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William Gibson is a literary genius

258 points by throw0101a 5y ago

UI_at_80x24 5y ago
I love reading Gibson. His prose is brilliant. In his book "Pattern Recognition" he spends the first page and half describing jet-lag in such brilliant manner that you feel like you just experienced art. Unfortunately I feel his plot/stories never seem to hold up. I will always consider him an artist. Something to savor. I've always felt that it was superior to true 'literature' in that each word is a morsel that adds to the whole and not up to the interpretation of the reader.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  Well said. I have similar feelings about Neal Stephenson, though I'd say Gibson's literary skills are a level above.
  - cletus 5y ago
    Stephenson is definitely about the journey not the destination. His endings aren’t the best. Cryptonomicon is an amazing book. The ending? Meh.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      Oof, if you didn't like the ending to Cryptonomicon, you'll hate the ending to Seveneves.
      - haasted 5y ago
        So much great worldbuilding, a notable and incredibly interesting development and then just "the end". That was rather upsetting.
        prepend 5y ago
        Such is life.
        slothtrop 5y ago
        > and then just "the end" That's what an ending does.
        FredPret 5y ago
        Maybe that’s part of the point of the ending. The implication is that the interesting developments in that world never end, even if the book must. Personally I find his endings enchanting.
        InitialLastName 5y ago
        Especially when there were at least two better endings already in the book.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        Personally preferred Seveneves' ending.
      - potta_coffee 5y ago
        I loved Cryptonomicon and I didn't even like the beginning to Seveneves. I don't think I made it through four chapters.
        blacktriangle 5y ago
        The beginning of Seveneves is pretty bad, but the rest of the book makes up for it. It's as if the first part of the book exists soley to set up the plot and characters for the second part of the story which is where the interesting bits are.
      - jkestner 5y ago
        At least that one ended in a burst of new threads for my imagination to chew on; the second half of Fall slowly dwindles into the petty, boring squabbles of gods, leaving a ton of more interesting questions unasked and unanswered.
        finnh 5y ago
        Fall was easily the worst thing he's written (pretty sure i've read all of his output... except the last hundred pages of Fall)
        jgon 5y ago
        Yikes! I'd decided to take a pass on anything he's written unless it received unanimous critical acclaim after slogging through Seveneves and not even finishing Reamde, so it's kind of sad to hear that things aren't getting better.
        finnh 5y ago
        Imagine a stoned teenager really falling in love with the idea of rewriting Paradise Lost "but in a computer, like Tron". And then vomiting like 700 pages of it. And then not editing it. And then releasing it in hardback.
    - runevault 5y ago
      Crypto's ending is still better than Snow Crash's (though I prefer SC overall). Someone sent me a great meme yesterday showing the back half of the horse fully drawn and the front half barely a stick figure of a horse and the back half said "Stephenson starting a book" and the front was "Stephenson finishing a book." I dunno if I've ever seen a truer meme in my life.
      - antiterra 5y ago
        I love the first chapter of Snow Crash, it brilliantly establishes the world, the tone and (the) Protagonist. There’s a breathless pacing that makes it incredibly fun to read aloud. The rest I can do without.
        runevault 5y ago
        IMO you could teach an entire semester long course on world building, pacing, prose, etc of an opening just on the first chapter of Snow Crash. And some people are not into the language stuff and the like. I can understand how it would miss a lot of people. I found it strangely engaging.
        croes 5y ago
        Snow Crash was one of the fastest books I've ever read.
      - cecilpl2 5y ago
        Sounds like pretty much the exact opposite of Brandon Sanderson.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Huh—I'd have said Cryptonomicon's the only one of his I've read that didn't turn into a directionless mess halfway through, and/or have a bad ending. Also read The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Anathem.
      - StevenRayOrr 5y ago
        I just finished _Reamde_ and was, overall, fairly satisfied with the way the story built towards the conclusion. It moves in unexpected directions, but I enjoyed the entire ride.
        handrous 5y ago
        I keep hearing & reading enough good things about that one that I'll likely check it out eventually. I kinda swore him off after The Diamond Age gave me the novel but unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author, but if/when I backslide on that Reamde will probably be what does it.
        argomo 5y ago
        Reamde is basically gun porn (in the same way Seveneves was orbital dynamics porn) with a protracted hostage situation for plot tension and some videogaming/spy craft stuff thrown in for flavor. Not really sci-fi IMO.
        progre 5y ago
        Ooh, let's do Zodiac next: Bike lock porn?
        webmaven 5y ago
        I'd have characterized Zodiac as 'pollution porn'.
        majormajor 5y ago
        Zodiac and toilet bowl part porn?
    - rrdharan 5y ago
      I’m convinced the ending (and other parts) of Cryptonomicon were inspired by A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, but I have no evidence to support this claim. Here’s an interesting thread with more books that share this conceit: https://ask.metafilter.com/190234/Help-me-find-novels-set-in-the-past-and-present https://ask.metafilter.com/190234/Help-me-find-novels-set-in...
    - EdwardCoffin 5y ago
      Stephenson occasionally fields questions about his endings in talks. Here's one of them, from his Google talk for the Anathem book tour [1]: Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it. A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. ... So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is. For me, the endings meme really is that - I don't see what people are complaining about. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s
      - gknoy 5y ago
        I've read a fair bit of Stephenson, and have never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings. I enjoy reading his stories enough that I still read (and have re-read) them. Maybe it's that I want more from the characters, or an epilogue lunch at shawarma palace (or, more appropriately, Uncle Enzo's Pizza) where they show things returning to normal. The closest thing I've encountered to that in film is the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. (SPOILERS) It's _very_ abrupt. And yet, when I think about it, it feels masterful -- there's nothing that could have been added between the climax and the ending that would have made it better. Objectively it seems really good, but it's _shocking_ in how abrupt it is, and as a viewer it took me some time to reconcile between "I hate that" and "that's probably brilliant".
        webmaven 5y ago
        > I've ... never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings It seems to me that that sort of satisfaction isn't what Stephenson is going for, but rather if his works can be said to have any consistent theme it is that narrative threads (plot, history, etc.) overlap but aren't aligned, so no matter when you start or stop at least some of those threads are going to be in the middle.
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      I found The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to be an incredible read, and a great introduction to Neal Stephenson. Like William Gibson he has a prophetic ability to see future technology, and put it to paper.
      - darkarmani 5y ago
        I would not have people start with that book. It's easy to get confused. It is very tough to get through some parts (unless you've read it multiple times and are a super-fan). I find the message very interesting: culture is technology. He has such strong libertarian characters in every novel, he also shows that: "being strong but along makes you weak" (Mel being captured and trussed up). His cultural superiority explanation falls apart slightly in two ways: Victorian culture is lacking (the point of the Mel experiment) and the three girls have completely different outcomes from their "Primer education". (or maybe Victorian culture just needs to evolve). I'm not sure how I feel about the Victorians battling the (barbarian) Chinese and the very feudal class structure.
      - satori99 5y ago
        It is also a possibly a (sort-of) sequel to Snow Crash. There are hints all over the Diamond Age that refer to Snow Crash; > "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself. > "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said. > "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      I gave up on Stephenson at Quicksilver. I didn't like Cryptonomicon, but liked his previous work so I gave Quicksilver a try. It's very rare that I don't finish a book, but I didn't finish that one.
      - celticninja 5y ago
        I lived that series. I think his books depend on how much time you can devote to them. If you can read for hours on end the. They are great, you can really immerse yourself in them. They are not books you can read a few pages of every now and then.
      - LeChuck 5y ago
        Funny, because I love the baroque cycle. The enormity of it, and how it feels you can just go to this world and look around as the story meanders in the background.
        aidenn0 5y ago
        Now that you say it, I think his later books spend too much time on "putting you into the world" and not enough time of actually interesting things happening in the world for my tastes.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      Anathem has easily his most complete ending, where there's even something of an epilogue after the plot threads are wrapped up, but sadly a lot of the stuff after it was a bit of a regression either in quality of ideas or of ending or both. (Anathem hides the central plot elements of the book until at least halfway through, though, which could be offputting on its own if you don't click with the world-building before that. But personally I greatly prefer that to the pedestrianness of a Reamde or Fall or even the front end of Seveneves.)
    - adafs23123 5y ago
      The same with Seven Eves. Absolutely amazing book, but you better enjoy it while you're reading, the end feels like your book has missed the last pages.
    - drunkenmagician 5y ago
      I’ve found Stephenson a mixed bag, I enjoyed his early work, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and Reamde was fine. However Ive struggled to enjoy his more recent work, I’m usually excited to see a book coming, but recent works seem to lack something for me.
- tgv 5y ago
  For me, it's the casual way in which he introduces new concepts and words, not breaking the flow of the sentence, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine their meaning as the story unfolds and paints a fairly convincing picture of the near future. The friend who introduced me to Gibson was also lyrical about the jet lag passage, but I remember thinking that traveling North-South would be a counter example. Anyway, it is well written.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Ironically, this is something that I know has turned a ton of people off cyberpunk. I suspect there's a deep bifurcation between people who are intrigued by mystery (e.g. new language) and people who are made uncomfortable by it. When it's done right though, it strikes that good mystery novel tone for me: enough detail and context to be tantalizing and whet the intellectual appetite, but not so little or so much as to break disbelief or flow.
    - mortenjorck 5y ago
      It is indeed an incredibly hard balance to strike, and I'm one of those people turned off from a lot of other science fiction where it's done ham-handedly. What Gibson nails so consistently is literary naturalism: his made-up words sound like things people would plausibly say without feeling ridiculous; he's a master forger of linguistic currency.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Someone once told me that early electronic music was good, because it was composed by non-electronic composers searching for a way to extend the art. Science fiction feels very similar. If you read the earliest stuff (including subgenres like cyberpunk), you get authors who were looking to go beyond. Later, you get a mix of them and trend writers. To me the thing that he does well is break down where understanding comes from: (1) pre-context, (2) "literary naturalism" (great phrase!), (3) context, & (4) post-context. Sometimes, it's not critical that a reader understands 100% of a concept exactly where it's introduced, and by establishing less than that, tension can be created. I guess it's treating your reader as another character in your writing, and understanding that just as your in-fiction characters have different levels of understanding at various times in the plot, so can your reader. Personally, it feels very satisfying when a piece of understanding clicks into place later, and I hit 100% on (insert new concept here).
- criddell 5y ago
  I've read most of his stuff and I'm not sure if I love or hate his writing. For one, I can't read any of his books just once. He seems to love having the reader confused for the first half of the book and lift the fog in the second half. If I really want to make sense of the story, I have to do a second reading and only then does the first half make any sense. I just got Agency and this time I think I'm going to read as many plot summaries as I can find before I dive in. Maybe I can make sense of the book in one pass that way.
  - aardvark179 5y ago
    There is a quote about Gene Wolfe’s writing that you can never read one of his books, you can only re-read it. Some people really like that type of writing, and some don’t. I personally can’t imagine reading a plot summary before reading a Gibson, part of what makes his books interesting is looking back and realising which little incidental detail was the true pivotal thing in the book.
  - version_five 5y ago
    I was disappointed with Agency, it had almost a Dan Brown feel of a character grabbed and going and doing one thing after another to advance a narrative that doesnt pause long enough to let you question if it makes any sense. It does still have a Gibson-created world with lots of allusions that you have to piece together (this is one reason I like Gibson). When I read it, I didn't realize it was a sequel / second book in that world, so I don't know what more is obvious if you've already read the first book
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    I enjoyed Agency, having said that, there's a significant plot thread that is just resolved in a very offhand and uninteresting manner. There was a lot of similarity with The Peripheral as well, and there's what feels like forever in the middle where nothing happens except characters shuttle repeatedly between different locations without really knowing anything or doing anything actually significant. None of the viewpoint characters do all that much or have much 'agency'. All of the actually interesting stuff is happening offscreen. I suppose it's strange to say I enjoyed it given those criticisms, but I do like his writing, and there are some fun ideas hidden in there too.
- jrm4 5y ago
  I think it would be hard to do what he does and also have tidy plots. I love thinking about his relationship to the Matrix; I believe his take was correctly something in the realm of -- "I mean, this is obviously me but also perhaps better in most ways" (especially as it followed Johnny Mnemonic)
- freediver 5y ago
  Excerpt: "She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."
  - andi999 5y ago
    Love it. If it were true though it would mean no human soul has ever been on the moon...
    - freediver 5y ago
      A profound implication.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      Once both reach orbit, the astronauts of the IIS meet their souls briefly 16 times a day. Enough to catch a microsleep.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    I don't know. It sounds nice, but it doesn't describe jetlag well at all IMO.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      It's an apt metaphor. Your internal clock is in a different time zone than you, and each day it comes a bit closer, until you and your internal clock are at last in sync. Souls don't exist, but the metaphor of something slower catching up to you is nicely done IMO.
      - dougmwne 5y ago
        You also spend those days feeling utterly unlike yourself, in a new environment that is perhaps subtly, perhaps radically different than home. You feel distinctly unmoored and if there could be a collective unconscious psychically linking us to those around, then surely it must take a little while to get plugged into such a thing.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  I found Neuromancer to be quite a frustrating read, as if the author is trying so hard to be cool. I understand that he invented a whole sub genre which is cool but for me the engagement with the characters was zero and the introduction of new ideas without context made me feel as lost as one of his characters.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    It was the 80's, _everybody_ was trying too hard. His more recent stuff is much less edgy and has better writing.
    - version_five 5y ago
      Interesting, Neuromancer is by far my favorite Gibson book. I feel like I'm generally very sensitive to authors trying to hard, and I dont get that vibe, although I think I can see how it can be construed that way. Neuromancer was (i think) a ground up creation of that world Sprawl/BAMA etc. Personally I always find characters / places the best when you experience them as they are and don't get the explanation, which when attempted is inevitably less interesting than what you might imagine. The later books in the sprawl series (Count Zero I believe and another one whose name I can't remember) felt much more one dimensional to me.
      - speed_spread 5y ago
        I agree on the later books of the first trilogy (last one's Mona Lisa Overdrive) - they didn't leave as much an impression on me as Neuromancer did. Following trilogies were probably much more pre-organized than the first.
  - LiquidSky 5y ago
    >the introduction of new ideas without context made me feel as lost as one of his characters. But that's exactly the point, it's SUPPOSED to feel overwhelming.
  - rasz 5y ago
    Gibson wrote Neuromancer without ever using a computer, its all vague because he didnt know how any of this would work :)
- keiferski 5y ago
  I wish Gibson would exclusively write short stories or even aphorisms. His brilliance is in how he builds a world in offhand comments. The overall narratives tend to be boilerplate sci-fi, unfortunately. I've read the first ±50 pages of Neuromancer a few dozen times, but quickly lose interest in the story after the narrative really gets going.
  - dr-detroit 5y ago
    Hot take. Neuromancer is like the best novel in the genre.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  The opening two sentences stick with me, with respect to apt jet-lag description: "Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
  - muad_kyrlach 5y ago
    Sounds just like every pre-8:00am meeting i have ever had to attend.
- isk517 5y ago
  Makes me think of the common saying when comparing two writers: 'X tells a better story, but Y tells a story better.' Gibson is pretty deep in the 'tells a story better' category.
ethbr0 5y ago
Perhaps my favorite piece of Gibson. It's echoed with me every time I travel for... 18 years now? "Tuesday, February 04, 2003 OUT AND ABOUT, WITHOUT A LAPTOP Day two, still not very far from home but starting to see that blogging on the fly and in internet cafes is probably not the best way to keep this updated. Though on the other hand I suspect I get to see more things because I don't travel with a camera. In the peculiar mobile fishbowl of a book tour, the only time I'd have to use a laptop would be the time I have to sit alone, staring blankly into space. I suspect that those moments serve some vital function." Written on his blog [0] while he was touring for Pattern Recognition(?). His blog is still the most Gibson thing I've read, and I cannot recommend it enough. Edit: Because I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't mention it. If you're a Gibson fan, read "New Rose Hotel" [1] and watch the film [2]. [0] http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2003/02/?m=1 http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2003/02/?m=1 [1] http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/hotel.txt http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/hotel.txt [2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Heh. I bought Pattern Recognition and got Gibson to sign it on that tour. Not knowing how book tours worked I asked him if he'd seen $local_thing_our_town_is_known_for. "Are you kidding?" he said. "This is a book tour. I don't have time to take a piss." And now I know how book tours work.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    The tour period entries (Jan to ?) read like someone who obviously hates traveling on book tours, but does it because it's part of the job, and is also kind of fascinated by dissecting his own discomfort. Everything before was more a collection of weird stuff he learned or was linked to that day.
- spats1990 5y ago
  Thank you, I thought this blog was gone from the internet. His site at one point had a fairly active message board attached to it and I was sad when that went along with what I remember was some sort of author-bloggy appendage.
boboche 5y ago
Funny coincidence as I am reading a novel that I have been putting off for decades, Neuromancer. Which I discovered after playing the game with the same name on C=64 as a kid. I loved the rendering of the cyberspace, the combat logic, the story and all. There are complete walkthrough now on youtube if you don’t want to go through all of it. The Amiga version was very nice graphically. I would love to see a GOOD Neuromancer movie. That would bring me back in the theatre.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Don't forget there's a trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The other books are just as good, if not better. Although be prepared that if you like it too much, there's no more. Gibson typically tires of writing in one style for more than three books. PS: There's an excellent New Rose Hotel movie that no one has ever seen. Highly recommend reading the short story and watching it. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    >Don't forget there's a trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Indeed. I wished the article had spent more energy on his masterpiece trilogy...
    - prepend 5y ago
      I actually like the blue ant trilogy better. It was the first novels I read after 9/11 that factored it into the story in a realistic and reasonable way.
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    Thanks, I just put New Rose Hotel on my watch list. Thanks for the link.
  - e12e 5y ago
    > Although be prepared that if you like it too much, there's no more. Well, there's (most of) the short stories in Burning Chrome, and I don't think the break is that huge for the bridge trilogy. It's a different future from Neuromancer, though. Then again I've yet to read anything by Gibson I didn't like, including the most recent books. So I might not be the best guide... I recommend looking into Bruce Sterling, if you enjoy Gibson - particularly Islands in the Net (if you can find it! I ended up buying an expensive used copy online) and Holy Fire.
leephillips 5y ago
I find Gibson entertaining, but I often get the feeling, reading his novels, that I’m in a product showroom. He mentions brand names strangely often, and a commercial style of speech is constantly leaking into his prose. I remember a description (I don’t remember which novel) mentioning the “high thread count” of the sheets on someone’s bed. I never expected to see that phrase outside of a product description. I doubt that there’s actual product placement in his books, but it feels like it. EDIT after reading replies: I agree with all the replies. I understood the brand-obsessed nature of the world he’s invoking. I may, however, have underestimated him, and not appreciated how he deliberately allows aspects of this universe to infect the authorial voice. Next time I read one of his books I’ll keep this in mind. I also sometimes enjoy the immersion into particular products, when Gibson goes into details about something I’d never heard of, such as Maybach automobiles.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  If that's from the Blue Ant trilogy, it's intended to have that effect. The underlying themes have a lot to do with individuality in a sea of hyperconsumerism. It's been a minute, but I think the Bridge trilogy also started nudging in that direction. Gibson likes to crib off emerging trends. Which is probably why he'd already abandoned writing hacker heroes by the 90s. (Bridge Laney having a somewhat different gift) Exhibit A for how that observation played out: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bed+sheets https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bed+sheets
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > I think the Bridge trilogy also started nudging in that direction. Yes, but in a slightly different way. For example there is a scene in Virtual Light where one character is listening to another complain about how "you can't tell the difference anymore between the 'programs' and the 'commercials,' whatever that meant".
- cgh 5y ago
  Bland, soul-deadening consumerism is one of his major themes so what you noticed is intentional.
- 5y ago
wintermutestwin 5y ago
Nice article, but I would have liked it to include a catalog of all of Gibson's prescient details in his masterpiece trilogy. Beyond Cyberspace, the one that seems to resonate the most as we look into our future with today's lens is the coming Methuselah uber-wealth elites that Yuval Noah Harari details in his books. Although Stephenson has his moments, I don't think we have seen any writer that has come close to either Phillip K. Dick or Gibson - and that includes post-trilogy Gibson.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  +1 I agree with everything that you just said. I really like Gibson's prose and also, in my imagination, his almost-no-government, corporate enclave centered world is (probably unfortunately) the pattern for future life. Corporations and elites have won class warfare (control of media and political parties - game over), nothing is going to change that, so accepting life as is, I am very curious what our transition into the future will look like.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    >Corporations and elites have won class warfare (control of media and political parties - game over) Yes, and I would add that mass surveillance is the checkmate...
    - mark_l_watson 5y ago
      I agree. We should talk on the phone sometime - I recognize your HN user name from prior comments.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      The primacy of the infosphere (in the sense of the shadow cloud of information that exists behind all of us now) is a pretty huge hit too. Not sure many others saw that coming in the mid-90s.
- tudorw 5y ago
  Lem
User23 5y ago
Burning Chrome is a masterpiece. It’s the best short story collection I’ve read in any genre.
- dchapp 5y ago
  Agreed. I remember reading Hinterlands as a high school student and being depressed for the following decade.
  - krylon 5y ago
    That one haunts me. I wish someone with the required talent would make it into a movie. It would be really creepy and depressing but I could not get enough of it.
shantnutiwari 5y ago
For me-- I loved Neuromancer(which I've read multiple times), but thought his other books were very meh, very forgettable. That said, his writing style is great. Most sci-fi (and fantasy) seem to love a lot of padding-- 300+ page books of which 200 is fluff. Gibson wrote comparatively short and sharp books- no unnecessary exposition, no character spending 3 pages describing the city, or admiring themselves in the mirror so we can learn about the strange alien races. I wish more scifi books were short and quick/easy to read.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  > I wish more scifi books were short and quick/easy to read. I echo this. I'm currently slogging my way through Blue Mars, the third weighty tome of Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars Trilogy...
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    Many sci-fi novels could be edited down to the length of Fahrenheit 451 and be improved by doing so.
    - e12e 5y ago
      Many books should be edited down. Neal Stephenson is a prime example of getting away with leaving in so much mediocre stuff that it drags down the quality of his books, even though he can be brilliant too. My favorite Murakami book so far is "South of the Border" - and I'm not sure "Norwegian Wood" could not have been made even better with a few (only a few !) cuts.
    - mattkevan 5y ago
      Peter F Hamilton has entered the chat. He has great plots, but they’re buried under so much unnecessary detail, reading his books is like an archaeological dig. Unless you really want to know in excruciating detail what every character, no matter how minor, had for breakfast.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
harry8 5y ago
I really like the way Gibson invents language and does so expertly enough that he can just use it without explanation and I feel clever for being able to follow it, which is almost certainly part of the trick. I think it gives extra weight to whatever his point happens to be. I can't think of anyone else who does it just now. Any suggestions? Doesn't have to be sf.
- ailun 5y ago
  It's not new, but I just read Neverness by David Zindell. I had a similar feeling with his invented language. He actually does it so realistically that sometimes I couldn't tell when the words were invented and when they were just archaic.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  The only other author I know of would be William Shakespear. Many find him harder to follow of course, but the words he invented aren't any harder than the rest.
  - harry8 5y ago
    That's a fair point but the effect is wildly different for the reader or audience in the modern world. Where Gibson's invented language invokes a mood with a very different language you can still follow, Shakespeare's language became common usage to the point of sounding cliched. He's even named his loverboy character "Romeo!" - a real quote from highschool. Kind of different to reading how someone interfaced, jacked, punched deck, couldn't proj etc. It's been decades so my examples are probably in need of some work but I guess they stayed with me that long.
- willowfine 5y ago
  Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, Norman Spinrod’s Child of Fortune.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Writing doesn't get any better than this. From this line onwards I was and always will be a Gibson fan. His latter works are less impressive though, I think.
- criddell 5y ago
  Today, TVs turned to a dead channel are brilliant blue. So I guess it still makes sense.
  - grkvlt 5y ago
    > The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel. An homage to this line by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere...
- cstuder 5y ago
  What, a uniform blue color? I remember a discussion about that particular line with Gibson, in an interview, but can't find it at the moment.
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    Given the time that the novel was written, televisions at the time would just display grey static on a dead channel.
  - Veen 5y ago
    This comment makes me feel old. I immediately knew he was talking about static, but I suppose if you didn't grow up with pre-digital terrestrial TV, you wouldn't be familiar with that.
  - e12e 5y ago
    as remarked on in homage by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: > The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
lazlee 5y ago
I love early Gibson but his last few books read like watered down Brett Easton Ellis and I haven't been able to finish reading any of them.
neurobashing 5y ago
It gets a small (peripheral?) mention but The Jackpot books - The Peripheral and Agency are really good. They're going to be a series on Amazon Prime too.
- jasonladuke0311 5y ago
  The Peripheral is one of my favorite books, so I was very disappointed that Agency didn't really seem to move the story along very much.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    Agency is cursed by being "the middle book". I expect it will become more significant in hindsight once the trilogy is completed.
    - spats1990 5y ago
      I think you're right there and I think it suffers from the political context in which it was written. The near future America of Peripheral was far stronger and more convincing, even politically, than the near future America of Agency.
      - speed_spread 5y ago
        Also, Peripheral described a dark, dilapidated countryside / suburbia which was a new landscape for Gibson. While Agency's stub differs significantly from ours but because it is closer chronologically maybe it felt uncanny?
        spats1990 5y ago
        Yeah I wasn't being precise sorry. The agency stub's similarities to our world felt too "on the nose" or similar, in a way that detracted from it being an accurate/enthralling depiction of our world (in the way that all sf is no matter when/where it's set). It's hard to phrase what I mean here but I think the countryside/suburbia might have something to do with it. "2060s USA: The Department of Homeland Security is an oppressive militia and also one of very few sources of stable employment" felt much more real and powerful than "Kinda 201X USA: Trump didn't win, but now there's a nuclear standoff" but I can't say why exactly. There is still a lot of classic Gibson prose in Agency though--the good stuff. High hopes for the new book.
drpgq 5y ago
Gibson's book Distrust that Particular Flavor of some collected columns is worth a read.
mlang23 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b922U1_7CM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b922U1_7CM
jdkee 5y ago
“In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win? Neal: You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.” See https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...
- fennecfoxy 5y ago
  This is actually fucking brilliant! Just makes me love those two (three) even more.
croes 5y ago
Are there still good cyberpunk novels these days?
narrator 5y ago
I found his prose kind of boring actually. Like trying to listen to a physics lecture, but it's delivered as an ASMR track. Way too caught up in its own awesomeness to actually efficiently communicate anything. That's not to say I don't like dense prose. Borges is fantastic and I have to read his stories carefully, one sentence at a time, but there is a ton of information packed in to very few words.
brazzy 5y ago
I was positively obsessed with (and still hold dear) Gibson's early works, especially the short stories, but the Idoru trilogy somehow bored me. Not sure whether his storytelling changed or my tastes did. I love how (as Gibson himself has remarked) Neuromancer has become nearly impossible to read straightforwardly by younger readers because he failed to predict the ubiquity of cell phones and has the characters depend on landlines and pay phones for communication - to someone who's grown up with omnipresent cell phones their absence is baffling and seems like an intentional plot point building up to some twist that never comes.
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  I hope the youts feel the same about The Matrix phones.
- spats1990 5y ago
  I'm a superfan as well and I think the Blue Ant ones hold up the best. With a few years of context we can see now that he was really well ahead of the curve on a ton of stuff that is now our reality. When Cayce explains why she quit coolhunting she says that the world has begun to suffer a contagion wherein almost everybody is a coolhunter of some kind, and of course that did happen, but the publication of the book where she says this predates instagram by two or three years. Gibson was one of the first to point out how ubiquitous internet essentially killed the geographical subculture with its signature language of fashion and so on. They still exist, but on a smorgasboard of options presented by the twining together of internet and culture. The Bigends of our world will send global anything that looks promising, shorn of its physical context. e: Molly Millions is the most iconic and famous Gibson character but I think Bigend, with his charm, machinations, drive to commodify art, etc, is the one really representing an archetype for our times.
- fennecfoxy 5y ago
  >their absense is baffling Well if they lack an imagination then that's not Gibson's problem. It would be like saying that they can't read fantasy because messages have to be delivered on horseback "why wouldn't they just have cell phones?" I hear them cry.
dkarl 5y ago
> (the “normcore” aesthetic of the 2010s can convincingly be traced to the habits of a Gibson character who’s “allergic” to brands) Normcore as I understand it is not averse to brands, and its spirit seems inconsistent with the character's unique look and obsessive attention to detail in her own outfits and accessories, but setting that aside, I'm struck by the implicit claim that Pattern Recognition could have had greater reach than No Logo by Naomi Klein, which came out a few years earlier and plugged into contemporary determination to personally resist the power of multinational corporations that was being amplified through globalization. No Logo was certainly a more famous book, but it's possible that an order of magnitude more people actually read Pattern Recognition and that it directly influenced the personal fashion of more people. If so, that would be a remarkable testament to the power of a fun read from a bestselling author. I any case I'd be interested in reading about how someone traced William Gibson's influence on fashion trends.
- webmaven 5y ago
  The eponymous Count Zero's boots seemed to foreshadow the Lunarcore aesthetic, but probably didn't influence it directly.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
frazbin 5y ago
I don't know where to put this but I can't get through even a page of his writing.. like the first and overwhelming impression is of a narcissistic haze/stink. Like reading a fart. I like most other science fiction.. what am I feeling here?
- pjc50 5y ago
  I don't know, maybe it's what you're not feeling? If the heavy visual imagery style is not for you, it's not for you, but you're missing out on a lot. Why do you find it narcissistic?
- ctrlp 5y ago
  You're missing the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old. It's craptacular dreck written by a hack with a febrile imagination.
ctrlp 5y ago
Can someone be a literary genius and suck at writing? I guess so. Prescient? Inventive? Sure. But good lord his prose is turgid. A while back, I tried to read his 'best' books and all I could reason about their popularity is that here was an author for adult adolescents. The excerpts from this article seem almost chosen on purpose to illustrate how bad it is.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  What do you like more?
  - ctrlp 5y ago
    SF is a tough genre to swallow. If that's the question I can't offer you much without qualification. Gibson is a particularly egregious desecrator of English but only one. The genre gravitates to pulp. These are fantasy novels not just in their imaginary worlds, but in their imaginary psychology. Pulp fetishizes thin, simplified inner lives and relationships. That's as much part of the escapism as the tech. Enjoy it if you can but if you don't know what good prose is already, you won't learn it from Gibson.
    - sphynxie 5y ago
      What authors do you recommend for good prose? Genuinely interested.. I love prose (and Gibson, generally) but am always looking to expand my horizons.
      - ctrlp 5y ago
        If you love Gibson's prose I'm not sure what to recommend. Maybe you'd enjoy James Joyce, or Kerouac or Burroughs maybe. If you love fiction generally there are all the great novels to read.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
I've wondered why more Gibson books aren't movies, or why when they're adapted, they're done so quite poorly. Some of his books would adapt quite nicely to hyperlink cinema. I'd also love to see the Safdie brothers try their hands at a Neuromancer adaptation. Their brand of over-adrenalized haphazard cinema would work well with Case's character.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
Gibson is one of my favorite authors in science fiction. He may even be on my top 5 favorite authors overall. Whenever I start a new book, I have the impression that it is written in subtle different language. It takes my brain a little while to catch on. China Miéville has that as well in a different manner. Gibson seems to me to be an author who thinks about every single word. His texture is unique. Some his later books have some slow passages.
- xarope 5y ago
  Another +1 for Miéville. Perdido Station and Railsea really reminded me of Gibson's "style".
  - zbentley 5y ago
    I love Miéville (well, his good stuff; his B roll not so much). But he's always going to be below Gibson on my ranking because Miéville's worlds and characters, while rich and innovative and unique and fascinating and and ... all seem so deeply _hopeless_ to me. It's ironic. Gibson writes about hypercapitalist dystopias (present or future), often starring burnouts and addicts, but manages, through all the grit and suffering, to often hint that things still tend towards hope--even if only in small, human ways--despite the overly cynical tone of the world: the AI ascendant, heroes tropily settled down. Miéville, on the other hand, writes of worlds packed with magic and intrigue and hypertrophic growth, but often ends his plots (deliberately, I think) on a hopeless, stagnant note. There are exceptions to both trends in each author's bibliography, to be sure, but it's a really pronounced juxtaposition (at least for me).
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  Not many people are aware, but there was an (excellent, IMO) mini-series made from The City And The City.
tracerbulletx 5y ago
The Bridge trilogy may actually be his best work but is hardly ever discussed. It's a real sleeper and if you haven't read it I highly recommend it.
- 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  It could just be because the real world changed a lot between publishing Neuromancer and Virtual Light, but the Bridge trilogy in my view is way better than Neuromancer.
adafs23123 5y ago
you can read today his books and forget they somehow were wroten full 20-30-40 years ago. His books have almost every technology we have today, or we have some similar stuff, sometimes we still don't have some technology he mentions, but there are prototypes. But the sociological aspect of the books are even more interesting. There's a book from 1993, "Virtual Light", where a character mentions he remembers going to school and having to use mask and all sorts of cleaning stuff, there was a virus "in the air", the teacher then explained the kids the word "pandemy". The historical moment mentioned for that pandemy would aproximately be this and/or the 2030s Just amazing.
ephimetheus 5y ago
It’s probably just me, but I found Neuromancer extremely hard to read. I forced myself to do it because the world building was so great, but I didn’t enjoy it a lot. I tried to do the same for The peripheral, but just couldn’t. Not for me I guess.
zbentley 5y ago
> the “normcore” aesthetic of the 2010s can convincingly be traced to the habits of a Gibson character who’s “allergic” to brands The Blue Ant books are some of my favorites, but I think that's quite a stretch. Cayce's character wasn't nearly widely enough read to be that influential.
fennecfoxy 5y ago
If you like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson et al try the Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. I wish he'd write more in that universe.
- futureproofd 5y ago
  Gibson and Stephenson have different styles of writing. The comments throughout this thread are evidence enough. I could see many liking one over the other so I have a hard time taking your recommendation even though I'd like to.

258 points by throw0101a 5y ago

I love reading Gibson. His prose is brilliant. In his book "Pattern Recognition" he spends the first page and half describing jet-lag in such brilliant manner that you feel like you just experienced art. Unfortunately I feel his plot/stories never seem to hold up. I will always consider him an artist. Something to savor. I've always felt that it was superior to true 'literature' in that each word is a morsel that adds to the whole and not up to the interpretation of the reader.

cbsmith 5y ago
Well said. I have similar feelings about Neal Stephenson, though I'd say Gibson's literary skills are a level above.
- cletus 5y ago
  Stephenson is definitely about the journey not the destination. His endings aren’t the best. Cryptonomicon is an amazing book. The ending? Meh.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Oof, if you didn't like the ending to Cryptonomicon, you'll hate the ending to Seveneves.
    - haasted 5y ago
      So much great worldbuilding, a notable and incredibly interesting development and then just "the end". That was rather upsetting.
      - prepend 5y ago
        Such is life.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        > and then just "the end" That's what an ending does.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        Maybe that’s part of the point of the ending. The implication is that the interesting developments in that world never end, even if the book must. Personally I find his endings enchanting.
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
        Especially when there were at least two better endings already in the book.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      Personally preferred Seveneves' ending.
    - potta_coffee 5y ago
      I loved Cryptonomicon and I didn't even like the beginning to Seveneves. I don't think I made it through four chapters.
      - blacktriangle 5y ago
        The beginning of Seveneves is pretty bad, but the rest of the book makes up for it. It's as if the first part of the book exists soley to set up the plot and characters for the second part of the story which is where the interesting bits are.
    - jkestner 5y ago
      At least that one ended in a burst of new threads for my imagination to chew on; the second half of Fall slowly dwindles into the petty, boring squabbles of gods, leaving a ton of more interesting questions unasked and unanswered.
      - finnh 5y ago
        Fall was easily the worst thing he's written (pretty sure i've read all of his output... except the last hundred pages of Fall)
        jgon 5y ago
        Yikes! I'd decided to take a pass on anything he's written unless it received unanimous critical acclaim after slogging through Seveneves and not even finishing Reamde, so it's kind of sad to hear that things aren't getting better.
        finnh 5y ago
        Imagine a stoned teenager really falling in love with the idea of rewriting Paradise Lost "but in a computer, like Tron". And then vomiting like 700 pages of it. And then not editing it. And then releasing it in hardback.
  - runevault 5y ago
    Crypto's ending is still better than Snow Crash's (though I prefer SC overall). Someone sent me a great meme yesterday showing the back half of the horse fully drawn and the front half barely a stick figure of a horse and the back half said "Stephenson starting a book" and the front was "Stephenson finishing a book." I dunno if I've ever seen a truer meme in my life.
    - antiterra 5y ago
      I love the first chapter of Snow Crash, it brilliantly establishes the world, the tone and (the) Protagonist. There’s a breathless pacing that makes it incredibly fun to read aloud. The rest I can do without.
      - runevault 5y ago
        IMO you could teach an entire semester long course on world building, pacing, prose, etc of an opening just on the first chapter of Snow Crash. And some people are not into the language stuff and the like. I can understand how it would miss a lot of people. I found it strangely engaging.
      - croes 5y ago
        Snow Crash was one of the fastest books I've ever read.
    - cecilpl2 5y ago
      Sounds like pretty much the exact opposite of Brandon Sanderson.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Huh—I'd have said Cryptonomicon's the only one of his I've read that didn't turn into a directionless mess halfway through, and/or have a bad ending. Also read The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Anathem.
    - StevenRayOrr 5y ago
      I just finished _Reamde_ and was, overall, fairly satisfied with the way the story built towards the conclusion. It moves in unexpected directions, but I enjoyed the entire ride.
      - handrous 5y ago
        I keep hearing & reading enough good things about that one that I'll likely check it out eventually. I kinda swore him off after The Diamond Age gave me the novel but unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author, but if/when I backslide on that Reamde will probably be what does it.
        argomo 5y ago
        Reamde is basically gun porn (in the same way Seveneves was orbital dynamics porn) with a protracted hostage situation for plot tension and some videogaming/spy craft stuff thrown in for flavor. Not really sci-fi IMO.
        progre 5y ago
        Ooh, let's do Zodiac next: Bike lock porn?
        webmaven 5y ago
        I'd have characterized Zodiac as 'pollution porn'.
        majormajor 5y ago
        Zodiac and toilet bowl part porn?
  - rrdharan 5y ago
    I’m convinced the ending (and other parts) of Cryptonomicon were inspired by A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, but I have no evidence to support this claim. Here’s an interesting thread with more books that share this conceit: https://ask.metafilter.com/190234/Help-me-find-novels-set-in-the-past-and-present https://ask.metafilter.com/190234/Help-me-find-novels-set-in...
  - EdwardCoffin 5y ago
    Stephenson occasionally fields questions about his endings in talks. Here's one of them, from his Google talk for the Anathem book tour [1]: Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it. A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. ... So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is. For me, the endings meme really is that - I don't see what people are complaining about. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s
    - gknoy 5y ago
      I've read a fair bit of Stephenson, and have never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings. I enjoy reading his stories enough that I still read (and have re-read) them. Maybe it's that I want more from the characters, or an epilogue lunch at shawarma palace (or, more appropriately, Uncle Enzo's Pizza) where they show things returning to normal. The closest thing I've encountered to that in film is the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. (SPOILERS) It's _very_ abrupt. And yet, when I think about it, it feels masterful -- there's nothing that could have been added between the climax and the ending that would have made it better. Objectively it seems really good, but it's _shocking_ in how abrupt it is, and as a viewer it took me some time to reconcile between "I hate that" and "that's probably brilliant".
      - webmaven 5y ago
        > I've ... never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings It seems to me that that sort of satisfaction isn't what Stephenson is going for, but rather if his works can be said to have any consistent theme it is that narrative threads (plot, history, etc.) overlap but aren't aligned, so no matter when you start or stop at least some of those threads are going to be in the middle.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    I found The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to be an incredible read, and a great introduction to Neal Stephenson. Like William Gibson he has a prophetic ability to see future technology, and put it to paper.
    - darkarmani 5y ago
      I would not have people start with that book. It's easy to get confused. It is very tough to get through some parts (unless you've read it multiple times and are a super-fan). I find the message very interesting: culture is technology. He has such strong libertarian characters in every novel, he also shows that: "being strong but along makes you weak" (Mel being captured and trussed up). His cultural superiority explanation falls apart slightly in two ways: Victorian culture is lacking (the point of the Mel experiment) and the three girls have completely different outcomes from their "Primer education". (or maybe Victorian culture just needs to evolve). I'm not sure how I feel about the Victorians battling the (barbarian) Chinese and the very feudal class structure.
    - satori99 5y ago
      It is also a possibly a (sort-of) sequel to Snow Crash. There are hints all over the Diamond Age that refer to Snow Crash; > "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself. > "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said. > "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I gave up on Stephenson at Quicksilver. I didn't like Cryptonomicon, but liked his previous work so I gave Quicksilver a try. It's very rare that I don't finish a book, but I didn't finish that one.
    - celticninja 5y ago
      I lived that series. I think his books depend on how much time you can devote to them. If you can read for hours on end the. They are great, you can really immerse yourself in them. They are not books you can read a few pages of every now and then.
    - LeChuck 5y ago
      Funny, because I love the baroque cycle. The enormity of it, and how it feels you can just go to this world and look around as the story meanders in the background.
      - aidenn0 5y ago
        Now that you say it, I think his later books spend too much time on "putting you into the world" and not enough time of actually interesting things happening in the world for my tastes.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Anathem has easily his most complete ending, where there's even something of an epilogue after the plot threads are wrapped up, but sadly a lot of the stuff after it was a bit of a regression either in quality of ideas or of ending or both. (Anathem hides the central plot elements of the book until at least halfway through, though, which could be offputting on its own if you don't click with the world-building before that. But personally I greatly prefer that to the pedestrianness of a Reamde or Fall or even the front end of Seveneves.)
  - adafs23123 5y ago
    The same with Seven Eves. Absolutely amazing book, but you better enjoy it while you're reading, the end feels like your book has missed the last pages.
  - drunkenmagician 5y ago
    I’ve found Stephenson a mixed bag, I enjoyed his early work, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and Reamde was fine. However Ive struggled to enjoy his more recent work, I’m usually excited to see a book coming, but recent works seem to lack something for me.
tgv 5y ago
For me, it's the casual way in which he introduces new concepts and words, not breaking the flow of the sentence, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine their meaning as the story unfolds and paints a fairly convincing picture of the near future. The friend who introduced me to Gibson was also lyrical about the jet lag passage, but I remember thinking that traveling North-South would be a counter example. Anyway, it is well written.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Ironically, this is something that I know has turned a ton of people off cyberpunk. I suspect there's a deep bifurcation between people who are intrigued by mystery (e.g. new language) and people who are made uncomfortable by it. When it's done right though, it strikes that good mystery novel tone for me: enough detail and context to be tantalizing and whet the intellectual appetite, but not so little or so much as to break disbelief or flow.
  - mortenjorck 5y ago
    It is indeed an incredibly hard balance to strike, and I'm one of those people turned off from a lot of other science fiction where it's done ham-handedly. What Gibson nails so consistently is literary naturalism: his made-up words sound like things people would plausibly say without feeling ridiculous; he's a master forger of linguistic currency.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Someone once told me that early electronic music was good, because it was composed by non-electronic composers searching for a way to extend the art. Science fiction feels very similar. If you read the earliest stuff (including subgenres like cyberpunk), you get authors who were looking to go beyond. Later, you get a mix of them and trend writers. To me the thing that he does well is break down where understanding comes from: (1) pre-context, (2) "literary naturalism" (great phrase!), (3) context, & (4) post-context. Sometimes, it's not critical that a reader understands 100% of a concept exactly where it's introduced, and by establishing less than that, tension can be created. I guess it's treating your reader as another character in your writing, and understanding that just as your in-fiction characters have different levels of understanding at various times in the plot, so can your reader. Personally, it feels very satisfying when a piece of understanding clicks into place later, and I hit 100% on (insert new concept here).
criddell 5y ago
I've read most of his stuff and I'm not sure if I love or hate his writing. For one, I can't read any of his books just once. He seems to love having the reader confused for the first half of the book and lift the fog in the second half. If I really want to make sense of the story, I have to do a second reading and only then does the first half make any sense. I just got Agency and this time I think I'm going to read as many plot summaries as I can find before I dive in. Maybe I can make sense of the book in one pass that way.
- aardvark179 5y ago
  There is a quote about Gene Wolfe’s writing that you can never read one of his books, you can only re-read it. Some people really like that type of writing, and some don’t. I personally can’t imagine reading a plot summary before reading a Gibson, part of what makes his books interesting is looking back and realising which little incidental detail was the true pivotal thing in the book.
- version_five 5y ago
  I was disappointed with Agency, it had almost a Dan Brown feel of a character grabbed and going and doing one thing after another to advance a narrative that doesnt pause long enough to let you question if it makes any sense. It does still have a Gibson-created world with lots of allusions that you have to piece together (this is one reason I like Gibson). When I read it, I didn't realize it was a sequel / second book in that world, so I don't know what more is obvious if you've already read the first book
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  I enjoyed Agency, having said that, there's a significant plot thread that is just resolved in a very offhand and uninteresting manner. There was a lot of similarity with The Peripheral as well, and there's what feels like forever in the middle where nothing happens except characters shuttle repeatedly between different locations without really knowing anything or doing anything actually significant. None of the viewpoint characters do all that much or have much 'agency'. All of the actually interesting stuff is happening offscreen. I suppose it's strange to say I enjoyed it given those criticisms, but I do like his writing, and there are some fun ideas hidden in there too.
jrm4 5y ago
I think it would be hard to do what he does and also have tidy plots. I love thinking about his relationship to the Matrix; I believe his take was correctly something in the realm of -- "I mean, this is obviously me but also perhaps better in most ways" (especially as it followed Johnny Mnemonic)
freediver 5y ago
Excerpt: "She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."
- andi999 5y ago
  Love it. If it were true though it would mean no human soul has ever been on the moon...
  - freediver 5y ago
    A profound implication.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Once both reach orbit, the astronauts of the IIS meet their souls briefly 16 times a day. Enough to catch a microsleep.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  I don't know. It sounds nice, but it doesn't describe jetlag well at all IMO.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    It's an apt metaphor. Your internal clock is in a different time zone than you, and each day it comes a bit closer, until you and your internal clock are at last in sync. Souls don't exist, but the metaphor of something slower catching up to you is nicely done IMO.
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      You also spend those days feeling utterly unlike yourself, in a new environment that is perhaps subtly, perhaps radically different than home. You feel distinctly unmoored and if there could be a collective unconscious psychically linking us to those around, then surely it must take a little while to get plugged into such a thing.
andy_ppp 5y ago
I found Neuromancer to be quite a frustrating read, as if the author is trying so hard to be cool. I understand that he invented a whole sub genre which is cool but for me the engagement with the characters was zero and the introduction of new ideas without context made me feel as lost as one of his characters.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  It was the 80's, _everybody_ was trying too hard. His more recent stuff is much less edgy and has better writing.
  - version_five 5y ago
    Interesting, Neuromancer is by far my favorite Gibson book. I feel like I'm generally very sensitive to authors trying to hard, and I dont get that vibe, although I think I can see how it can be construed that way. Neuromancer was (i think) a ground up creation of that world Sprawl/BAMA etc. Personally I always find characters / places the best when you experience them as they are and don't get the explanation, which when attempted is inevitably less interesting than what you might imagine. The later books in the sprawl series (Count Zero I believe and another one whose name I can't remember) felt much more one dimensional to me.
    - speed_spread 5y ago
      I agree on the later books of the first trilogy (last one's Mona Lisa Overdrive) - they didn't leave as much an impression on me as Neuromancer did. Following trilogies were probably much more pre-organized than the first.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  >the introduction of new ideas without context made me feel as lost as one of his characters. But that's exactly the point, it's SUPPOSED to feel overwhelming.
- rasz 5y ago
  Gibson wrote Neuromancer without ever using a computer, its all vague because he didnt know how any of this would work :)
keiferski 5y ago
I wish Gibson would exclusively write short stories or even aphorisms. His brilliance is in how he builds a world in offhand comments. The overall narratives tend to be boilerplate sci-fi, unfortunately. I've read the first ±50 pages of Neuromancer a few dozen times, but quickly lose interest in the story after the narrative really gets going.
- dr-detroit 5y ago
  Hot take. Neuromancer is like the best novel in the genre.
revolvingocelot 5y ago
The opening two sentences stick with me, with respect to apt jet-lag description: "Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
- muad_kyrlach 5y ago
  Sounds just like every pre-8:00am meeting i have ever had to attend.
isk517 5y ago
Makes me think of the common saying when comparing two writers: 'X tells a better story, but Y tells a story better.' Gibson is pretty deep in the 'tells a story better' category.

ethbr0 5y ago

Perhaps my favorite piece of Gibson. It's echoed with me every time I travel for... 18 years now? "Tuesday, February 04, 2003 OUT AND ABOUT, WITHOUT A LAPTOP Day two, still not very far from home but starting to see that blogging on the fly and in internet cafes is probably not the best way to keep this updated. Though on the other hand I suspect I get to see more things because I don't travel with a camera. In the peculiar mobile fishbowl of a book tour, the only time I'd have to use a laptop would be the time I have to sit alone, staring blankly into space. I suspect that those moments serve some vital function." Written on his blog [0] while he was touring for Pattern Recognition(?). His blog is still the most Gibson thing I've read, and I cannot recommend it enough. Edit: Because I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't mention it. If you're a Gibson fan, read "New Rose Hotel" [1] and watch the film [2]. [0] http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2003/02/?m=1 http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2003/02/?m=1 [1] http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/hotel.txt http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/hotel.txt [2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/

dreamcompiler 5y ago
Heh. I bought Pattern Recognition and got Gibson to sign it on that tour. Not knowing how book tours worked I asked him if he'd seen $local_thing_our_town_is_known_for. "Are you kidding?" he said. "This is a book tour. I don't have time to take a piss." And now I know how book tours work.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The tour period entries (Jan to ?) read like someone who obviously hates traveling on book tours, but does it because it's part of the job, and is also kind of fascinated by dissecting his own discomfort. Everything before was more a collection of weird stuff he learned or was linked to that day.
spats1990 5y ago
Thank you, I thought this blog was gone from the internet. His site at one point had a fairly active message board attached to it and I was sad when that went along with what I remember was some sort of author-bloggy appendage.

boboche 5y ago

Funny coincidence as I am reading a novel that I have been putting off for decades, Neuromancer. Which I discovered after playing the game with the same name on C=64 as a kid. I loved the rendering of the cyberspace, the combat logic, the story and all. There are complete walkthrough now on youtube if you don’t want to go through all of it. The Amiga version was very nice graphically. I would love to see a GOOD Neuromancer movie. That would bring me back in the theatre.

ethbr0 5y ago
Don't forget there's a trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The other books are just as good, if not better. Although be prepared that if you like it too much, there's no more. Gibson typically tires of writing in one style for more than three books. PS: There's an excellent New Rose Hotel movie that no one has ever seen. Highly recommend reading the short story and watching it. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  >Don't forget there's a trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Indeed. I wished the article had spent more energy on his masterpiece trilogy...
  - prepend 5y ago
    I actually like the blue ant trilogy better. It was the first novels I read after 9/11 that factored it into the story in a realistic and reasonable way.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Thanks, I just put New Rose Hotel on my watch list. Thanks for the link.
- e12e 5y ago
  > Although be prepared that if you like it too much, there's no more. Well, there's (most of) the short stories in Burning Chrome, and I don't think the break is that huge for the bridge trilogy. It's a different future from Neuromancer, though. Then again I've yet to read anything by Gibson I didn't like, including the most recent books. So I might not be the best guide... I recommend looking into Bruce Sterling, if you enjoy Gibson - particularly Islands in the Net (if you can find it! I ended up buying an expensive used copy online) and Holy Fire.

leephillips 5y ago

I find Gibson entertaining, but I often get the feeling, reading his novels, that I’m in a product showroom. He mentions brand names strangely often, and a commercial style of speech is constantly leaking into his prose. I remember a description (I don’t remember which novel) mentioning the “high thread count” of the sheets on someone’s bed. I never expected to see that phrase outside of a product description. I doubt that there’s actual product placement in his books, but it feels like it. EDIT after reading replies: I agree with all the replies. I understood the brand-obsessed nature of the world he’s invoking. I may, however, have underestimated him, and not appreciated how he deliberately allows aspects of this universe to infect the authorial voice. Next time I read one of his books I’ll keep this in mind. I also sometimes enjoy the immersion into particular products, when Gibson goes into details about something I’d never heard of, such as Maybach automobiles.

ethbr0 5y ago
If that's from the Blue Ant trilogy, it's intended to have that effect. The underlying themes have a lot to do with individuality in a sea of hyperconsumerism. It's been a minute, but I think the Bridge trilogy also started nudging in that direction. Gibson likes to crib off emerging trends. Which is probably why he'd already abandoned writing hacker heroes by the 90s. (Bridge Laney having a somewhat different gift) Exhibit A for how that observation played out: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bed+sheets https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bed+sheets
- webmaven 5y ago
  > I think the Bridge trilogy also started nudging in that direction. Yes, but in a slightly different way. For example there is a scene in Virtual Light where one character is listening to another complain about how "you can't tell the difference anymore between the 'programs' and the 'commercials,' whatever that meant".
cgh 5y ago
Bland, soul-deadening consumerism is one of his major themes so what you noticed is intentional.
5y ago

wintermutestwin 5y ago

Nice article, but I would have liked it to include a catalog of all of Gibson's prescient details in his masterpiece trilogy. Beyond Cyberspace, the one that seems to resonate the most as we look into our future with today's lens is the coming Methuselah uber-wealth elites that Yuval Noah Harari details in his books. Although Stephenson has his moments, I don't think we have seen any writer that has come close to either Phillip K. Dick or Gibson - and that includes post-trilogy Gibson.

mark_l_watson 5y ago
+1 I agree with everything that you just said. I really like Gibson's prose and also, in my imagination, his almost-no-government, corporate enclave centered world is (probably unfortunately) the pattern for future life. Corporations and elites have won class warfare (control of media and political parties - game over), nothing is going to change that, so accepting life as is, I am very curious what our transition into the future will look like.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  >Corporations and elites have won class warfare (control of media and political parties - game over) Yes, and I would add that mass surveillance is the checkmate...
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    I agree. We should talk on the phone sometime - I recognize your HN user name from prior comments.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    The primacy of the infosphere (in the sense of the shadow cloud of information that exists behind all of us now) is a pretty huge hit too. Not sure many others saw that coming in the mid-90s.
tudorw 5y ago
Lem

User23 5y ago

Burning Chrome is a masterpiece. It’s the best short story collection I’ve read in any genre.

dchapp 5y ago
Agreed. I remember reading Hinterlands as a high school student and being depressed for the following decade.
- krylon 5y ago
  That one haunts me. I wish someone with the required talent would make it into a movie. It would be really creepy and depressing but I could not get enough of it.

shantnutiwari 5y ago

For me-- I loved Neuromancer(which I've read multiple times), but thought his other books were very meh, very forgettable. That said, his writing style is great. Most sci-fi (and fantasy) seem to love a lot of padding-- 300+ page books of which 200 is fluff. Gibson wrote comparatively short and sharp books- no unnecessary exposition, no character spending 3 pages describing the city, or admiring themselves in the mirror so we can learn about the strange alien races. I wish more scifi books were short and quick/easy to read.

mattowen_uk 5y ago
> I wish more scifi books were short and quick/easy to read. I echo this. I'm currently slogging my way through Blue Mars, the third weighty tome of Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars Trilogy...
- tcoff91 5y ago
  Many sci-fi novels could be edited down to the length of Fahrenheit 451 and be improved by doing so.
  - e12e 5y ago
    Many books should be edited down. Neal Stephenson is a prime example of getting away with leaving in so much mediocre stuff that it drags down the quality of his books, even though he can be brilliant too. My favorite Murakami book so far is "South of the Border" - and I'm not sure "Norwegian Wood" could not have been made even better with a few (only a few !) cuts.
  - mattkevan 5y ago
    Peter F Hamilton has entered the chat. He has great plots, but they’re buried under so much unnecessary detail, reading his books is like an archaeological dig. Unless you really want to know in excruciating detail what every character, no matter how minor, had for breakfast.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago

harry8 5y ago

I really like the way Gibson invents language and does so expertly enough that he can just use it without explanation and I feel clever for being able to follow it, which is almost certainly part of the trick. I think it gives extra weight to whatever his point happens to be. I can't think of anyone else who does it just now. Any suggestions? Doesn't have to be sf.

ailun 5y ago
It's not new, but I just read Neverness by David Zindell. I had a similar feeling with his invented language. He actually does it so realistically that sometimes I couldn't tell when the words were invented and when they were just archaic.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
The only other author I know of would be William Shakespear. Many find him harder to follow of course, but the words he invented aren't any harder than the rest.
- harry8 5y ago
  That's a fair point but the effect is wildly different for the reader or audience in the modern world. Where Gibson's invented language invokes a mood with a very different language you can still follow, Shakespeare's language became common usage to the point of sounding cliched. He's even named his loverboy character "Romeo!" - a real quote from highschool. Kind of different to reading how someone interfaced, jacked, punched deck, couldn't proj etc. It's been decades so my examples are probably in need of some work but I guess they stayed with me that long.
willowfine 5y ago
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, Norman Spinrod’s Child of Fortune.

mattowen_uk 5y ago

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Writing doesn't get any better than this. From this line onwards I was and always will be a Gibson fan. His latter works are less impressive though, I think.

criddell 5y ago
Today, TVs turned to a dead channel are brilliant blue. So I guess it still makes sense.
- grkvlt 5y ago
  > The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel. An homage to this line by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere...
cstuder 5y ago
What, a uniform blue color? I remember a discussion about that particular line with Gibson, in an interview, but can't find it at the moment.
- tcoff91 5y ago
  Given the time that the novel was written, televisions at the time would just display grey static on a dead channel.
- Veen 5y ago
  This comment makes me feel old. I immediately knew he was talking about static, but I suppose if you didn't grow up with pre-digital terrestrial TV, you wouldn't be familiar with that.
- e12e 5y ago
  as remarked on in homage by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: > The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.

lazlee 5y ago

I love early Gibson but his last few books read like watered down Brett Easton Ellis and I haven't been able to finish reading any of them.

neurobashing 5y ago

It gets a small (peripheral?) mention but The Jackpot books - The Peripheral and Agency are really good. They're going to be a series on Amazon Prime too.

jasonladuke0311 5y ago
The Peripheral is one of my favorite books, so I was very disappointed that Agency didn't really seem to move the story along very much.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Agency is cursed by being "the middle book". I expect it will become more significant in hindsight once the trilogy is completed.
  - spats1990 5y ago
    I think you're right there and I think it suffers from the political context in which it was written. The near future America of Peripheral was far stronger and more convincing, even politically, than the near future America of Agency.
    - speed_spread 5y ago
      Also, Peripheral described a dark, dilapidated countryside / suburbia which was a new landscape for Gibson. While Agency's stub differs significantly from ours but because it is closer chronologically maybe it felt uncanny?
      - spats1990 5y ago
        Yeah I wasn't being precise sorry. The agency stub's similarities to our world felt too "on the nose" or similar, in a way that detracted from it being an accurate/enthralling depiction of our world (in the way that all sf is no matter when/where it's set). It's hard to phrase what I mean here but I think the countryside/suburbia might have something to do with it. "2060s USA: The Department of Homeland Security is an oppressive militia and also one of very few sources of stable employment" felt much more real and powerful than "Kinda 201X USA: Trump didn't win, but now there's a nuclear standoff" but I can't say why exactly. There is still a lot of classic Gibson prose in Agency though--the good stuff. High hopes for the new book.

drpgq 5y ago

Gibson's book Distrust that Particular Flavor of some collected columns is worth a read.

mlang23 5y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b922U1_7CM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b922U1_7CM

jdkee 5y ago

“In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win? Neal: You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.” See https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...

fennecfoxy 5y ago
This is actually fucking brilliant! Just makes me love those two (three) even more.

croes 5y ago

Are there still good cyberpunk novels these days?

narrator 5y ago

I found his prose kind of boring actually. Like trying to listen to a physics lecture, but it's delivered as an ASMR track. Way too caught up in its own awesomeness to actually efficiently communicate anything. That's not to say I don't like dense prose. Borges is fantastic and I have to read his stories carefully, one sentence at a time, but there is a ton of information packed in to very few words.

brazzy 5y ago

I was positively obsessed with (and still hold dear) Gibson's early works, especially the short stories, but the Idoru trilogy somehow bored me. Not sure whether his storytelling changed or my tastes did. I love how (as Gibson himself has remarked) Neuromancer has become nearly impossible to read straightforwardly by younger readers because he failed to predict the ubiquity of cell phones and has the characters depend on landlines and pay phones for communication - to someone who's grown up with omnipresent cell phones their absence is baffling and seems like an intentional plot point building up to some twist that never comes.

hindsightbias 5y ago
I hope the youts feel the same about The Matrix phones.
spats1990 5y ago
I'm a superfan as well and I think the Blue Ant ones hold up the best. With a few years of context we can see now that he was really well ahead of the curve on a ton of stuff that is now our reality. When Cayce explains why she quit coolhunting she says that the world has begun to suffer a contagion wherein almost everybody is a coolhunter of some kind, and of course that did happen, but the publication of the book where she says this predates instagram by two or three years. Gibson was one of the first to point out how ubiquitous internet essentially killed the geographical subculture with its signature language of fashion and so on. They still exist, but on a smorgasboard of options presented by the twining together of internet and culture. The Bigends of our world will send global anything that looks promising, shorn of its physical context. e: Molly Millions is the most iconic and famous Gibson character but I think Bigend, with his charm, machinations, drive to commodify art, etc, is the one really representing an archetype for our times.
fennecfoxy 5y ago
>their absense is baffling Well if they lack an imagination then that's not Gibson's problem. It would be like saying that they can't read fantasy because messages have to be delivered on horseback "why wouldn't they just have cell phones?" I hear them cry.

dkarl 5y ago

> (the “normcore” aesthetic of the 2010s can convincingly be traced to the habits of a Gibson character who’s “allergic” to brands) Normcore as I understand it is not averse to brands, and its spirit seems inconsistent with the character's unique look and obsessive attention to detail in her own outfits and accessories, but setting that aside, I'm struck by the implicit claim that Pattern Recognition could have had greater reach than No Logo by Naomi Klein, which came out a few years earlier and plugged into contemporary determination to personally resist the power of multinational corporations that was being amplified through globalization. No Logo was certainly a more famous book, but it's possible that an order of magnitude more people actually read Pattern Recognition and that it directly influenced the personal fashion of more people. If so, that would be a remarkable testament to the power of a fun read from a bestselling author. I any case I'd be interested in reading about how someone traced William Gibson's influence on fashion trends.

webmaven 5y ago
The eponymous Count Zero's boots seemed to foreshadow the Lunarcore aesthetic, but probably didn't influence it directly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

frazbin 5y ago

I don't know where to put this but I can't get through even a page of his writing.. like the first and overwhelming impression is of a narcissistic haze/stink. Like reading a fart. I like most other science fiction.. what am I feeling here?

pjc50 5y ago
I don't know, maybe it's what you're not feeling? If the heavy visual imagery style is not for you, it's not for you, but you're missing out on a lot. Why do you find it narcissistic?
ctrlp 5y ago
You're missing the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old. It's craptacular dreck written by a hack with a febrile imagination.

ctrlp 5y ago

Can someone be a literary genius and suck at writing? I guess so. Prescient? Inventive? Sure. But good lord his prose is turgid. A while back, I tried to read his 'best' books and all I could reason about their popularity is that here was an author for adult adolescents. The excerpts from this article seem almost chosen on purpose to illustrate how bad it is.

germinalphrase 5y ago
What do you like more?
- ctrlp 5y ago
  SF is a tough genre to swallow. If that's the question I can't offer you much without qualification. Gibson is a particularly egregious desecrator of English but only one. The genre gravitates to pulp. These are fantasy novels not just in their imaginary worlds, but in their imaginary psychology. Pulp fetishizes thin, simplified inner lives and relationships. That's as much part of the escapism as the tech. Enjoy it if you can but if you don't know what good prose is already, you won't learn it from Gibson.
  - sphynxie 5y ago
    What authors do you recommend for good prose? Genuinely interested.. I love prose (and Gibson, generally) but am always looking to expand my horizons.
    - ctrlp 5y ago
      If you love Gibson's prose I'm not sure what to recommend. Maybe you'd enjoy James Joyce, or Kerouac or Burroughs maybe. If you love fiction generally there are all the great novels to read.

hardwaregeek 5y ago

I've wondered why more Gibson books aren't movies, or why when they're adapted, they're done so quite poorly. Some of his books would adapt quite nicely to hyperlink cinema. I'd also love to see the Safdie brothers try their hands at a Neuromancer adaptation. Their brand of over-adrenalized haphazard cinema would work well with Case's character.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

Gibson is one of my favorite authors in science fiction. He may even be on my top 5 favorite authors overall. Whenever I start a new book, I have the impression that it is written in subtle different language. It takes my brain a little while to catch on. China Miéville has that as well in a different manner. Gibson seems to me to be an author who thinks about every single word. His texture is unique. Some his later books have some slow passages.

xarope 5y ago
Another +1 for Miéville. Perdido Station and Railsea really reminded me of Gibson's "style".
- zbentley 5y ago
  I love Miéville (well, his good stuff; his B roll not so much). But he's always going to be below Gibson on my ranking because Miéville's worlds and characters, while rich and innovative and unique and fascinating and and ... all seem so deeply _hopeless_ to me. It's ironic. Gibson writes about hypercapitalist dystopias (present or future), often starring burnouts and addicts, but manages, through all the grit and suffering, to often hint that things still tend towards hope--even if only in small, human ways--despite the overly cynical tone of the world: the AI ascendant, heroes tropily settled down. Miéville, on the other hand, writes of worlds packed with magic and intrigue and hypertrophic growth, but often ends his plots (deliberately, I think) on a hopeless, stagnant note. There are exceptions to both trends in each author's bibliography, to be sure, but it's a really pronounced juxtaposition (at least for me).
snovv_crash 5y ago
Not many people are aware, but there was an (excellent, IMO) mini-series made from The City And The City.

tracerbulletx 5y ago

The Bridge trilogy may actually be his best work but is hardly ever discussed. It's a real sleeper and if you haven't read it I highly recommend it.

8fingerlouie 5y ago
It could just be because the real world changed a lot between publishing Neuromancer and Virtual Light, but the Bridge trilogy in my view is way better than Neuromancer.

adafs23123 5y ago

you can read today his books and forget they somehow were wroten full 20-30-40 years ago. His books have almost every technology we have today, or we have some similar stuff, sometimes we still don't have some technology he mentions, but there are prototypes. But the sociological aspect of the books are even more interesting. There's a book from 1993, "Virtual Light", where a character mentions he remembers going to school and having to use mask and all sorts of cleaning stuff, there was a virus "in the air", the teacher then explained the kids the word "pandemy". The historical moment mentioned for that pandemy would aproximately be this and/or the 2030s Just amazing.

ephimetheus 5y ago

It’s probably just me, but I found Neuromancer extremely hard to read. I forced myself to do it because the world building was so great, but I didn’t enjoy it a lot. I tried to do the same for The peripheral, but just couldn’t. Not for me I guess.

zbentley 5y ago

> the “normcore” aesthetic of the 2010s can convincingly be traced to the habits of a Gibson character who’s “allergic” to brands The Blue Ant books are some of my favorites, but I think that's quite a stretch. Cayce's character wasn't nearly widely enough read to be that influential.

fennecfoxy 5y ago

If you like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson et al try the Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. I wish he'd write more in that universe.

futureproofd 5y ago
Gibson and Stephenson have different styles of writing. The comments throughout this thread are evidence enough. I could see many liking one over the other so I have a hard time taking your recommendation even though I'd like to.