8 ms·

Avid sci-fi reader here. Gibson had maybe 3 good books in him. 30 years ago. Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Him and a few ot

Avid sci-fi reader here. Gibson had maybe 3 good books in him. 30 years ago. Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Him and a few others (Rudy Rucker, etc) made some contributions. There's far better out there and I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.

EliRivers 7y ago
"...when his output is so little." Unless you're his publisher, the measure of a good writer is not how many books he's churned out. Look at Donna Tartt; she does one a decade.
- paggle 7y ago
  Ugh Donna Tartt's books are such horrible juxtapositions of beautiful writing and terrible plots. If she crafted worse sentences I could just skip her awful books but the way she writes leaves me in the position of feeling compelled to read them and then hating how dumb the plots are.
  - sectiondetail 7y ago
    Sounds like my reaction to Neal Stephenson. His phrasing is godly. His plotting is godawful.
    - shantly 7y ago
      My "favorite" part of The Diamond Age was when he had a whole scene solely so one character could explain to the reader what another's (lame) motivation had been for the last half the book or so, as it had been in no other way established or explained up 'till then and the book was about to wrap up.
    - busterarm 7y ago
      For all of my problems with Neal, The Big U is an amusing read.
      - sectiondetail 7y ago
        I think it's because he hadn't learned a whole lot of bad pacing habits at that point, but had already developed a strong descriptive style. Snow Crash is an evolution of that. The pacing is a mess, but entertainingly so, and the first-class descriptive writing and dialogue makes up for it. He desperately needs an iron-fisted editor in his life. It's a tragedy that he doesn't.
        paggle 7y ago
        In what ways is the “pacing” of Snow Crash a “mess”? Not really familiar with the concept of pacing. Thanks
    - tech2 7y ago
      Every time I read a Stephenson novel I have to break through that first quarter to a third before I'm fully taken in. It's like a dog or cat finding a comfortable position to sleep in. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, all require me to push through that first part before I can get comfortable. I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.
ericmcer 7y ago
Who is far better? I mean I would put like Gene Wolfe and PKD ahead of him among a few others, but he’s definitely a top tier sci fi author in my book.
- busterarm 7y ago
  Great examples! I think Gibson's work is built on roads mostly laid by Ellison & Zelazny. I think he has about 3 absolutely great books but the rest of his output is pretty unremarkable. That's a far cry from the output and impact of PKD specifically (favorite author, btw).
  - atombender 7y ago
    Samuel Delaney was a big influence; Gibson wrote the foreword to newer editions of Dhalgren. Gibson has also said John Brunner was also a big influence, and praised The Sheep Look Up (which is great). I wonder if Gibson read Alfred Bester, whose The Stars My Destination certainly has something cyberpunk in it. His lesser-known novel The Computer Connection (also known as Extro) is also terrific.
empath75 7y ago
Neuromancer by itself is enough to make him worth studying.
- cletus 7y ago
  I knew someone would bring up Neuromancer and honestly I'm with the GP here. I find Gibson highly overrated. I find Neuromncer in particular extremely overrated. It's not bad. It's just nothing exceptional as a piece of writing. Now I read it many years after it came out so I suspect a lot of the fawning comes from nostalgia and those who happened to be the right age when it came out to be blown away by his ideas. There GP had it right though. Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan and a lot less interesting once you realize it was a thinly veiled expression of xenophobia about the Japanese. Some works are exceptional because their exceptional. Others are viewed as such because they're pioneering and while credit is due for Novell ideas often the only thing holding that up later is nostalgia over what's really a pedestrian work of fiction.
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan I disagree. Cyberpunk is now one of the principal, default sci-fi tropes.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    Those who live in the visionary's future do not appreciate how extraordinary that vision was at the time. So much of what you consider "normal tech" today seemed mind-blowing fantasy when predicted. In a world of 16,384-byte 4MHz computers communicating at 110 bits per second, high-res VR via multi-core multi-GHz computers networked at gigabit/s [0] was magic we didn't know how to comprehend. So much linguistic/cognitive representation was lacking that "futuristic" then sounds primitive/confused today. Once you grasp the context it was written it, you may see how insightful & innovative the works were. [0] ...used to watch cat videos and argue with strangers.
    - cletus 7y ago
      So those is wrong on two fronts: we don't live in Neuromancer's future and many of the ideas you attribute to him predate him quite significantly. Technologically augmented humans? Nope. Pervasive VR? Hardly. Dystopian future? Not realty. Corporations supplanting governments? That's a stretch. There was a book from the 1950s or 1960s (the names escapes me) that looe decline in sending bits, the natural conclusion of which was that in the coming decades you would be able to share your experience in real time to anyone else the planet. Off that's not VR I don't know what is. Gibson may have popularized it in sci-fi (although I'm not entirely convinced of that) but nostalgia really seems to be trying to cast there present in Gibsob's future more than I think is justices.
antoinevg 7y ago
The world he created was all around you by the time you were born so you probably wouldn't understand.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Perhaps similarly to how someone today watching Pulp Fiction for the first time will see something cliched and derivative.
  - hindsightbias 7y ago
    I watched a Peckinpah movie with a youth and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when they went there, but then I realized he was being generationally ironical.
- ozim 7y ago
  That is such a great point. From all other stuff I was reading and watching, I had that idea about a story. Not quite like "The Matrix" but something about people trapped in virtual world. I was also getting myself to finally read William Gibson, this year I got to read "Neuromancer". That was eye opening thing, I had to check twice when that book was released.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Neuromancer itself was written on a typewriter. That's how different the world was.
  - jdkee 7y ago
    Exactly. "At the time you coined “cyberspace,” you’d supposedly barely spent any time on a computer. That’s hard to believe. Oh no, I had scarcely seen one. Personal computers were not common objects at all, and I had been writing short fiction on the kind of manual portable that hipsters are starting to pay really good money for now. And then a friend of mine called from Texas and said, “My dad just gave me this machine called an Apple IIc, and, like, it automates the writing of fiction — you’ve gotta get one.” So I went down to a department store, which was the only Apple dealership in town. I bought the IIc and the printer and the bits you needed to make it work and took it all home in a box, and never looked back. It was a godsend for me because I can’t type, and having this endlessly correctable, effortlessly correctable way to write was fantastic." https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cyberspaceman-william-gibson-on-life-inside-and-outside-the-internet-181670/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cyberspace...
daeken 7y ago
> Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Which is why The Matrix and its sequels were a huge box-office flop, why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title), and why there haven't been half a dozen extremely successful adaptations of (mostly recent) cyberpunk works over the last few years. /sarcasm Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.
- naravara 7y ago
  >Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world. Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past. Is it? I'd say that's the view from the nice top floors. And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? I'd say cyberpunk hit the nail in the head: https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fnational%2fhealth-science%2fus-life-expectancy-declines-again-a-dismal-trend-not-seen-since-world-war-i%2f2018%2f11%2f28%2fae58bc8c-f28c-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html%3f https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2f... https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-deaths-los-angeles-county https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-dea... https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generation-by-generation/ https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...
    - naravara 7y ago
      >And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? They don't actually intermingle much with the future as cyberpunk might have made us think though. Usually the nightmare cyberpunk scenario was that you find yourself in debt peonage to some corporate overlord. But that's a dramatic overestimation of our value to corporate overlords.
mherdeg 7y ago
I just finished "Rewired: the Post Cyberpunk Anthology" which has some commentary mixed in about this issue. The editors' view seems to be in part that Gibson's work was influential precisely because of the reaction it got. Do we WANT to live in a post government mega corporate future where everyone has mirror shades? The folks who got to thinking about that when Gibson was telling us about that future came up with some great ideas. Gibson's modern work still feels good to me but it feels more like fiction than science fiction because we've crept into his future.
__jal 7y ago
Taste is intensely personal, and everyone gets their own. Impact on the genre and on culture in general, however, is an more objective thing, and by that measure, Gibson is a giant. > I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little. As a huge science fiction nerd, I get impatient for new mind candy, too. But I far prefer a few stellar novels to a stream of forgettable pap, and by that measure, Gibson also over-performs.
mattkevan 7y ago
Cyberpunk doesn’t feel so novel anymore because we’re quite literally living in a Cyberpunk dystopia. We don’t just notice it in the same way that fish don’t notice it’s wet. As for Gibson’s Neuromancer aesthetic, it’s been strip-mined and recycled so thoroughly that it no longer has the shock of the new. As a similar example, the bullet-time effects used in the Matrix (which itself owes a huge debt to Gibson) were so different, they went from jaw-dropping to cliche almost immediately through overuse.
- pharke 7y ago
  >Cyberpunk doesn’t feel so novel anymore because we’re quite literally living in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Not really. Our AI is speciously intelligent, our computers are woodenly interactive, our governments are unimaginatively democratic, and our corporations are predictably mercantile. There is a general feeling of living in a pre-cyberpunk present but little of that world has materialized and I feel, like notions of a coming atomic age, it will continue to languish unfulfilled until replaced by another fashionable future.
numbsafari 7y ago
I’m not sure what you mean by “his output is so little”. Just because he hasn’t become the overly verbose waster of words that so many others have (ahem...) doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a solid body of work. I count 15 books on my shelf that bear his name. “So little”?
- e12e 7y ago
  Wait, 15 books? Burning Chrome Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive The Difference Engine (w/Bruce Sterling) Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History The Peripheral That's 12?
  - atombender 7y ago
    With the graphic novel Archangel and his non-fiction collection Distrust That Particular Flavor you get 14, at least. The sequel to The Peripheral comes out in January.
killion 7y ago
I enjoy his early work as well. I read his newer ones but mostly out of an appreciation for the old stuff. I find the new books to be about things that are very low stakes, like an ad agency, or rich people from the future messing with people as a hobby. Because of that I'm less engaged. But even with the low stakes the language is very high minded. I spend a lot of time with the lookup feature, which makes me glad I use an e-reader.

EliRivers 7y ago

"...when his output is so little." Unless you're his publisher, the measure of a good writer is not how many books he's churned out. Look at Donna Tartt; she does one a decade.

paggle 7y ago
Ugh Donna Tartt's books are such horrible juxtapositions of beautiful writing and terrible plots. If she crafted worse sentences I could just skip her awful books but the way she writes leaves me in the position of feeling compelled to read them and then hating how dumb the plots are.
- sectiondetail 7y ago
  Sounds like my reaction to Neal Stephenson. His phrasing is godly. His plotting is godawful.
  - shantly 7y ago
    My "favorite" part of The Diamond Age was when he had a whole scene solely so one character could explain to the reader what another's (lame) motivation had been for the last half the book or so, as it had been in no other way established or explained up 'till then and the book was about to wrap up.
  - busterarm 7y ago
    For all of my problems with Neal, The Big U is an amusing read.
    - sectiondetail 7y ago
      I think it's because he hadn't learned a whole lot of bad pacing habits at that point, but had already developed a strong descriptive style. Snow Crash is an evolution of that. The pacing is a mess, but entertainingly so, and the first-class descriptive writing and dialogue makes up for it. He desperately needs an iron-fisted editor in his life. It's a tragedy that he doesn't.
      - paggle 7y ago
        In what ways is the “pacing” of Snow Crash a “mess”? Not really familiar with the concept of pacing. Thanks
  - tech2 7y ago
    Every time I read a Stephenson novel I have to break through that first quarter to a third before I'm fully taken in. It's like a dog or cat finding a comfortable position to sleep in. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, all require me to push through that first part before I can get comfortable. I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.

ericmcer 7y ago

Who is far better? I mean I would put like Gene Wolfe and PKD ahead of him among a few others, but he’s definitely a top tier sci fi author in my book.

busterarm 7y ago
Great examples! I think Gibson's work is built on roads mostly laid by Ellison & Zelazny. I think he has about 3 absolutely great books but the rest of his output is pretty unremarkable. That's a far cry from the output and impact of PKD specifically (favorite author, btw).
- atombender 7y ago
  Samuel Delaney was a big influence; Gibson wrote the foreword to newer editions of Dhalgren. Gibson has also said John Brunner was also a big influence, and praised The Sheep Look Up (which is great). I wonder if Gibson read Alfred Bester, whose The Stars My Destination certainly has something cyberpunk in it. His lesser-known novel The Computer Connection (also known as Extro) is also terrific.

empath75 7y ago

Neuromancer by itself is enough to make him worth studying.

cletus 7y ago
I knew someone would bring up Neuromancer and honestly I'm with the GP here. I find Gibson highly overrated. I find Neuromncer in particular extremely overrated. It's not bad. It's just nothing exceptional as a piece of writing. Now I read it many years after it came out so I suspect a lot of the fawning comes from nostalgia and those who happened to be the right age when it came out to be blown away by his ideas. There GP had it right though. Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan and a lot less interesting once you realize it was a thinly veiled expression of xenophobia about the Japanese. Some works are exceptional because their exceptional. Others are viewed as such because they're pioneering and while credit is due for Novell ideas often the only thing holding that up later is nostalgia over what's really a pedestrian work of fiction.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan I disagree. Cyberpunk is now one of the principal, default sci-fi tropes.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Those who live in the visionary's future do not appreciate how extraordinary that vision was at the time. So much of what you consider "normal tech" today seemed mind-blowing fantasy when predicted. In a world of 16,384-byte 4MHz computers communicating at 110 bits per second, high-res VR via multi-core multi-GHz computers networked at gigabit/s [0] was magic we didn't know how to comprehend. So much linguistic/cognitive representation was lacking that "futuristic" then sounds primitive/confused today. Once you grasp the context it was written it, you may see how insightful & innovative the works were. [0] ...used to watch cat videos and argue with strangers.
  - cletus 7y ago
    So those is wrong on two fronts: we don't live in Neuromancer's future and many of the ideas you attribute to him predate him quite significantly. Technologically augmented humans? Nope. Pervasive VR? Hardly. Dystopian future? Not realty. Corporations supplanting governments? That's a stretch. There was a book from the 1950s or 1960s (the names escapes me) that looe decline in sending bits, the natural conclusion of which was that in the coming decades you would be able to share your experience in real time to anyone else the planet. Off that's not VR I don't know what is. Gibson may have popularized it in sci-fi (although I'm not entirely convinced of that) but nostalgia really seems to be trying to cast there present in Gibsob's future more than I think is justices.

antoinevg 7y ago

The world he created was all around you by the time you were born so you probably wouldn't understand.

EliRivers 7y ago
Perhaps similarly to how someone today watching Pulp Fiction for the first time will see something cliched and derivative.
- hindsightbias 7y ago
  I watched a Peckinpah movie with a youth and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when they went there, but then I realized he was being generationally ironical.
ozim 7y ago
That is such a great point. From all other stuff I was reading and watching, I had that idea about a story. Not quite like "The Matrix" but something about people trapped in virtual world. I was also getting myself to finally read William Gibson, this year I got to read "Neuromancer". That was eye opening thing, I had to check twice when that book was released.
pjc50 7y ago
Neuromancer itself was written on a typewriter. That's how different the world was.
- jdkee 7y ago
  Exactly. "At the time you coined “cyberspace,” you’d supposedly barely spent any time on a computer. That’s hard to believe. Oh no, I had scarcely seen one. Personal computers were not common objects at all, and I had been writing short fiction on the kind of manual portable that hipsters are starting to pay really good money for now. And then a friend of mine called from Texas and said, “My dad just gave me this machine called an Apple IIc, and, like, it automates the writing of fiction — you’ve gotta get one.” So I went down to a department store, which was the only Apple dealership in town. I bought the IIc and the printer and the bits you needed to make it work and took it all home in a box, and never looked back. It was a godsend for me because I can’t type, and having this endlessly correctable, effortlessly correctable way to write was fantastic." https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cyberspaceman-william-gibson-on-life-inside-and-outside-the-internet-181670/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cyberspace...

daeken 7y ago

> Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Which is why The Matrix and its sequels were a huge box-office flop, why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title), and why there haven't been half a dozen extremely successful adaptations of (mostly recent) cyberpunk works over the last few years. /sarcasm Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.

naravara 7y ago
>Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world. Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past. Is it? I'd say that's the view from the nice top floors. And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? I'd say cyberpunk hit the nail in the head: https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fnational%2fhealth-science%2fus-life-expectancy-declines-again-a-dismal-trend-not-seen-since-world-war-i%2f2018%2f11%2f28%2fae58bc8c-f28c-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html%3f https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2f... https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-deaths-los-angeles-county https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-dea... https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generation-by-generation/ https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...
  - naravara 7y ago
    >And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? They don't actually intermingle much with the future as cyberpunk might have made us think though. Usually the nightmare cyberpunk scenario was that you find yourself in debt peonage to some corporate overlord. But that's a dramatic overestimation of our value to corporate overlords.

mherdeg 7y ago

I just finished "Rewired: the Post Cyberpunk Anthology" which has some commentary mixed in about this issue. The editors' view seems to be in part that Gibson's work was influential precisely because of the reaction it got. Do we WANT to live in a post government mega corporate future where everyone has mirror shades? The folks who got to thinking about that when Gibson was telling us about that future came up with some great ideas. Gibson's modern work still feels good to me but it feels more like fiction than science fiction because we've crept into his future.

__jal 7y ago

Taste is intensely personal, and everyone gets their own. Impact on the genre and on culture in general, however, is an more objective thing, and by that measure, Gibson is a giant. > I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little. As a huge science fiction nerd, I get impatient for new mind candy, too. But I far prefer a few stellar novels to a stream of forgettable pap, and by that measure, Gibson also over-performs.

mattkevan 7y ago

Cyberpunk doesn’t feel so novel anymore because we’re quite literally living in a Cyberpunk dystopia. We don’t just notice it in the same way that fish don’t notice it’s wet. As for Gibson’s Neuromancer aesthetic, it’s been strip-mined and recycled so thoroughly that it no longer has the shock of the new. As a similar example, the bullet-time effects used in the Matrix (which itself owes a huge debt to Gibson) were so different, they went from jaw-dropping to cliche almost immediately through overuse.

pharke 7y ago
>Cyberpunk doesn’t feel so novel anymore because we’re quite literally living in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Not really. Our AI is speciously intelligent, our computers are woodenly interactive, our governments are unimaginatively democratic, and our corporations are predictably mercantile. There is a general feeling of living in a pre-cyberpunk present but little of that world has materialized and I feel, like notions of a coming atomic age, it will continue to languish unfulfilled until replaced by another fashionable future.

numbsafari 7y ago

I’m not sure what you mean by “his output is so little”. Just because he hasn’t become the overly verbose waster of words that so many others have (ahem...) doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a solid body of work. I count 15 books on my shelf that bear his name. “So little”?

e12e 7y ago
Wait, 15 books? Burning Chrome Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive The Difference Engine (w/Bruce Sterling) Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History The Peripheral That's 12?
- atombender 7y ago
  With the graphic novel Archangel and his non-fiction collection Distrust That Particular Flavor you get 14, at least. The sequel to The Peripheral comes out in January.

killion 7y ago

I enjoy his early work as well. I read his newer ones but mostly out of an appreciation for the old stuff. I find the new books to be about things that are very low stakes, like an ad agency, or rich people from the future messing with people as a hobby. Because of that I'm less engaged. But even with the low stakes the language is very high minded. I spend a lot of time with the lookup feature, which makes me glad I use an e-reader.