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William Gibson

i love gibson! is all tomorrows parties any good? not read it yet:(
 
Toffeenose said:
i love gibson! is all tomorrows parties any good? not read it yet:(

It's wonderful.

If you like Gibson, try Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon is the best, but Snowcrash and Zodiac are both good too. Not as prolific as Gibson, but he's a just as good, IMO. Sucky website though.
 
I never heard of him. but your right he said..

FAVORITE MAGAZINE?

GIANT ROBOT is wonderful, but the one magazine I still buy with keen and absolute regularity, and read almost immediately, literally cover to cover, is FORTEAN TIMES. Nothing like it.

my favorite author is Stan Lee
 
William Gibson is the author who first coined the
phrase "cyberspace" back in the mid-eighties in the
cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer".

I guess the whole reason Gibson has a website at the mo, is
to promote his new book "Pattern Recognition". It sounds
very intriguing!

My son kept after me and after me to read
Stephenson's "Snow Crash".
Once I got past the first chapter, I was hooked.

Ruff, I used to think Stan Lee was a god, but after
several dozen Letters to the Editor of "Incredible Hulk" --
NONE of which got published (very bruising to a 10-year-old's ego!) I kinda became disenchanted with him. ;)

TVgeek
 
Oh, I dunno - Gibson and Stephenson both suffer, IMHO, from overdoing it a bit when describing things. IIRC, there's one corker in 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' which, it turns out, is just talking about a cigarette lighter. I think they have good ideas but execute them quite badly in text form. However, like Clive Barker, WG's short stories are much better - less overly-wordly-for-no-reason IMHO ;) There's a good mickey-taking cyberpunk story here: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=382
 
William Gibson wrote a season 5 X Files ep called Kill Switch about a life form let loose on the internet to develop and grow. Good episode!

Ok, I know that was geeky, before anyone says. :eek:
 
re" spookY A

No!! not geeky at all (try working in a comic store !!god sometimes "the stuff I "have" to hear , I think my heads going to explode as I stand there smiling) but, anyway you know what some "good" writting was (I thinK) are most of all the episode's of the "first"(1960's) Outer Limits" series, they were way before their time IMHO.:)
 
A three part interview with William Gibson in Wired.

Wired: In your essay in the new book Punk: An Aesthetic, you write that punk was the last pre-digital counterculture. That’s a really interesting thought. Can you expand on that?

Gibson: It was pre-digital in the sense that in 1977, there were no punk websites [laughs]. There was no web to put them on. It was 1977, pre-digital. None of that stuff was there. So you got your punk music on vinyl, or on cassettes. There were no mp3s. There was no way for this thing to propagate. The kind of verbal element of that counterculture spread on mostly photo-offset fanzines that people pasted up at home and picked up at a print shop. And then they mailed it to people or sold it in those little record shops that sold the vinyl records or the tapes. It was pre-digital; it had no internet to spread on, and consequently it spread quickly but relatively more slowly. ...

Wired: What if punk emerged today, instead of in 1977? How do you think it would be different?

Gibson: You’d pull it up on YouTube, as soon as it was played. It would go up on YouTube among the kazillion other things that went up on YouTube that day. And then how would you find it? How would it become a thing, as we used to say? I think that’s one of the ways in which things are really different today. How can you distinguish your communal new thing — how can that happen? Bohemia used to be self-imposed backwaters of a sort. They were other countries within the landscape of Western industrial civilization. They were countries that most people would never see — mysterious places. You’d pay a price, potentially, for going there. That’s always cool and exciting. Now, where are they? Where can you do that? How are people transacting that today? I am pretty sure that they are, but I don’t have that much firsthand experience of it. But they have to do it in a different way. ...
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/ ... unk-memes/

You can read William Gibson on Twitter, Antique Watches and Internet Obsessions
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/ ... n=Previous

And William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/ ... n=Previous
 
William Gibson: The Future Will View Us "As a Joke"
The dystopian author on time travel, cronuts, and his 22nd-century novel.

For evidence that the sci-fi future is encroaching on the present, look no further than William Gibson's latest book, The Peripheral, which opens a mere decade or so from now and includes a cameo for cronuts, those croissant-doughnut hybrids invented last year by a New York City chef. When Gibson's debut, Neuromancer, exploded onto the sci-fi scene way back in 1984, his vision of "cyberspace" felt dizzyingly distant. (Gibson, now 66, had coined the term in a short story a couple of years earlier.)

Now Neuromancer just seems prescient: a corporate dystopia whose denizens, increasingly engrossed with their technological distractions, live on opposite sides of a cavernous divide between the tech haves and have-nots, their lives circumscribed by conglomerates with insatiable appetites for data. The new book, meanwhile, stars a bunch of downtrodden trailer park residents who get caught up in the deadly games of some time-warping elites from 70 years hence. For this week's episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, I reached Gibson at home in suburban Vancouver—he has dual citizenship—to talk about everything from vintage feminist sci-fi to his speed date with Google Glass.

https://soundcloud.com/inquiringminds/5 ... -as-a-joke

Here's a condensed version of the interview:

Mother Jones: What made you decide to set The Peripheral in an era so close to our own?

William Gibson: I had written three novels in the mid-to-late '80s, and they were all set—although the books never say—around 2035. Then I wrote three books in the '90s, which were set in the just-about-now, so they've become alternate history, in a way: Nothing they depict actually happened in 2014 although the real 2014 does feel kind of like those books. I decided that for the actual 21st century, I would write books set basically in the moment: There's a near future, maybe 10 or 15 years from now, that's pretty recognizable, but shabbier and less fortunate than ours. And then there's something in the 22nd century. So I've got a dual narrative. ...

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/1 ... -interview
 
Re: I never heard of him. but your right he said..

ruffready said:
my favorite author is Stan Lee

Mine are Lennon & McCartney.
 
Tech Time Warp of the Week: Cyberpunk’s Not Dead. In Fact, We’re Living It

THE WORD “CYBERPUNK” evokes a very particular iconography of late 20th-century near-futurism. Computer hackers in leather jackets. Science fiction paperbacks. Club kids with goggles and fake dreadlocks. But it’s a past that is now very much part of the present.

The term first appeared all the way back in 1982 as the title of a short story by author Bruce Bethke and was quickly adopted as the name for science fiction sub-genre pioneered by the likes of William Gibson, John Shirley, Pat Cadrigan, and Bruce Sterling. Cyberpunk stories featured noirish outsiders and criminals as protagonists struggling against powerful mega-corporations in dystopian societies. Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and, of course, computer hacking were its tropes.

Soon, hackers and other anti-authoritarian denizens of the early Internet were appropriating the designation for themselves, and “cyberpunk” took on a life of its own, as detailed in a 1990 documentary of the same name (above). ...

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/tech-t...nks-not-dead-fact-living/?mbid=social_twitter
 
5 Essential William Gibson Reads
Theresa DeLucci

It’d be a criminal oversight not to feature William Gibson during Tor.com’s Cyberpunk Week. More than thirty years have passed since Neuromancer and Burning Chrome were published and while some may debate who actually invented the term cyberspace, it’s without doubt that Gibson is the author who popularized it. In the time since the American-Canadian author debuted, our concept of the internet has changed from a flashy representational grid of glowing lights and towering monoliths of code into something so commonplace, even your grandparents have a Twitter account. You can purchase a drone at your local Walmart. So what does William Gibson observe now?

“The future is here,” he has said, several times. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Gibson’s work is best appreciated in chronological order, to see those publication dates and gain a better understanding of the frame in which the stories were written. Technology outpaced speculative fiction in ways even the genre’s best minds couldn’t foresee and our visions of the future—and the people living in them—changed, too.

Burning Chrome (1986)

The ten stories collected here, written between 1977 and 1985, are some of the most finely-honed short fiction in the genre. Featuring some award-winning collaborations with genre heavies including John Shirley and Michael Swanwick, Gibson’s solo stories give readers a glimpse at a futuristic noir underbelly. From the salvaged tech in a Vancouver dumpster to the neon promises glittering in Tokyo’s skyline to the towering walls of ICE in cyberspace, the desperate men and women of these futures are cool as rock stars and familiar as the femme fatales and hard-bitten detectives of a Raymond Chandler novel.

Not to be missed: the introduction to the girl with the razor fingernails and mirror eyes, Molly Millions, making her first appearance in “Johnny Mnemonic,” the Sprawl story of corporate espionage “New Rose Hotel,” “The Winter Market” centered around the conflict between humanity, immortality, and consumer waste—themes echoed in Gibson’s 1996 novel Idoru— and the title story, which combines a heist job, a love triangle, and an ending that perfectly, memorably, poignantly captures what fellow SF visionary Bruce Sterling calls in his introduction “Gibson’s classic one-two combination of high tech and lowlife.” ...

http://www.tor.com/2016/06/06/5-essential-william-gibson-reads/
 
I finished Neuromancer 2 days ago. It was a tougher read than I was expecting to be honest. Definitely a few chapters that required re-reading.
 
BBC Radio 4 ‏@BBCRadio4 42m42 minutes ago
You know who has got really great taste in music? William Gibson:

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is William Gibson. Long before the existence of the Internet, he wrote about 'cyberspace', a boundless world reached only through computers. External space travel,to the Moon and Mars, had become old hat. By creating internal space, he breathed new life into science fiction. In conversation with Sue Lawley, he talks about his life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00941v7
 
The Future of Privacy
By WILLIAM GIBSON DEC. 6, 2016
  • Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.

    Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.

    I’ve never been able to fit the concepts of privacy, history and encryption together in a satisfying way, though it continues to seem that I should. Each concept has to do with information; each can be considered to concern the public and the private; and each involves aspects of society, and perhaps particularly digital society. But experience has taught me that all I can hope to do with these three concepts is demonstrate the problems that considering them together causes.

    Privacy confuses me, beyond my simplest understanding, which is that individuals prefer, to different degrees, that information about them not be freely available to others. I desire privacy myself, and I understand why other individuals want it. But when the entity desiring privacy is a state, a corporation or some other human institution, my understanding of privacy becomes confused.

    While it’s true that states and corporations often desire privacy, they just as often desire that I myself have less privacy. What does it mean, in an ostensible democracy, for the state to keep secrets from its citizens? The idea of the secret state seems antithetical to democracy, since its citizens, the voters, can’t know what their government is doing. Thereby hang the countless conspiracy theories of our day, many of them supposing that we possess far less privacy than we actually do. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/opinion/the-future-of-privacy.html?smid=tw-share
 
Learn About Cyberpunk Via A Bizarre ’90s Documentary
Marianne Trench’s film is weird snapshot of ’90s cyberpunk philosophy and literature that features music by Severed Heads, Esplendor Geometrico and Front 242.

Take interviews with legendary sci-fi writer William Gibson and Front Line Assembly, mix in wonderfully weird technicolor ’90s animation and stir with some damn fine music from Severed Heads and other luminaries, and you’ll get Cyberpunk. Directed by Marianne Trench in 1990, the film is an experimental and often impressionistic account of a cultural movement that swept across numerous different scenes in the late-’80s and early ’90s.

http://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/watch-bizarre-90s-documentary-music-cyberpunk/


 
William Gibson changed his upcoming sci-fi novel after the results of the presidential election

Agency is set in the same world as his 2014 novel, The Peripheral

William Gibson described November 9th, the day after the 2016 presidential election, as a “really weird and powerful sensation.” Like many in the science fiction community, he had anticipated that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would beat her opponent Donald Trump. In the months after Trump was elected, he began to explore his feelings as he wrote his next novel, Agency, according to The New York Times.

Agency is set to be released on January 16th, 2018, and it will share a world with Gibson’s 2014 book The Peripheral, which is set between two futures: one in the 22nd century, the other in the near future. Like The Peripheral, Agency will involve a form of time travel, and will play out in a pair of alternate futures: one set in a 2017 in which Hillary Clinton was elected president, and one in a post-apocalyptic 22nd century London.

The New York Times describes Agency as “both a sequel and a prequel” to The Peripheral. Gibson explained that he began writing the novel as a standalone book in 2016, only to find that the presidential election changed his near-future world, and that the entire story would need to be rewritten. “I assumed that if Trump won, I’d be able to shift a few things and continue to tell my story,” he said. Instead, he decided to keep the original sequence of events by turning back to the mechanism he used in The Peripheral: people in the 22nd century have the ability to alter the past and create alternate timelines. ...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/...e-peripheral-presidental-election-sci-fi-book
 
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In this interview Gibson riffs on Dystopian and (Post) Apocalyptic fiction, also his new comic project Archangel.

He points out that Dystopias are relative: Much of the planet’s human population, today, lives in conditions that many inhabitants of North America would regard as dystopian. Quite a few citizens of the United States live under conditions that many people would regard as dystopian. Dystopia is not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias
By Abraham RiesmanShare

Few authors have crafted more vividly realized future worlds than William Gibson. In timeless classics such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, he dreamed up environments filled with fantastical technology and innovative social arrangements. Those works are often held as seminal works of modern dystopian literature, but in his latest outing, Gibson explores the past, too. Along with co-author Michael St. John Smith and an array of artists, Gibson has created Archangel, a comic book published by IDW that follows a group of time travelers sent from an apocalyptic 2016 back to the smoking ruin of 1945 Berlin. Their mission is to avert world-ending catastrophe, though the contours of that catastrophe remain a mystery for much of the work. As part of Vulture’s Dark Futures week, we caught up with Gibson to talk about Archangel, but also about dystopian and apocalyptic literature in general.

How do you account for the recent surge in popular fiction about the collapse of civilization into dystopia or Armageddon?
This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.

Do you mean it’s ominous because people are so pessimistic that they can’t even imagine a future?
Well, that’s the question — why don’t we? I don’t know.

Why do you think we, as a culture, are so endlessly obsessed with stories about last-ditch attempts to stave off the end of the world?The end of the world is universal shorthand for whatever we don’t want to happen. We have very little control over anything much at all, individually, so fantasies of staving off the end of the world are fairly benign fantasies of increased agency. ...

http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/will...e=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b
 
Hope this time it actually comes to fruition.

'Deadpool' Director Tim Miller to Adapt 'Neuromancer' for Fox

Miller will direct an adaptation of the 1984 sci-fi novel Neuromancerfor Fox, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Longtime X-Menproducer Simon Kinberg will produce the film, and a writer has not yet been set.

The novel was written by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, and it launched his Sprawl trilogy. Neuromancer centers on Henry Dorsett Case, a disgraced computer hacker living in Japan who was punished for stealing from his employer by being rendered unable to access The Matrix, a worldwide virtual reality network. But he's given a shot at getting back in the saddle when he is hired to complete the ultimate hack: one on an artificial intelligence orbiting Earth. The novel was Gibson's first, and went on to win acclaim — as well as the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. He followed Neuromancerwith Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), all set in the same world and future. ...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/he...ctor-tim-miller-adapt-neuromancer-fox-1028185
 
Interesting interview/article.

William Gibson on the apocalypse: “it’s been happening for at least 100 years”
For four decades, the inventor of cyberpunk has described near futures that have seemed uncannily well judged. What’s worrying about his latest novel is that it gives a credible account of the end of the world.

Science fiction writers are made to seem prescient by confirmation bias: with time, almost any imagined future can be said to have come true. Take the pulp space opera Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, in which an inept, “babbling” protagonist called Boris Johnson goes to war against a technocratic transnational government. It sounds like a satire of the present but it was written, in earnest, in 1967.

The American speculative fiction author William Gibson has said that sci-fi writers are “almost always wrong”, but over the course of a dozen acclaimed novels, Gibson himself has proven he has a gift for describing the present in terms of where it’s headed. His fame as a writer was established by his insight that much of our future would be played out in representative space, the not-there place to which people go when they stare at a computer screen – a realm he called, in the 1982 short story “Burning Chrome”, “cyberspace”. In the age of the smartphone this may seem obvious, but that story and Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, were written on a Hermes 2000 typewriter from the 1930s. The first website was almost a decade away, and no one he knew had a personal computer.

In another short story (“Johnny Mnemonic”, 1981) he described, 17 years before Google was founded, an “information economy” in which “it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information… that can be retrieved, amplified”. In 1996, 14 years before Instagram launched, he described in his novel Idoru a future in which “it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us”.

Considering this record, it might be worrying to learn that Gibson’s latest novel, Agency, is largely a credible account of a coming apocalypse. His characters call it “the Jackpot”. “It’s multi-causal, and it’s of extremely long duration,” he explains. Over many decades, climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors – “I’ve never really had the heart to make up a full list, else I’ll depress myself” – deplete the human race by 80 per cent.

The Jackpot is the mundane cataclysm of modernity itself. It is hundreds of millions of people driving to the supermarket in their SUVs, flying six times a year, and eating medicated animals for dinner. “If the Jackpot is going to happen,” Gibson says, “it’s already happening. It’s been happening for at least 100 years.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/william-gibson-apocalypse-it-s-been-happening-least-100-years
 
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