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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

by ethbr0 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.)

by ethbr0 5y ago

rasz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.)