4 ms·

I always felt like Gibson was describing Sega City or Odaiba instead of 'enclaves near Chiba' .. Odaiba in particular 'feels' more like what he intended for the

by aa-jv 4y ago

I always felt like Gibson was describing Sega City or Odaiba instead of 'enclaves near Chiba' .. Odaiba in particular 'feels' more like what he intended for the neighborhood, and its kind of in the same direction, relative to Ginza and central Tokyo ..

rasz 4y ago
He wasnt describing anything, as he never saw those places until 1988. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/9/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/9/htm Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga "Chronologically speaking, the moment Gibson shifts emphasis from cyberspace to junkyard was noticed when he paid the first visit to Japan in the winter of 1988. Celebrating the completion of the Cyberspace Trilogy, we had a welcome party for him at an ethnic restaurant called Sunda located just in front of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in Jinnan, Shibuya ward, Tokyo" just like he didnt know anything about computers while writing about cyberspace https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson... “I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful."
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Gibson can be... flexible with history in interviews. Especially when it's a good PR blurb. E.g. the typewriter story that far outlived reality. The truth when he says "I didn't know anything about computers" is probably more akin to "I didn't personally use computers. I did conduct deep and comprehensive research on their characteristics and use by others." When he was blogging for All Tomorrow's Parties, the amount of esoterica and research he apparently read every day was staggering.
  - rasz 4y ago
    By typewriter story you mean the one from Cyberpunk: The Documentary (1990) (60p) https://youtu.be/UdvxPlhTjDU?t=2619 https://youtu.be/UdvxPlhTjDU?t=2619 where he admits to not even touching a computer pre 1988 and using typewriter up to that point?
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Yup. It circulated in a lot of pieces subsequently, up until he mentioned that he'd been using a word processor for the last several books. Although I think a huge amount of the traction it got was a journalistic in-approval of "See, person who writes technofuturism hates technology."
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    The amount of research Gibson did for Neuromancer is really impressive and sometimes shines through in the text. For example, at one point he talks about an "annealing" algorithm. The term "simulated annealing" was first coined in a paper by Kirkpatrick et al. one year before Neuromancer was published. Was he talking to scholars who were reading cutting-edge scientific computing/optimization papers? Or was he familiar with metal annealing and just made the leap himself? Either way, it's impressive. (I've also heard that the chemistry/pharmacology in Neuromancer also makes sense in a fairly detailed way, but I'm not qualified to assess this personally.)
    - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
      He was probably reading scientific magazines. Cheap Truth, a zine from back in the days, had a review in #7 telling everyone how valuable they are for science fiction writers. Now sure that is not a fact about Gibson personally, but it's insight into the crew he hang with. >> non-fiction magazines can help the SF writer and reader escape genre stereotypes and come to grips with the real social and technical issues of the human future. ~~ V.O.
      - AlanYx 4y ago
        That makes sense to me. Kilpatrick's simulated annealing paper was published in Science in 1983, so he could have run across the term while browsing through issues of Science. (Another theory is that he might have spotted various computer science talks at UBC when he was taking the creative writing course and decided to sit in on some as fodder for his fiction.)
- aa-jv 4y ago
  I don't care if he saw them or not, I saw them and made the connection in my mind .. it just felt like he was describing Odaiba.

by aa-jv 4y ago

rasz 4y ago

He wasnt describing anything, as he never saw those places until 1988. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/9/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/9/htm Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga "Chronologically speaking, the moment Gibson shifts emphasis from cyberspace to junkyard was noticed when he paid the first visit to Japan in the winter of 1988. Celebrating the completion of the Cyberspace Trilogy, we had a welcome party for him at an ethnic restaurant called Sunda located just in front of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in Jinnan, Shibuya ward, Tokyo" just like he didnt know anything about computers while writing about cyberspace https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson... “I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful."

ethbr0 4y ago
Gibson can be... flexible with history in interviews. Especially when it's a good PR blurb. E.g. the typewriter story that far outlived reality. The truth when he says "I didn't know anything about computers" is probably more akin to "I didn't personally use computers. I did conduct deep and comprehensive research on their characteristics and use by others." When he was blogging for All Tomorrow's Parties, the amount of esoterica and research he apparently read every day was staggering.
- rasz 4y ago
  By typewriter story you mean the one from Cyberpunk: The Documentary (1990) (60p) https://youtu.be/UdvxPlhTjDU?t=2619 https://youtu.be/UdvxPlhTjDU?t=2619 where he admits to not even touching a computer pre 1988 and using typewriter up to that point?
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Yup. It circulated in a lot of pieces subsequently, up until he mentioned that he'd been using a word processor for the last several books. Although I think a huge amount of the traction it got was a journalistic in-approval of "See, person who writes technofuturism hates technology."
- AlanYx 4y ago
  The amount of research Gibson did for Neuromancer is really impressive and sometimes shines through in the text. For example, at one point he talks about an "annealing" algorithm. The term "simulated annealing" was first coined in a paper by Kirkpatrick et al. one year before Neuromancer was published. Was he talking to scholars who were reading cutting-edge scientific computing/optimization papers? Or was he familiar with metal annealing and just made the leap himself? Either way, it's impressive. (I've also heard that the chemistry/pharmacology in Neuromancer also makes sense in a fairly detailed way, but I'm not qualified to assess this personally.)
  - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
    He was probably reading scientific magazines. Cheap Truth, a zine from back in the days, had a review in #7 telling everyone how valuable they are for science fiction writers. Now sure that is not a fact about Gibson personally, but it's insight into the crew he hang with. >> non-fiction magazines can help the SF writer and reader escape genre stereotypes and come to grips with the real social and technical issues of the human future. ~~ V.O.
    - AlanYx 4y ago
      That makes sense to me. Kilpatrick's simulated annealing paper was published in Science in 1983, so he could have run across the term while browsing through issues of Science. (Another theory is that he might have spotted various computer science talks at UBC when he was taking the creative writing course and decided to sit in on some as fodder for his fiction.)
aa-jv 4y ago
I don't care if he saw them or not, I saw them and made the connection in my mind .. it just felt like he was describing Odaiba.