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One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. U
by macleginn 1y ago
One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)
- qiine 1y agofascinating
- reactordev 1y agoSometimes, ignorance is truly bliss. Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all. Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
- itomato 1y agoMāyā.
- reactordev 1y agoPrecisely
- api 1y agoThere's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.
- dfxm12 1y agoMy ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future. If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint. When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
- mikepurvis 1y agoThe trick is to invent future tech that feels organic, cohesive, and believable, and not just whatever happens to be needed for the story you’re trying to tell. Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
- KineticLensman 1y ago> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint. I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
- nradov 1y agoThe scene in Neuromancer involving a row of pay phones in the airport seems kind of hilarious today.
- mjevans 1y agoIt would honestly be nice if airports had 'phone booths' like I've seen in high tech companies. Think 1 person sized meeting rooms in larger spaces. One door on the pod opens, there's a seat and a small desk inside. Enough to make a mostly private phone call. In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ. I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.
- jfengel 1y agoI find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people. This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
- throwup238 1y ago> Sci fi is always about people. I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
- bad_haircut72 1y agoI cant find the quote either but I think it was Asimov
- bradly 1y agoSimilar situation with Abbott's Flatland fiction from the 1800's. No math/physics background, but a very interesting perspective on different dimensions from a humanistic point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts in ways that at the time many felt impossible.
- plq 1y agoUrsula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi: https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar... EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-library/Dreams-Must-Explain-Themsel_-_Z-Library_/page/n53/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
- magicalhippo 1y agoI hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years. The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads. Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
- deadbabe 1y agoJust goes to show, if you want to write romantically about something, it’s best to have little or no idea what you’re talking about, so that your imagination can take over. Shouldn’t be too hard for some people on hackernews, they do it everyday!
- throwaway328 1y agoZing!
- roughly 1y agoGibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point. (Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
- keiferski 1y agoFor a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense. It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
- Apocryphon 1y agoI always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick / Dick is the American Ballard.
- keiferski 1y agoBallard is much, much more grounded in his stories, and I wouldn’t describe even his most outlandish ones as sci-fi. I actually think a lot of his writing is a bit dry and much prefer Gibson in that sense. PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on. Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.
- DrewADesign 1y agoThe heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.
- corysama 1y agoThe indie documentary https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
- beefnugs 1y agoYes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge. And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
- swayvil 1y agoSo the basic desire of the ruling class is to definitively control the underclass. And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.