William Gibson: The Books

[Maria_H]

Science fiction owes an enormous debt to William Gibson, the cyberpunk pioneer who revolutionized the genre with his startling stories of tough, alienated loners adrift in a world of sinister high technology.

Which of his books have you read? Is there one story or character that speaks to you the most?

Reply to this message to talk about William's books, or ask him for his insights.

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Neuromancer
The first fully-realized glimpse of humankind's digital future, it is a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Pattern Recognition
Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet - a world renowned "coolhunter" who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she's offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded on the Internet - footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide.

Idoru
Twenty-first-century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere, blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea creature. Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is not, he is careful to point out, a voyeur. He is an intuitive fisher of patterns of information, the "signature" a particular individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the interesting (read: dangerous) bits. Which makes him very useful - to certain people. Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She's fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble, in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out. Rei Toei is the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. The Idoru. And Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that brought Chia to Tokyo. But the things that bother Rez are not the things that bother most people. Is something different here, in the very nature of reality? Or is it that something violently new is about to happen? It's possible the Idoru is as real as she wants or needs to be - or as real as Rez desires. When Colin Laney looks into her dark eyes, trying hard to think of her as no more than a hologram, he sees things he's never seen before. He sees how she might break a man's heart.

All Tomorrow's Parties
All Tomorrow's Parties brings back Colin Laney, one of the most popular characters from Idoru, the man whose special sensitivities about people and events let him predict certain aspects of the future.

Count Zero
A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him, for a mission more dangerous than the one he's recovering from: to get a defecting chief of R&D-and the biochip he's perfected-out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties-some of whom aren't remotely human.

See All Titles by William Gibson.

[tassava]

After reading Spook Country when it came out last year, I worked my way backwards through all of your books; I'm winding up with Neuromancer right now. Though of course I enjoyed them all, I was especially taken with Virtual Light, which seems almost frightening prescient, right down to the VL courier's name being the same as the UN's WMD inspector in Iraq! Tell me that's not a coincidence. And more importantly, I'd like to know your throughts on which of your (SF) books - or which bits and pieces of your books - have turned out to resemble reality the most. Is this accident - the emergence of a technology that just happens to resemble something in a book? Careful research into how the future is shaping up? Something else?

[UberDog]

Looking over that list I am reminded of an interview in which he recently intimated he may not finish of the presumptive Bigend Trilogy. if he doesn't, and goes on to something else altogether I wonder if it will nag at him, having these last two books kind of hanging there without the complete cycle of three books for three trilogies.

I suppose it won't bother him, or he'd finish off the Bigend cycle.

[Stephanie]

UberDog,

Interesting question- I suppose you're right, if something nags at one enough, well, the nagging wins out, doesn't it? 

But if one's enthusiasm, sentiment, drive (whatever compels), is gone, what then?  Can it be finished? Should it?

[UberDog]

Here's me thinking: Gibson always talks about how his process is unconscious and necessarily so. that being the case, it is no accident that most of his books fall into a pattern of trilogies (wherein other patterns are included) and that he might very likely be inclined to write this next book as a capstone to the latest departure into almost-real-time.

The fact that he seems to be moving away from that predisposition is, to me, indicative of how an awareness of said process (or at least the patterns emerging there from) has begun to interfere with the raw feed.

If you take his website as a kind mirror, however distorted, by which he can sometimes glimpse an outsider's perspective on his own work, then the very nature of hypertexting his work by posting about it in some sense changes the work itself. it is as if the reader has become more a part of the process on the authorial side than ever before.

I suspect that if there were no profusion of internet comments and online interviewers talking about his trilogies and patterns he might be so inclined to break said patterns in the next book.

I don't have a huge investment either way as I will alway read and likely love whatever he writes. nevertheless, it is interesting to note how the very unconsciousness wished for is in some sense refuted by the world he somewhat presaged.

Indeed, if the world of Big Brother has become more porous perhaps the world of the writer as sole creator has as well. Or perhaps it has merely become more obviously so and was really always a collaborative process.

[Stephanie]

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UberDog wrote:

If you take his website as a kind mirror, however distorted, by which he can sometimes glimpse an outsider's perspective on his own work, then the very nature of hypertexting his work by posting about it in some sense changes the work itself. it is as if the reader has become more a part of the process on the authorial side than ever before.

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UberDog,

Of course, I can't speak for any author, but I wonder how welcome such a thought would be - while the reader is as necessary as the author (Barthe - "The Death of the Author"?) will the author let the reader in on his end?  That takes out the balance a bit, hm?

[UberDog]

Bill always talks about the reader being essential to the final product as said product is generated in part inside the reader's head. this is why he ways finds it funny when a concept drawing or film is looked at and a reader says: "But so-and-so doesn't look like that!"

As to the reader getting inside his (or and other author's head) well, I think some of that is always unavoidable. In a contemporary situation, having your own blog and ant-farm of followers, one would be hard pressed to simply divorce the reader from the process of writing. I think his unwillingness to discuss current projects is itself a hedge against this sort of influence which is likely already infected him as an errant meme.

This is in no way to imply that he writes for "us" or changes his writing because of "us" but rather that the very manifestation of something rather nebulous as "one's public" must in some way have an effect on how one views the product which said public consumes.

At the very least there is a quantum analogy to be be made by which the act of being observed by his public changes the results.

As a very small example, Bill took the character name "bunny" out of the last book. For another character he put in the name "Archie," a squid named for one of his frequent website posters.

There isn't any refuge from this interaction except unplugging and I'm glad he doesn't do that. The very nature of the way in which celebrity relates to "the masses" has been altered in the last ten years. Bill is himself a rather minor celebrity and likely not immune to the shift.

But so far none of us are ordering burritos for him at Taco Bell at 2AM because he can't read the menu nor has he run over any of our feet.

[William_Gibson]

All of this infers an awful lot, and too much for me to sort out here, but it seems to me that the writer-reader interface is "automated" by the internet, to a new degree, but is not in itself so very new.

[Stephanie]

While it makes perfect sense that an author wants to have a readership- fans, if you will- do you agree that the artistic quality that is inherent in writing means an author should focus on the work, not the recipient of the work?

I do know what you mean about the inevitability of the reader getting inside the author's head somewhat, but to what extent does the author let him in, and to what extent does he push him out?  I would imagine that varies according to the individual.   I will add that I truly hope all of the authors I read will continue to write that great story, and if they please themselves, they'll please me. 

[William_Gibson]

I sat in on a brainstorming session for a new brand of clothing, last year. Very high-end outdoor-wear company planning a very specifically-targeted sub-brand.

In the course of that, the company's president explained to me that their most successful products were always the result of an employee inventing something to meet a very personal need, while ignoring all other factors. The least successful were the result of "listening to feedback from the mall", via distributors.

I believe this to be equally true of fiction.