Ahira's Hangar

Quote:Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...--William Gibson, Neuromancer

--For better or worse William Gibson, after winning the Hugo and Nebula award 4 Nueromancer, was tagged w/the label: the father of "Cyber-Punk". You already get an ideal of what this genre, w/in a genre, is from the quote above. I immediately loved Nueromancer when I first read it in '92, and while movie versions r said 2 b in the works, no movie yet, really captures Gibson's vision. The best movie 2 do this so far is Blade Runner based on Philip K. Dick's Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep? U do get a "taste" of the "cyper punk" world and a character that comes close 2 Case (see Nueromancer mini-reviews below) in the movie Johnny Mnuemonic w/Keanu Reaves. And speaking of Reaves the best movie "loosely" based on the cyperpunk concept is, w/out a doubt The Matrix. 2 briefly describe the "cyber punk" world picture the near future, say 2050, where computer weapons, virtual worlds, international corporate hegemonies, drugs, some bio-engineering, weapons grafted in2 human arms & eyes, hackers that "spinal-tap" themselves directly in2 computers, goth, nilism, apathy and anarchy run wild. Whew! almost sounds like 2day! Well, u get the ideal.

Books by Gibson:
Nueromancer
Virtual Light
Idouro
Bruning Chrome
Mona Lisa Overdrive
The Difference Engine w/Bruce Sterling
Count Zero
Johnny Mnemonic
All Tomorrow's Parties (taken from a Velvet Underground song)

Movies adapted or loosely based on Gibson's visions:
Johnny Mnemonic-Keanu Reeves
Virtual Reality-Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington
New Rose Hotel-Christopher Walken, Wilhelm DaFoe
The Martrix-Keanu Reeves, Samuel L. Jackson
The Thirteenth Floor
Tron

A, fairly, good Cyber Punk primer:
Nueromancer & Count Zero-William Gibson
Islands in the Net-Bruce Sterling
The Diamond Age & Snowcrash-Neal Stephenson
The Otherland series-Tad Williams
Hardwired-Walter Jon Williams
Green Eyes-Lucius Shephard

Other authors:
Tom Maddox, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Eric Nyland

Gibson media contributions:
wrote screenplay 4 Aliens 3
wrote 2 episodes of the X-Files w/Tom Maddox:
"Kill Switch" & "First Person Shooter"

Books by Gibson that I have read & recommend:
Nueromancer
Count Zero
The Difference Engine
Burning Chome (I have heard many "iffy reviews" about Mona Lisa Overdrive, so b careful!)

Mini reviews of Nueromancer "borrowed" from All Sci-Fi.com:

A young computer genius named Case got too greedy doing a job for an ex-employer, when caught, they destroyed his nervous system leaving him to die a slow death, until a new employer recruits him. This new artificial intelligence has what Case needs, that is his health in order to go on living. When he joins forces with a mirror-eyed girl street-samurai, everything changes and the story becomes increasingly chilly. The social conditions, the mentality and the level of intelligence sets the tone for the book's compelling and riveting themes."
linda d'amico, Resident William Gibson Scholar


"A burnt-out hacker and a streetwise badgirl attempt to outwit a psychotic artificial intelligence. Origin of "cyberspace" and font of all cyberpunk, for better or worse."
Adam Greenfield, Resident William Gibson Scholar


"Neuromancer. A book written in 1982 that to this day is a better cyberspace read than most others. From the opening paragraph, i still get chills, 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.'."
steven brown, Resident William Gibson Scholar

warning: many "cyper-punk" books move at hyperkinentic, breakneck speed so fasten ur seatbelt!!"


How far do you fall Pilot?<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 2/11/04 2:12 pm
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Danlo -

Weird Chiba City or what. I'm actually rereading Neuromancer at this moment. I really dig Gibson. And Bruce Sterling. And Pat Cadigan. But I feel they all owe a debt to PK Dick.

Reading any one of the above is never easy. Like Burgess in Clockwork Orange, Gibson lets his characters invent a form of NewSpeak which can be a bit bewildering until you get the hang of it.

But like you I love the guys work. Aure entuluva !<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 6/13/02 6:28:41 pm
</i>

++It also helps if ur 2 best friends r super-intense programmers and systems engineers and almost talk like that anyway! They turned me on 2 Gibson and Sterling as well as; Schrodinger's Cat, Stephen J. Gould (who alas, just passed) and Robert L. Forward--try reading Dragon's Egg! Boy it's almost 2 technical 4 Sci-Fi, or as Carl Sagan would say: "How can we precieve, or even concieve, of life in a flat dimension?" heeheehee. A great movie 2 c, along those lines, is Mindwalk, which reminds me of The Mind's Eye and Stephen Hawkings and...

++Anyway, I def agree w/u about P. K. Dick, which is y I snuck the Blade Runner reference in2 the above post. Yes u could count Burgess, mayb 1 or 2 Heinlien stories, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison and some others as "contributing" grandfathers of "cyberpunk", but as the reviews indicate-as far as modern "cyberpunk" and the media r concerned-all things still, pretty much, begin and end w/Gibson. How far do you fall Pilot?<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 1/13/04 7:51 am
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(here's a Amazon.com review of Gibson's latest book, I've noticed it's been on the NY Times Bestseller List 4 about 5 weeks now...)

Pattern Recognition - a review by Michael Moore, March 4, 2003
Reviewer: ginevra7 from Bowling Green, Kentucky
Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter. She strolls the streets of London and Tokyo, nearly always jet-lagged, but ever so keenly attuned to the evolution of cool. Hypersensitive to labels, both demographic and product, she seems a sort of savant of the pigeon-holing of society. She looks for those strange attractors in our daily lives that somehow form around the Next Big Thing.

Curiously, she compulsively eschews fashion in her own wardrobe, attacking signature labels with scissors, or selecting articles of clothing so ecclectic, so narrowly represented in the industry, that they could not possibly be recognized as fashion.

I suppose there are such people in the world today, those in the advertising biz who can merely glance at a logo and tell if it's right for the product it represents. But as soon as you begin to think about such a job as the focus of the novel, the story line goes white-hot global. Intrigue comes roaring in on the coat-tails of some patented Gibson technology, which is really only today's back-alley hacks elevated to the status of the commonplace. Soon you begin to find yourself nearly as jet-lagged as our wonderfully intelligent protagonist.

Gibson paints this Cayce (pronounced "Case," and this should ring a bell to you Gibson afficianados) as a beyond cool consultant, ultra-urban, but never stuffy or highbrowed. She is as comfortable with streetwise Russians as she is with fashion industry kingpins. As with his previous work, Gibson celebrates the nuances of the global urban community, with characters that live and breathe in architechtural spaces that would barely summon a glance from most of us. His present-tense juxtaposition of characters with wildly different worldviews make this book pop. You just can't stop thinking about it.

In a nod to E-bay enthusiasts, Gibson takes the reader through the streets of London, glimpsing shadowy figures trading in aging Timex computers, WW2 era codewheels, and the choicest of information tidbits.

But the overarching, permeating theme in this book is the internet, specifically, a web log that follows a certain freelance footage of the finest film noir, released in many parts, with no apparent sequence or plot, but with stunning cinamatography and direction. Cayce, and several other main characters are "footage-heads." Many would call the love and obsession over this fractionated internet film a higher-order revelation in how such media is processed by the masses. The footage seems to be the biggest next big thing, and Cayce is retained, somewhat reluctantly, to find out who or what is behind its production.

As far from his cyberpunk roots as he can write, William Gibson scores a huge hit with Pattern Recognition. Buy this book!

Mike Moore

And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i></i>

Following your reccomendation, Danlo, I picked up Neuromancer at the bookstore yesterday. Am looking forward to eventually reading it!! Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

Great book. I prefered his book of short stories (title escapes me at the moment, but includes the story Johny Mnemonic (of which I am probably the only fan) was based off). I still need to get my hands on a copy of Count Zero.
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I wanna feel the metamorphosis and cleansing I've endured within my shadow. Change is coming. Now is my time. Listen to my muscle memory. Contemplate what I've been clinging to. -Tool, "Forty-Six & Two"<i></i>

U'll enjoy Nueromancer, it gets very intense! I 2 like Johnny Mnemonic...my rough bibliography prob threw u off Syl--Johnny is in the Bruning Chrome short story collection... And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i></i>

Burning Chrome, that's it. Great collection.

Glad someone out there liked the movie (Keanu and Dolph Lundgren in the same movie!). All I gotta say is, best movie to pinball machine conversion ever.

(100 posts! yayyyyyyyy!)
________________
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and cleansing I've endured within my shadow. Change is coming. Now is my time. Listen to my muscle memory. Contemplate what I've been clinging to. -Tool, "Forty-Six & Two"<i></i>

: : : oohmy OUTSTANDING MASTER PILOT SYL!!!! And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 1/13/04 7:55 am
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I think the Burning Chrome stories are his best work. Short fiction really seems to be Gibson's forte.

I was a huge Gibson freak during the 80's and figured I always would be. I still think he may be, sentence for sentence, the best pure writer ever to work in SF proper (won't argue about Pynchon), but I've found my interest in him drifting with each new book.

I still rip through the new novels in a single sitting - like I say, he's just a GREAT writer - but it seems like the relevance factor of his work is on the wane (a fate that his friend and contemporary, Bruce Sterling, seems to have escaped).

At this point, the tech stuff only seems to distract him from his real calling - cultural analysis. This probably sounds crazy, but I actually wish Gibson would just give up on Science Fiction! I'd buy a Gibson book about World War I or 1950's industrial designers in a second.

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Oh wow, I feel kinda stupid. After typing this rant, I went and looked up the description of Pattern Recognition (which I obviously haven't read) on Amazon.com. Sounds like Gibson's already moving away from the cyberpunk. PR is set in the present, with none of the virtual reality jazz. Cool, I'll have to check it out. <i>Edited by: AlphSeeker at: 5/15/03 6:16:11 pm
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Hmm, just read Pattern Recognition a few days ago. Not necessarily disappointed, it was definitely an enjoyable read - in fact, I think I liked it better than Gibson's last two - but, I dunno ... there's just something inconsequential about his books anymore. They're too 'quaint' or 'cozy' or something.

Gibson seems to be introducing a lot of Fortean themes into his work now, which I think is cool. Unfortunately, he's also adopted a much more straightforward prose style. Gone are the beautiful hi-tech metaphors that seemed like haiku for a new century.

I'm curious to hear what others who've read PR thought of the main character, Cayce Pollard. She struck me as kind of whiney and passive - not very appealing, at any rate.


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Audentes fortuna iuvat!<i></i>

Alph could u please explain to us what Fortean themes r?--I used 2 kno but can't recall right away...thanks! *****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>

Oh, sure, I guess I meant "Fortean" in the sense of unexplained phenomena - think X-Files or Art Bell. Charles Fort was kind of the original crank, collecting descriptions of all manner of strange phenomena during the early 20th Century, and publishing them in works like Book of the Damned, New Lands and Wild Talents. Somewhere I read that The Fortean Society is Gibson's favorite magazine, so that stuck in my head.

Not to overstate the Fortean influences in PR, though. They're more like adornments than actual plot devices. The main character is named after the 'prophet' Edgar Cayce, for example.

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Audentes fortuna iuvat!<i></i>

I've heard the same thing said about Gibson before, usually in comparison to Sterling who seems to be keeping his writing fresh. ________________
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and cleansing I've endured within my shadow. Change is coming. Now is my time. Listen to my muscle memory. Contemplate what I've been clinging to. -Tool, "Forty-Six & Two" <i></i>

OK!!! I messed up and could not find this heading the other day and posted this in the wrong spot.
posted by me the other day Quote:On TechTV cable channel there is a show at 8.00 pm Eastern time called Screen Savers. This show discusses various topics regarding technology and computers. Well, tomorrow on this show, William Gibson, the author, will be a guest. Previously, this show has had Cory Doctorow(Down and out in the Magic Kingdom) as a guest. That message was for their Thursday (2/5) evening show, and it got repeated this a.m Central time (2/8) However I heard while at dinner Friday nite and confirmed by this interview, that William Gibson is doing a book tour for the paperback of Pattern Recognition just released. taraswizard
Allan Rosewarne N9SQT/WDX6HQV
Chicago area
W/T forever, always
Plan C - http://planc.bravepages.com/main.html<i></i>