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William Gibson: How I wrote Neuromancer
- abruzzi 12y ago"The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" -- That is one of the all-time classic opening lines. It is also something people will gradually lose since most people no longer have that grey static.
- GauntletWizard 12y agoWorse yet, some generations will misread the symbolism, as my current TV displays a bright blue screen when set to an input that's not in use. This is probably a passing phase, though, as the TVs of the current generation have strange media hubs with crappy builtin apps.
- devindotcom 12y agoMaybe something like "The sky was the color of the sky, seen through a tacky vintage Instagram filter."
- monk_e_boy 12y agoOh God. I can see it now. [Static app] for your TV, purchased by old fogies. Configure Static app to come on when you fall asleep in front of the tv. Most often purchased with [Off: Vanishing dot], [Stand by mysterious hum], [wired VCR controller (comes with 3 feet of wire)], [bad signal - signal degrades depending on weather] ....
- pdkl95 12y agohttp://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ We already have [Static app] in some devices, which apparently play some sort short video recording of static. So now we get static with DCT compression artifacts.
- GauntletWizard 12y agoMy android device already does a weird animation of a CRT blinking out when I turn off the screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zFwpb_LDHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zFwpb_LDHQ
- Crito 12y agoI want a little blinking 7-segment under my television that only displays "12:00".
- jacquesm 12y agoPremium option: burnt out vertical deflection amplifier, and upset convergence.
- coldtea 12y agoYou might be interested in this app: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- pewpewlasergun 12y ago"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." - Neil Gaiman, "Neverwhere"
- desdiv 12y agoA fan asked Neil Gaiman about it and here's the exchange: A fan: "You're either paying homage to Gibson, which is weird because the two books are in different genres and he isn't mentioned in the acknowledgements, or perhaps there's some manner of Jungian collective unconscious phenomenon at work here, in which you have unwittingly mimicked Gibson, or..?" Neil Gaiman: "Or it was a very small joke, essentially pointing out that since what is arguably the most famous opening sentence in SF was published in 1984, the nature of what a "dead channel" looked like had completely changed, from grey static fuzz to a pure dead blue. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway." http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/12/some-days-bears-on-top.asp http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/12/some-days-bears-on-top...
- GauntletWizard 12y agoI'd forgotten how much I'd laughed at that line. Gaiman is great.
- Argorak 12y agoMaybe there should be a "Museum of endangered visuals", just as there is a "Museum of endangered sounds". http://savethesounds.info/ http://savethesounds.info/
- singingfish 12y agohah reminded me of my favourite gibson quote: > These people figured video was the Lord's preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush.
- chiph 12y agoThis reminds me of the First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints, from John Varley's Steel Beach. Their temple features glass tubes in the rounded-rectangle of classic CRTs.
- abruzzi 12y agoOr the Cathode Ray Mission from Videodrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJzbgfaFANg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJzbgfaFANg
- marlinspire 12y agoNeil Armstrong equates the moon and tv : We could see that at the terminator, at the boundary between the black part of the moon and the lighted part of the moon. It was as if you were looking at a television set with the contrast turned to full contrast, very black and very white. from http://youtu.be/PtdcdxvNI1o?t=1m30s http://youtu.be/PtdcdxvNI1o?t=1m30s Sky At Night BBC 1970 , Neil Armstrong & Patrick Moore
- eco 12y agoI've been wondering lately how many young children would actually understand what is going on when the HBO ident appears. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC_uTMkmH08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC_uTMkmH08
- Raphael 12y ago[1] 1. White noise.
- noblethrasher 12y agoSimilarly, I remember reading a short story (or poem) that I believe was penned sometime in the 1960s. The piece contained a line to the effect of “he had a heart like a telephone”. Now days, people might think that the subject’s heart was easily broken, but it meant just the opposite because those heavy Bell rotary phones were unbelievably durable.
- abruzzi 12y agothats a great line. There are all sorts of secondary meanings that could be added by new connections. Yes, easily broken, but also inconstant (dropped calls), easily distracted. This is very much like the whole authorial fallacy. Meaning, in a work of art, is not simply what the author wanted it to mean, but also what the audience took it to mean, and that changes.
- SCAQTony 12y agoNooooooo! His heart telegraphed all his emotions like a telephone. You always knew what mood he was in because you could "hear" it. Land lines never dropped calls.
- Shog9 12y agoThat's an interesting interpretation. But now I need an excuse to write, "He had a heart like a text message, phoning in his emotions like a telegraph."
- Kurtz79 12y agoRecently I have been started using Windows 8 and was "relieved" to find out that Microsoft kept the Blue Screen of Death, well, blue. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/BSoD_in_Windows_8.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/BSoD_in_W...
- Shivetya 12y agosilly me is waiting for the day when thin displays can be rolled out to cover walls at affordable prices, then I can set it to static and keep it as a background. all I will need to do is add a hiss sound
- egypturnash 12y agoHello best idea ever.
- crucini 12y agoNeuromancer was amazing. I realize now that Gibson's books monotonically decreased in quality. The books have gotten thicker, artier, more self-indulgent, and weaker. I'm sure he'd like to recapture the magic he had at 34, but maybe it requires the fear he spoke of. And an absolute ignorance about computers and networks. I think it shares more with The Maltese Falcon than with any SciFi. Saw WG complaining about GamerGate recently and thought how much he's aged, and how ungracefully, since GG and Operation Disrespectful Nod reminded me of the Panther Moderns.
- dilap 12y agoWow, his books have changed (and Neuromancer is an absolute classic...you don't get that with every book), but I think all of his output that I've read has been quite good. His most recent, The Peripheral, is excellent.
- huhtenberg 12y agoI don't know. I found his book about jeans fashion to be remarkably awful and disappointing, just a bleak reflection of Neuromancer. * PSA: Zero History. It was called Zero History.
- DigitalJack 12y agoNeuromancer was spectacular. Count Zero was ok. I don't really remember anything about Mona Lisa Overdrive. Everything after that may be written as well or better, but they simply aren't stories I want to spend my time on.
- devindotcom 12y agoI don't know. I mean, he's still got his finger on the pulse. "Idoru" was excellent, and the idea behind the main character in "Pattern Recognition" (brand allergy) was brilliant. His stories are a bit more conventional. But I think that's because the strange future he visualized has become more conventional as well. What about his opinion on GamerGate troubled you?
- wiredfool 12y ago“Is it going to be OK?” I asked, my anxiety phrasing the question. He paused on the stair, gave me a brief, memorably odd look, then smiled. “Yes,” he said, “I definitely think it will,” Anxiety. Over the quality of the manuscript.
- aikah 12y agoA great book. Unfortunately after Johnny Mnemonic , and the matrix(2+3) which were total garbage, I'm not sure I would want a movie based on that book. It however influenced so much good stuff,like Ghost in the shell which is basically the same plot,Deus ex and others. I enjoyed the audio-book read by Gibson itself,it was excellent.
- devindotcom 12y agoGhost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex (the show, first two seasons) is definitely some of the best and most sophisticated sci-fi in the genre. Really quite amazing.
- lmm 12y agoIf you're ok with animation you might like Kaiba. This very weird visual style which is actually the whole point, and a superficially childish world that makes the underlying cyberpunk horror all the clearer.
- alecco 12y agoIf produced by Charlie Brooker, count me in. Hell, make a multi-season series of the Sprawl Trilogy. HBO?
- tabrischen 12y agoConsidering that Darren Aronofsky is adapting Margaret Atwood's 'MaddAddam’ book Trilogy as a HBO series, a Sprawl Trilogy could very well be a distant reality.
- andyjohnson0 12y agoI enjoyed the audio-book read by Gibson itself,it was excellent. Me too. For others who might be curious, it can be obtained from [1]. The source is legally dubious, but Gibson's narration doesn't seem to be commercially available at the moment. [1] http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/neuromancer_audio.html http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/neuromancer_audi...
- yzzxy 12y agoI find Gibson's greatest gift is naming things and coming up with vernacular. Panther Moderns and ice are obvious standouts but I particularly liked "funny" as a term for pirated 3d printed objects in The Peripheral.
- jessaustin 12y agoInteresting to find that editor/author Terry Carr was so instrumental. The first scifi I ever read was his Cirque. That was a deeply weird book for an 8yo in the early 1980s (and thinking back I'm not sure whose bookshelf I could have raided to find it) but I was hooked.
- veidr 12y agoAn interesting brief history of what is, if I was forced to pick one, (still!) the best among the thousands of novels I've read. The whole Sprawl trilogy is fantastic, and while I agree with other commenters here that Gibson's subsequent novels have become somewhat less awesome, it's hard to complain too much about that if you believe, as I do, that the author in question's first attempt resulted in the best novel of all time. Still, Neuromancer is indisputably dated, as any such work would inevitably be, so I am glad to have originally read it in the 1980s.
- lhl 12y agoI recently re-read Neuromancer this year as part of my VR research, and while it basically had no technical relevance, it stood head and shoulders above the rest (Snow Crash, etc) as a literary work, and if you rework some numbers/treat as slang the few bits of technical flavor ("three megabytes of hot RAM"!!!) it actually doesn't feel very dated to me - mostly due to just how clear/strong the writing is. I was surprised by how strongly it evokes this sort of late-80s oppressive paranoia though. A reminder/argument for science fiction as a lens on contemporary society I suppose.
- veidr 12y agoYeah, it doesn't feel that dated until you get into the technical details. I think part of that stems from the fact that Gibson didn't really know anything about computers and technology (and, IIRC, wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter). The novel itself is about humans. Well, and a couple AIs also. But a glaring example, as Gibson himself has mentioned, is that lack of cell phones. In fact, once of the most powerful scenes in the novel -- that I remember raising the hairs on the back of my neck as a read it -- involves the AI, Wintermute, wanting badly to talk to Case. Case is walking through an airport, past a bank of payphones, and the AI causes each phone to ring in turn as he passes it. There aren't even long banks of cellphones in airports anymore, but that notwithstanding, why wouldn't Case and Molly and everybody have cellphones, in this future-world where they have fully immersive VR interfaces to the matrix? Of course they would. But you can't really hold that agains the decades-old novel... especially since it was so remarkably prescient in so many ways.
- hyp0 12y agoanswer to title: I would write, then, to the audience I imagined in the future of my discovery by friendly if unimaginable forces, and to them alone.
- laichzeit0 12y agoThis is very interesting to me from the "performing under pressure" point of view. I've been under the gun, so to speak, on more than one occasion and invariably I've delivered and learned most rapidly during those times. Makes me wonder if people who "get shit done" operate on that sort of do-or-die mental state, or how long it's possible to put yourself in that mental state without either burning out or breaking down. I've read similar anecdotes from people like John Carmack and Richard Feynman (again, pressurized during WWII). It's almost like we're operating at 50% efficiency, maybe we go to 75% when we're really focusing, but actually only when we're in the self-preservation state, we go to 90+%