William Gibson C/D

Lucas just stood there, facing the doorway, his face expressionless, the tip of his cane planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop the other on a brass knob. "First thing that you learn," he said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, "is that you always gotta wait..."

I liked Pattern Recognition, though, so maybe we'll see some improvement soon. A friend of mine once remarked that Gibson writes female characters the way others write about sports cars, but he's gotten better at it and it shows in this book.

molly was certainly some kind of sportcar fantasy tho, yeah.

xpost - You might like Cryptonomicon better, it's a little more grounded in reality (if a bit too long). And yeah, Snow Crash can be a little out there, and sort of burns out at points, but the momentum it built up in the first half was enough to keep me going through its slightly less than stellar conclusion.

in re: Stephenson being "more well-researched"

I once asked a twenty-something computer geek if he'd ever read any Stephenson and he replied that he specifically avoided him because of the technological inaccuracies in some of his books. As a big science fiction fan myself I don't really regard "accuracy" more important than, say, plot theme or characters, so I wouldn't really give a shit how accurate Stephenson's books are. But is this an issue with others?

For ex., Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe (did someone refer to it as the cantos upthread?) seems rather wildly improbable but outstanding nevertheless.

But I agree with you - technical accuracy does not the good scifi novel make. Witness: Michael Crichton.

_Snow Craash_ starts out with one of the most irritatingly-written scenes ever committed to paper but becomes deeply engrossing once you hit chapter 2.

"The Diamond Age" is better, though, I think

Wait, you think the pizza delivery car chase that Snow Crash starts out with is irritating? SACRILEGE. You have to at least respect the fact that when YT is looking for a vehicle to latch onto she picks a minivan in some expensive suburb, and the narrative goes on from there to presuppose that:

1. the minivan's erratic driving is due to some idiot chode of a 14 year old who secretly stole it from his mom for the night

2. he probably takes horse steroids

Have some respect for the her and the Deliverator, man. It's a 20 or so page passage that masterfully describes the privatized, libertarian/anarchical world of Snow Crash almost incidentally to what's actually happening in those pages.

I spent the first chapter rolling my eyes and thinking "Why should I care? Who are these people? Is the whole thing written this way? For fuck's sake!" then did an abrupt about-face on the entire book once Hiro and YT were actually given personalities.

xpost:

"then did an abrupt about-face on the entire book once Hiro and YT were actually given personalities."

I see what you mean. But like you said, to Stephenson's credit the characters are developed more fully throughout the book. Personally, I suppose I was a little more used to (or less jaded with) that sort of trick, having grown up on some relatively substance-free Robert Heinlein and Harry Harrison books and being a great fan of cheesy action sci fi movies and shows. I've still got to say that that's one of my favorite passages though, especially in light of how the mostly excellent book drags down towards the end (for me, the doldrums come right around the time they get on the giant floating ship/island).

Hahahahaha wow I guess I haven't babbled as much about my personal faves on ILE as much as I thought! (fave book: _Starship Troopers_; read oodles and oodles of Heinlein, Harrison, Key, McCaffery, Anthony, Brooks, Saberhagen, Cherryh, Weis/Hickman, etc when growing up; am #1 ILE Doctor Who zombie; usw)

_Snow Crash_ is IMO a book that starts awfully, then kicks into high gear and doesn't let go through the ending; I LOVED the entire sequence on the ship. Pash picked out my favorite part of the first chapter (and I agree that hax0r would have made it even better).

I think the sex scene between YT and Raven is one of the best ones I've read in a scifi novel. I also just love the way Hiro becomes this absolute badass by the end of the book. The entire sequence between when he buys the motorbike to the end is just perfect.

The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was written by hand on 100% cotton paper using three different fountain pens: a Waterman Gentleman, a Rotring, and a Jorg Hysek. It was then transcribed, edited, formatted and printed using emacs and TeX. When it was totally finished, the TeX version of of the ms. was converted to Quark XPress format using an emacs LISP program written by the author. Some share of credit thus goes to the people who made the GNU/Linux operating system and to the originators of LISP. Maps were produced by Nick Springer with useful input from Lisa Gold, who also organized the family trees and assisted in the preparation of the Dramatis Personae. The geometrical illustrations (Apollonius of Perga's conic sections and the woodcuts from Newton's Principia Mathematica) were prepared by Alvy Ray Smith, working from scans or photographs of old books.

WTF!!!

Gibson, I've only read Neuromancer, which I liked. Stephenson, only Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon; Snow Crash is fun, but the writing is rough. He hadn't figured out how to integrate his digressions and history lessons into the flow of his stories (he doesn't even try, he just keeps sending Hiro to the library for a lesson whenever there's some cool thing he wants to explain). The integration is a lot smoother in Cryptonomicon, and the characters are more well thought-out. I don't know how "accurate" his stuff is, but as a techno-idiot, I found a lot of Cryptonomicon fascinating -- it made me think about computers differently.

anybody else read the new one? was very similar to PR but with vancouver standing in for london.

I'm just starting it. The first few pages read like a Gibson piss-take. I read it under the light of a Philips quad 18-watt bayonet-fit bulb, while drinking a Kia-Ora orange drink. I'm just checking the time on my vintage japanese digital watch, which has been painstakingly restored by an Inuit-Filipino collective etc etc

i wish i'd known about this thread when i was writing an essay comparing gibson's short story 'the gernsback continuum' with pynchon's 'the crying of lot 49' :(

i have 'burning chrome' but i've only read a few of the stories. he definitely has a better writing style than stephenson, but i enjoyed 'snow crash'.

[for some reason, i kept reading the title 'neuromancer' as 'necromancer' for a really long tiime]

Gibson's technique is definitely above almost all the other sci-fi writers out there, but that's probably because Gibson was an English Lit major in college, and in the interviews I've read, he keeps up with theory, journals and all that shit (I still hold Lit gives you better background to write with than an MFA or workshop).

There's probably a whole other level to appreciate his writing on, but people don't often get into that kinda detail with sci-fi type things.

i enjoyed it, but it did feel, slightly, like a remix of PR.

terrible piece on the guardian web site (one of their jokey (?) 'digested read' things, which seem to exist just to drop spoilers and take the piss) and a better interview here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2146989,00.html

although he must really be pissed off about being asked the same question for 20 years.

and he still, as i mentioned way above, drops in something every page or so that makes you stop and think 'did he just make that up? or does it really exist?'.

i loved his idea of 'semiotic ghosts' as being a representation of cultural artefacts - the results of the mass consciousness (from 'the gernsback continuum'). it was a really cool theory for explaining ufo sightings and the like.

great interview at slate

I mean, it's a good book, I've read it a few times, but I distinctly remember on my first read thinking, "Wait...is this whole book...about pants?"

Unperson, did you read that long New Yorker profile about Gibson a couple years back?

Gibson got a couple of clothing collabs off of Pattern Recognition, that plotline in the third book was VMIC.

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