8 ms·

The Setup: William Gibson

86 points by Umalu 15y ago

lylejohnson 15y ago
"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  The sense I get is that he lives one rung up the ladder of abstraction.
  - keithpeter 15y ago
    Yes. Just simple tools and the writing. Canny, and aware of the demands of the industry (word: 'talks to publishers'). The page is small (word-count/ego) and to the point as well.
- softbuilder 15y ago
  Perhaps he's become jaded.
  - dualboot 15y ago
    When he began his craft it was a world of typewriters. Amazing imagination and forward thinking -- but it's hard to blame him for wanting technology to mostly stay out of his way.
    - gwern 15y ago
      > When he began his craft it was a world of typewriters. It kind of blew my mind to learn he wrote _Neuromancer_ on a typewriter.
- cstross 15y ago
  If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job. (I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386 lunchboxen or Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist is younger than I am.) Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with style and fashion and design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee. Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...
  - EwanG 15y ago
    Let's face it. A TRS-80 Model 100 in many ways is probably still the ideal portable writing machine. Only displays a couple lines at a time so you can't get too distracted with formatting and such. Rugged, full keyboard, 20+ hours of battery life, and reasonably easy to read even in full daylight. While I have migrated to an iPad 2 for many things, I sometimes wonder if that really represented an improvement...
    - astrodust 15y ago
      I'd like to proof-read things more than a line at a time, though.
  - dy 15y ago
    Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."
- freyday 15y ago
  I would think that, as a Science Fiction writer, separating yourself from current technology as a whole would allow you to be more creative in how you perceive the world(s) you are creating.
- bitwize 15y ago
  I'm of the belief that William Gibson pretty much hates computers which is why he wrote so much about them. He doesn't write SF, he writes anti-SF. An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. Gibson's novels about cyberspace and that relied extensively on handwaving, magical thinking, and "unseen, unknown threat" to develop their narratives. This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows more about computers than you. Hint: Rather than look at technical details, he has always thought about computers from the most critical perspective: at the points where they interact with people.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    > An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. You probably missed all the "soft science fiction" movement after the sixties... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction ). What you describe was 30-50s style "hard science fiction" --think Asimov, Clark, etc
    - bitwize 15y ago
      I'm aware of what "soft SF" is. What I was getting across is that it is much more a rebellion against SF than a continuation or evolution of it.
dshep 15y ago
Wow these are getting pretty boring...
- Tiktaalik 15y ago
  Maybe next time they should interview a lumberjack.
  - Semiapies 15y ago
    I can't think of any famous lumberjacks for them to interview, but Hell, I'd read it. Even if it was on the order of "this axe, this chainsaw, and this old phone I can use while wearing workgloves", I'd learn a little.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    Not for one thing or another, but you can find lumberjacks discussing Stihl over Husqvarna for hours on end.
    - Semiapies 15y ago
      Which you can see with a quick search. :)
- michaelbuckbee 15y ago
  I think this is one of those cases where the lack of stacks of software and hardware says as much about the person in question as the presence of it.
- generalk 15y ago
  Would it have been less boring if Gibson waxed for pages about weighing the new Lenovo laptops vs. the MacBook, or the merits of one word processor over another? I think it's fairly fascinating to discover that the author of one of the most notable cyberpunk novels doesn't really care about technology. (In fact, that's kind of the feeling you get from Neuromancer. There's loads of amazing technology but nobody's really fawning over it. It's just there, and it's just used.)
0x12 15y ago
Technology is a means to an end. Once you can reach the end with the tech that you have there is no need to upgrade any further. Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do. Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.
- icandoitbetter 15y ago
  >Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do. You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it. Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.
- Blunt 15y ago
  150% agree. I have a Pentium III class machine we still use to run our company email. It's been rock solid for so long, there has never been a need to upgrade it. Should the hardware finally fail, we have a few spares kicking around on stand-by and a build script that builds the software and an rsynced version of the mailbox store (cyrus IMAP). I guess, just another data point to your point.
- cstross 15y ago
  Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1 upvote ... It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.
ableal 15y ago
> It’s the WiFi, no cellular to worry about A palpable hit. Gibson was talking about the tablet, but I suspect there may be quite a few (Wi-Fi enabled) phones out there without data plans.
rdl 15y ago
I really hope someone has set him up with an offsite automatic backup system, plus maybe some versioned local storage.
baddox 15y ago
I'm pretty sure a four year old Macbook Pro would weigh more than two pounds.
jberryman 15y ago
Gibson fetishizes technology (apple products in particular) so much in his books that I'm surprised he's so blasé about the shiny new in real life. Weird.
aaronbrethorst 15y ago
I am somewhat disappointed that he didn't say he'd goosed his Mac's performance with "3MB of hot RAM." Oh well.
huhtenberg 15y ago
His retweet feed is really entertaining, very diverse and unboring, highly recommended - http://twitter.com/greatdismal http://twitter.com/greatdismal
jc4p 15y ago
I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on. I'd love to know what he would think of http://www.iawriter.com/ http://www.iawriter.com/
mortenjorck 15y ago
Gibson just tweeted a perfect postscript to this interview: Gizmos bore me. People doing the weird unexpected things they do with gizmos fascinates me. https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/126155241723928576 https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/12615524172...

86 points by Umalu 15y ago

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

joebadmo 15y ago
The sense I get is that he lives one rung up the ladder of abstraction.
- keithpeter 15y ago
  Yes. Just simple tools and the writing. Canny, and aware of the demands of the industry (word: 'talks to publishers'). The page is small (word-count/ego) and to the point as well.
softbuilder 15y ago
Perhaps he's become jaded.
- dualboot 15y ago
  When he began his craft it was a world of typewriters. Amazing imagination and forward thinking -- but it's hard to blame him for wanting technology to mostly stay out of his way.
  - gwern 15y ago
    > When he began his craft it was a world of typewriters. It kind of blew my mind to learn he wrote _Neuromancer_ on a typewriter.
cstross 15y ago
If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job. (I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386 lunchboxen or Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist is younger than I am.) Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with style and fashion and design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee. Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...
- EwanG 15y ago
  Let's face it. A TRS-80 Model 100 in many ways is probably still the ideal portable writing machine. Only displays a couple lines at a time so you can't get too distracted with formatting and such. Rugged, full keyboard, 20+ hours of battery life, and reasonably easy to read even in full daylight. While I have migrated to an iPad 2 for many things, I sometimes wonder if that really represented an improvement...
  - astrodust 15y ago
    I'd like to proof-read things more than a line at a time, though.
- dy 15y ago
  Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."
freyday 15y ago
I would think that, as a Science Fiction writer, separating yourself from current technology as a whole would allow you to be more creative in how you perceive the world(s) you are creating.
bitwize 15y ago
I'm of the belief that William Gibson pretty much hates computers which is why he wrote so much about them. He doesn't write SF, he writes anti-SF. An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. Gibson's novels about cyberspace and that relied extensively on handwaving, magical thinking, and "unseen, unknown threat" to develop their narratives. This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows more about computers than you. Hint: Rather than look at technical details, he has always thought about computers from the most critical perspective: at the points where they interact with people.
- dextorious 15y ago
  > An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. You probably missed all the "soft science fiction" movement after the sixties... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction ). What you describe was 30-50s style "hard science fiction" --think Asimov, Clark, etc
  - bitwize 15y ago
    I'm aware of what "soft SF" is. What I was getting across is that it is much more a rebellion against SF than a continuation or evolution of it.

dshep 15y ago

Wow these are getting pretty boring...

Tiktaalik 15y ago
Maybe next time they should interview a lumberjack.
- Semiapies 15y ago
  I can't think of any famous lumberjacks for them to interview, but Hell, I'd read it. Even if it was on the order of "this axe, this chainsaw, and this old phone I can use while wearing workgloves", I'd learn a little.
- 0x12 15y ago
  Not for one thing or another, but you can find lumberjacks discussing Stihl over Husqvarna for hours on end.
  - Semiapies 15y ago
    Which you can see with a quick search. :)
michaelbuckbee 15y ago
I think this is one of those cases where the lack of stacks of software and hardware says as much about the person in question as the presence of it.
generalk 15y ago
Would it have been less boring if Gibson waxed for pages about weighing the new Lenovo laptops vs. the MacBook, or the merits of one word processor over another? I think it's fairly fascinating to discover that the author of one of the most notable cyberpunk novels doesn't really care about technology. (In fact, that's kind of the feeling you get from Neuromancer. There's loads of amazing technology but nobody's really fawning over it. It's just there, and it's just used.)

0x12 15y ago

Technology is a means to an end. Once you can reach the end with the tech that you have there is no need to upgrade any further. Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do. Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.

icandoitbetter 15y ago
>Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do. You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it. Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.
Blunt 15y ago
150% agree. I have a Pentium III class machine we still use to run our company email. It's been rock solid for so long, there has never been a need to upgrade it. Should the hardware finally fail, we have a few spares kicking around on stand-by and a build script that builds the software and an rsynced version of the mailbox store (cyrus IMAP). I guess, just another data point to your point.
cstross 15y ago
Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1 upvote ... It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.

ableal 15y ago

> It’s the WiFi, no cellular to worry about A palpable hit. Gibson was talking about the tablet, but I suspect there may be quite a few (Wi-Fi enabled) phones out there without data plans.

rdl 15y ago

I really hope someone has set him up with an offsite automatic backup system, plus maybe some versioned local storage.

baddox 15y ago

I'm pretty sure a four year old Macbook Pro would weigh more than two pounds.

jberryman 15y ago

Gibson fetishizes technology (apple products in particular) so much in his books that I'm surprised he's so blasé about the shiny new in real life. Weird.

aaronbrethorst 15y ago

I am somewhat disappointed that he didn't say he'd goosed his Mac's performance with "3MB of hot RAM." Oh well.

huhtenberg 15y ago

His retweet feed is really entertaining, very diverse and unboring, highly recommended - http://twitter.com/greatdismal http://twitter.com/greatdismal

jc4p 15y ago

I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on. I'd love to know what he would think of http://www.iawriter.com/ http://www.iawriter.com/

mortenjorck 15y ago

Gibson just tweeted a perfect postscript to this interview: Gizmos bore me. People doing the weird unexpected things they do with gizmos fascinates me. https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/126155241723928576 https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/12615524172...