6 ms·

"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."

"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.

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.