-people living in it. We should expect our Sci Fi literature to be variously engaging in this or responding to it.
This is what I've liked so much about his last two novels; the real (or realistic, or at least possible in today's society) brought out and examined as the bizarre. I'm really looking forward to the close of this trilogy in the fall.
I know it's a little off-topic, but I don't find Lady Gaga to be all that 'new.' She just reminds me of Cher.
[Further off-topic: Chromium's dictionary didn't think 'reminds' was a word]
Again not 100% sure it was him, but if it was that could explain his diminishing interest and the fact that his books seemed to move further towards now than the future.
I agree the future isn't what it used to be. I think it's that technology fundamentally changed our social structure, and while it was assimilating the technology, it created a gap, an unknown, that we could escape to, and which might answer perennial questions about being a human, for better or worse. But now we've assimilated it, so that gap is no more.
Perhaps we'll get science fiction again, when next we develop a technology that fundamentally changes the structure of society. Continuously improving communication wouldn't do it; that's one of the things we've assimilated. Don't know what it would be, but perhaps a way of looking for it would be to examine our social structures, and ask what changes it copes well with, and what it wouldn't. ie. hack society.
I have to assume PKD would find something to write about, were he alive today.
Too much of sci-fiction has been written by people with great ideas, but inferior way of writing them down.
The digital Now, as a concept seems as if it needs some kind of thinking comprehension as a state. An inward recognition that as he puts it "the future is always someone else's past". But I don't see that when I look around me. I don't see a society filled with people conscious of what's around them, I see one filled largely with sleepwalkers. Where ground-breaking technological marvels are not accepted as part of a capital-N Now, but simply ignored, or never apprehended. I don't know, but I fear that the end of the Futurist is more to do with the end of the Presentist - you can't consider the future without the springboard of the present, and current culture seems to be too numbing for most people to have the will, or need, to do so.
Well, that came out much more grumpy than I'd thought.
Interesting. Will there be a free online version?