| |
|
Quote from Flyboy:
“One of the things I find fascinating about these books (Neuromancer in particular) is that reading them from the perspective of 2001, it's hard to tell how much stuff in there that rings true was a) already in existence/early phases and Gibson just researched it, b) speculated by Gibson and subsequently developed, or c) speculated by Gibson and subsequently developed deliberately by geeks who'd read Gibson.”
Interestingly, reading Count Zero and Neuromancer led to my decision to study electronics at uni, muddle-headed 16-year old stoner that I was. And the specialty I opted for was ‘bio-electronic’ interfaces, making electronics work with and mimic biology in various ways - I’ve spoken to a few engineers who read it when they were younger. Perhaps a sour discovery for some is Gibson’s oft-voiced disdain for geekdom, and I remember an interview in wired in 1993 when he seemed bemused at the attention from technologists and VR enthusiasts, saying that, while he admired these people’s obvious grasp of the science end, “they’d be hell to have dinner with”.
A lot of the stuff does seem prescient, and not just the groovy gadgets - I remember reading Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1993, when drum n bass was just starting to kick-off and noticing that people in the book listened to an electronic Afro-influenced music called ‘dub’ or something like that - and I thought ‘bloody hell’.
Not sure which technologies he was first on the block with - he was definitely first to coin the term ‘cyberspace’, imagining the internet as a huge, hallucinatory 3d virtual world - it would be good to see that done well in a film. The technology of neural interfaces had been thought of before but these stories brought it into sharper focus in people’s imaginations, I think.
There’s a fantastic bit in Count Zero when the character inserts one of these ‘biosoft’ chips into the socket behind his ear, without realising it’s actually intended for an AI user, not a human, and he’s subjected to a head-jarring rollercoaster of sensation and information. A lot of the imagery from these books seemed to really start to influence graphic design and popular culture in the early 90s, in everything from magazines like Mondo 2000 to rave flyers of the period, or videos from Future Sound of London.
But it’s anyone’s guess where that whole neon city, chrome-plated future vision came from - probably just an amplification of trends and currents in the 80s to a sensitive person - he said that seeing Blade Runner made him think that him and Ridley Scott were onto the same thing. |
|
|
and Pat Cadigan (the insulin pump in Synners if anyone's read it... yummy) and Neal Stephenson - I really get on with their writing in all its forms. 