Yeah, yeah, I know -- not original. Anyway. William Gibson now has a blog. It's brand new, and I have the feeling it's not going to have permalinks. It's got that "top" target link at the bottom of the one and only entry instead, like Neil Gaiman's blog uses. What is it with writers' blogs without permalinks? All I can figure is they must use the same web designer or program to set them up. Anyway, it looks good otherwise. Personally, Gibson's work has never interested me much. The only thing I ever read through of his was a short story featuring Case and Molly that appeared in Omni magazine back in the late Seventies or early Eighties. His cyber-noir style just sort of leaves me cold after a while. I remember reading an interview with him where he hilariously confessed to being pissed off, when he finally got around to buying a personal computer, that instead of some neat crystalline thing data was stored on these prosaic flat plastic diskettes.
Posted by Andrea Harris at January 7, 2003 03:22 PMMan, I used to love Gibson, then he went totally off the radar, replaced by Gaiman and that Cryptonomicon guy. Maybe he's picked it back up -- his blog doesn't seem to show signs of it, but maybe his books do.
Posted by: Scott at January 8, 2003 at 12:40 AMGibson is nothing but a neo-Luddite posing as a sci-fi writer. If you want GOOD cyberpunk, try some Walter Jon Williams. "Hardwired" kicked so much ass, it's just amazing. "Aristoi", on the other hand, is to be avoided.
Sci-fi authors that try to work out their fixations with Utopia creating "philosophers" of the past just get creepy.
Posted by: Eichra Oren at January 8, 2003 at 04:07 AMGibson? A Neo-Luddite? The guy who coined "cyberspace"? Are you sure you've read any of his stuff? Are you sure you know what "Neo-Luddite" means? The fact that he writes about the evil that can be accomplished using advanced technology in no way is indicative of a loathing of said technology. Read his short bio here and you'll find that he's a pretty regular person, as full of complications and contradictions as any of the rest of us. In some ways, he reminds me of me. I'm immersed in technology every day; so much so that I have little time to tinker with it in my off hours.
Walter Jon Williams wrote Hardwired, which is the only of his works I thought worthy of regard. But at the time, his only works I could find were Angel Station and Voice of the Whirlwind, both of which I disliked for reasons I don't recall. Gibson got it good many, MANY times. Stevenson is brilliant. After reading Cryptonomicon (and shanghai-ing a lot of my relatives to follow suit) I went back and got his earlier works. It's obvious his talents are waxing; his earlier stuff is less luscious the further back you go. Haven't read Zodiac or The Big U yet.
Posted by: David Perron at January 8, 2003 at 09:49 AMI must admit "Luddite" is not a term that comes to mind when I think of William Gibson. He's not a bad writer either, it's just that I'm not into cyberpunk, myself. Though I keep hearing hosannas for Stevenson's Cryptonomicon so maybe one day I will try it out...
Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 8, 2003 at 10:22 AM