You searched for book_author:"William Gibson"
It’s strange, because Neuromancer is over 30 years old and relies on concepts of technology that have diverged from our own world (Gibson’s cyberspace and the visualizations it birthed seem remarkably quaint these days)—yet in almost every respect, it holds up far better than Zero History, which is only 6 years old.
It was the constant use of the word iPhone that got to me. Every character kept taking out their iPhone—not their phone,…
Whenever I need a dose of the future past, I turn to William Gibson. I’m catching up. Soon I’ll be able to read The Peripheral. But first we need to return to Northern California, circa sometime in the near future that never was. All Tomorrow’s Parties definitely has a conclusive feel to it. The Bridge trilogy has always felt somewhat laid-back in its connections across books—characters in common, vague references to events, but each…
One reason I regret that so much young-adult science fiction is dystopian at the moment is that it fails to adequately explore the intersections of technological advancement and pop culture. In fact, this is largely true of much science-fiction—but it’s a particularly keen absence in a subgenre wherein pop culture should be at the foreground of the protagonist’s experience. Considering that the amount of time most of us spend engaging with pop culture to one…
It’s common to accuse a writer of writing the same thing over again. In many cases this merely means the writer sticks to variations on a theme. Sometimes, though, it feels like each novel is another installment in an iterative process designed to get at a central idea. As I continue to read William Gibson’s novels, I continue to get a better idea of the novel he is trying to write. Mona Lisa Overdrive mixes…
William Gibson can write. I keep exploring this in different ways and different words as I read through Gibson’s oeuvre, but in the end it comes down to two appropriately alliterative words: William Gibson has voice and vision. He has a way with language that not every writer, even really good ones, ever manages to master. He knows how to use and manipulate words and phrases to create cultures. With this talent, he…
Last week Kevin Mitnick was on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, Ghost in the Wires and talk about hacking. For those of us who grew up with the Web as a fact of life and absorbed "hacker culture" through Hollywood, Mitnick's experiences seem somewhat alien. Hacking started long before the Web, of course, and even today hacking is nothing like what one sees on the movies. However, it's just in this decade…
The trouble with reading good books is that any review one writes feels insufficient. It's not just finding the right words to describe how such books make one feel that's the challenge ... it's organizing those words in such a way to convey the breadth and scope of moving literature. Neuromancer poses such a problem. Writers trade in stories and ideas; while a case can be made that Neuromancer is deficient in some respects of…
We are very spoiled, and very privileged, to live now in the twenty-first century. We look back on works of science fiction from the 1950s, 1960s, and onward that reference the 1990s or 2000s as "the future" and make grandiose predictions: we'll have flying cars! a eugenics war! robot apocalypse! It's interesting to note that such extrapolation, while often falling very short of the mark, tends to be conservative when it describes the technological platforms…
Did you read Neuromancer and say, "This was good, but it could have used more steampunk?" That's kind of how one might describe The Difference Engine: Neuromancer meets steampunk. It's not a comprehensive, completely accurate description, but if that's sufficient for you, you can stop reading now and go read the book.
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William Gibson is on my "I must read everything by him!" shelf, and his influence on literature, particularly science…
After reading Neuromancer I took a short detour into some of Gibson’s other works of fiction, and then I read Virtual Light. With Pattern Recognition I seem to have established a trend of reading his three trilogies in a breadth-first rather than depth-first mode: having completed all of the first books, I will now read all three second books, etc. This might be an unusual way to go about it, but I hope it…
Can a thriller also anaesthetize? Spook Country tries to find out. It has all the trappings of a modern espionage story, with quasi—government agents and a mysterious shipping container being tracked by a paranoid GPS geohacker. Yet William Gibson seems strangely reticent to let the story or the characters off their leash and venture boundlessly into this world. Instead, he escorts the reader on a meandering tour of a possible present (or near-future) which ponders…
William Gibson is one of those authors whose books I think I like a lot more than I do. Likely because his fingerprints are all over science fiction these days, some subgenres more than others of course. There’s no denying that he is a brilliant inventor of ideas and extrapolator of futures. But I think there is probably a reason it has taken me so long to finally read The Peripheral. I kept telling…
Damn but William Gibson can write! I realize this might feel like a contradictory pronouncement to the one I made at the start of my review of The Peripheral, but I assure you the statements are compatible. I wasn’t aware of this sequel, Agency, until recently, but it was nice to pluck it from my library’s shelves. While you don’t need to have read the first book—this is a very loose sequel, with…